Then there’s You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood, the metatextual novel within a novel referred to by the title. From the narrative main artery of the story springs an offshoot of spiralling veins in the form of transcripts, editor’s notes and poetic vignettes that explore the futility of human nature with a revelling nihilism reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk’s best (and least pretentious) work. The only clues to their fate are an expertly assembled exhibition of intriguing set pieces that fit together in a cyber-Gothic mosaic and presented to the reader as a dossier of lyrical cruelty. The part-true-crime-part-total-headfuck novella traverses a labyrinth of coiling twists and centipedic turns, centering on an ambiguous narrative of two missing lovers - Martyr Black and Ambrose Thorne. It’s best to approach You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood with a hefty level of ignorance of its content (the details of which will be skipped over in this review), but even without detailing specifics, fans of dystopian tech-horror anthology series Black Mirror or Shinya Tsukumoto’s raging cyberpunk epic Tetsuo: The Iron Man will find a lot to love in LaRocca’s ouroboreal nightmare. With their cryptic and morbid single-sentence titles and Francis Bacon-esque covers from Swedish artist Kim Jakobsson, assuming a LaRocca title will be a descent into horrors unlike any other put to page would be a just judgement.
LaRocca is quickly making a name for himself as of the most exciting and innovative authors in horror fiction at present, maintaining momentum since receiving deserved virality in the community with his novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. The eons-old and oft-spouted phrase, ‘you should never judge a book by its cover (or title)’, may be true for a lot of authors - but not for Eric LaRocca.
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