Eric LaRocca is at the forefront of extreme horror in the 2020s. Through books like the breakthrough Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and last year's At Dark, I Become Loathsome, he's risen to become one of the brightest stars in the genre thanks to his unflinching portraits of human darkness.
It's going to be a busy 2026 for LaRocca, and that includes the second installment in his acclaimed Burnt Sparrow trilogy, We Turn Gruesome At Night. The sequel to 2025's acclaimed We Are Always Tender with Our Dead, the book promises to return readers to the grim New Hampshire town of Burnt Sparrow, where ten years after the first book took place, new darkness is rising. Today, FANGORIA is pleased to exclusively reveal the gorgeous cover for We Turn Gruesome at Night, coming this September from Titan Books.
And here, courtesy of Titan, is the official synopsis:
Ten years after the devastating massacre that occurred on Christmas morning in 2003, the community of Burnt Sparrow, NH struggles to move forward. Meanwhile, Rupert Cromwell and Gladys Esherwood find themselves trapped in End House and suffering unbearable monotony day in and day out.
When a town courier named Pierce arrives at End House and introduces Rupert to a secret organization known as The Perdido Society, Rupert discovers a deeply intricate and intensely sinister web of secrets spreading through the town. It isn’t long before more blood is spilled, shameful transgressions are revealed, and temptations are finally satisfied.
Captivating and profoundly unnerving, this is the story of two lost souls who are sent on an odyssey into the depths of depravity only for them to discover that it’s quite easy to turn monstrous, to become the thing you once despised. Lyrical, nihilistic and brutally poetic, this is shocking, unflinching, must-read horror from an author at the top of his game.
If you've read any of LaRocca's previous work, you know to expect the extreme, the bleak, and the graphic from his books, but We Are Always Tender with Our Dead stood out even by those standards. It was one of the most brutal major horror releases of 2025 in any medium, and now the saga continues with an even deeper journey into the dark heart of Burnt Sparrow. Here's what LaRocca told Fango about the journey so far:
“It has been a privilege and honor to work with Titan editors Cath Trechman and George Sandison on the creation of The Burnt Sparrow Trilogy. If these books are resonant and deeply affecting, it’s certainly because of Cath and George’s editorial guidance. In this second novel, We Turn Gruesome at Night, I explore the same themes I had analyzed in the first book of the series—the normalization of violence, the apathy of those in charge, the cyclical nature of brutality.
“However, I find myself working on a much smaller canvas as I investigate the lives of those characters trapped inside End House. This novel is intense, claustrophobic, and discomforting. I really want these Burnt Sparrow books to operate with a kind of surreal, nightmare logic—the same feeling of inevitability you might encounter inside a bad dream. With the increasing rise of fascism in the United States, I think these novels are timelier and more prescient than when I first started writing them over three years ago.”
We Turn Gruesome at Night arrives September 8, 2026 from Titan Books.
