Gabino Iglesias Reviews This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances by Eric LaRocca
This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances, Eric LaRocca (Titan 978-1-80336-664-7, $22.99, 240pp, hc) April 2024.
Eric LaRocca has quickly established himself as one of strongest and most unique voices in contemporary horror fiction. This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances is emotionally charged and full of the kind of strange body horror LaRocca is known for. A collection of four novellas that aren’t afraid to explore humanity, relationships, grief, and the need for companionship while also delivering blood and gore, this book shows LaRocca is here to stay.
The collection kicks things off with “This Skin Was Once Mine”, a story about Jillian Finch, a woman who is called home when her father dies under mysterious circumstances. Jillian loved her father, but always had a tense, cold, distant relationship with her mother, who threw Jillian out of the house almost two decades before. Once back home, Jillian discovers that almost everything she thought she knew about her mother and father was wrong, and then she makes an even worse discovery, and it’s something that forces Jillian’s true, monstrous nature to come to light. A tense narrative about grief and family drama that slowly spirals into cruelty, murder, and violence, this one is a great opener that sets the tone for the three tales that follow.
“Seedling”, the second novella in this collection, is its crowning jewel. It tells the story of a young man who, like the protagonist in the first story, is called home by his father because his mother has just passed away. When he gets there, his mother’s body is still in the house. Between his maelstrom of feelings, the chaos of dealing with the body, and trying to cope with his father’s insistence to pay tribute to his mother and say his last goodbye, the man has enough to deal with, but then he discovers something else: a small wound on his wrist that’s full of darkness. Then, he sees the same type of wound on his father. Soon, black tendrils start coming from the wounds. As the strange lesions multiply and get bigger, the young man and his father slip into a bizarre communion of the flesh that’s also a very emotional journey. A wonderful blend of love, grief, understanding, and LaRocca’s characteristic body horror make this one a superb tale that could easily carry the collection even if the other three stories were mediocre, which they’re not.
The third story, “All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn”, follows Enoch Leadbetter, a man on a mission to buy a great cooking knife for his husband so he can use it to prepare dinner for an upcoming party at their place. Besides getting the knife, Enoch also gets something far stranger when the man who sells him the blade slices into his arm and puts a sliver of glass in the wound. Enoch quickly develops a bizarre obsession that affects him psychologically and even sexually. When one of the gems on the knife falls off, it gives Enoch the perfect excuse to go back to the store, where the man who cut his flesh introduces him to a group of people just like him. The opportunity to keep indulging in his new obsession leads Enoch on a dangerous journey where he will encounter something even stranger, and far more deadly, than putting pieces of glass inside wounds.
Lastly, “Prickle” follows two men in their seventies, Mr. Chessler and Mr. Spirro, two old friends who meet again after years apart. During their reunion. they start paying prickle, a game they used to play where they inflict “little cruelties on people.” The game is fun for a while, but then things take a very dark turn.
LaRocca is one of the leading voices of the new wave of horror, and This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances is a superb addition to an already impressive oeuvre. These sad, unique, dark, gruesome tales show he has honed his style into something engaging and immediately recognizable. I have no doubt he’ll be delivering great books full of queer representation and top-notch body horror for years to come.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.
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