Synopsis:
Ten years after the devastating massacre that occurred on Christmas morning in 2003 and 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.
Review:
Dammit LaRocca. Burnt Sparrow, New Hampshire is a place that I have had festering inside of me like a nasty splinter since last year, a place that I have been terrified, but desperately excited to return to since the atrocities of “We Are Always Tender With Our Dead.” Such feelings were warranted. A vicious collision of the extreme and the gothic “We Turn Gruesome At Night,” is poetic and vile in equal measure- a claustrophobic and uncomfortable novel that is over the moon, positively delighted to be just that. Picking up a decade after the depraved events of its predecessor, LaRocca’s latest is even more disturbing, this novel truly immerses you in the twisted minds and ugliest impulses of its characters. Wretched, loathsome, gruesome- take your pick of pejoratives- and beautiful too, if you’re a little weird, if your tastes run toward the dark, strange and nasty, and you have a stomach of steel, then this novel is for you, and all yours from September 8th when it releases from Titan Books.
Rupert Cromwell has spent the last 10 years of his sorry existence trapped in End House with its lady Gladys Esherwood and her maid Veronica. It could have been better. The awful day to day does get more interesting however when Rupert begins to receive anonymous confessional letters through the town’s elusive Perdido Society. Delivered each week by the handsome Pierce the grim letters quickly become the highlight of an otherwise bleak existence, not least because Rupert becomes infatuated with their courier. It is hardly a spoiler to say though, that neither the fate of this budding romance nor the candid admissions of the letters are sunshine or rainbows.
There feels something voyeuristic and perverse about epistolary elements, the impression you are reading what was never meant for your eyes or that you are handling evidence still wet from a crime scene, or that’s certainly the case when they are invoked by LaRocca. Now, I invariably enjoy the diary entries, letters, chatlogs, and assorted scraps of correspondence scattered throughout their oeuvre; they sometimes feel like cruel non-sequiters used simply to ruin your day a little further as opposed to moving the plot forward. Don’t get me wrong, there are some delightfully grim asides tucked away in “We Turn Gruesome At Night,” but the Perdido Society letters are crucial to Rupert’s story and the wider mythology of the series itself. They will also for the avoidance of doubt, absolutely still ruin your day.
Whilst layered with grotesque worldbuilding, “We Turn Gruesome At Night,” is really a character study, a story about humans, human transgression and the vile things we are capable of inflicting on one another. It’s about isolation, psyche, queerness, pseudo-family, corruption and conspiracy, shame and obsession,there’s body horror. It is the uncomfortable truth that we possess an unrivalled talent for cruelty, and I often find that truth to be the most horrific part of LaRocca’s work.
“We Turn Gruesome At Night,” is relentless in its ugliness, fearless in its transgression and unwavering in its commitment to making readers squirm. I come away from this novel utterly repulsed, feeling rather filthy- I shall have to go and shower it off.
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