To read an Eric LaRocca story is to reach out and let the darkness take your hand.
Longtime readers know this, and even newcomers who’ve flirted with LaRocca’s short fiction have come to expect it. It’s not whether transgressive, violent content will appear, but about how hard it will pull you when it does, and how deep you’ll go under.
This is by design, but LaRocca’s stories are not simply built as endurance tests to see how long you can stay in the depths. Through all the darkness, LaRocca laces bright, beautiful threads of humanity, reminding us not just that we’re capable of turning to the light, but crucially, how close light and dark are to each other, always intertwining, always locked in a dance.
It’s a delicate, challenging thing, but LaRocca does it very well, and We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is the best thing he’s done yet.
The first part of a trilogy named Burnt Sparrow, after the New Hampshire town where it all takes place, We Are Always Tender With Our Dead opens in the aftermath of a horrific mass murder. Here we find a young man named Rupert, struggling to come to terms with his mother’s death, his father’s distance, and his own identity as a queer person. Rupert, who already feels like the strange, isolated coldness of Burnt Sparrow will one day swallow him whole, is adrift as he considers who he wants to be, and what the town will have to say about his future. Then, with the tragedy comes a strange new responsibility.
Faced with a pile of fresh corpses and a trio of faceless perpetrators, the insular town and its purple-clad elders draft Rupert and his father into a project to care for the dead, preserve them as an example while some measure of justice is pursued. But justice in Burnt Sparrow is often indistinguishable from pure, unbridled cruelty, and the closer Rupert gets to the truth, the more he chafes against his town’s old ways.
As the beginning of a multi-part saga, We Are Always Tender With Our Dead sets out to lay groundwork for a larger story, and so we come to know Burnt Sparrow as a place pregnant with tragedy, a town so sheltered and mysterious that it may as well be a pocket universe. The worldbuilding is there, and it’s rich and enticing, but it never overwhelms LaRocca’s tight focus on character. Rupert and the other residents of the town are painted with a delicate brush through LaRocca’s formal-yet-accessible prose, evoking Clive Barker and Shirley Jackson. They emerge not just through choices, but through urges, longings, wishes ungranted. Even amid the weird, almost cosmic dread creeping in through every page of the novel, they feel like us, like people who simply want something beyond the bounds of this place they’ve been cursed to call home.
That curse, as you’d expect from LaRocca’s fiction, is something quite potent indeed. We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is an unapologetically brutal book rich with unadulterated depravity, but as good as he is at turning stomachs, LaRocca is not simply draping gore over his narrative. There’s a meditation at work here, a ritual.
By invoking the absolute darkest parts of Burnt Sparrow’s residents over and over again while also constantly reminding us of their desires, their hopes, their capacity for tenderness, LaRocca asks us to consider something profound. If the darkness and the tenderness are always side-by-side, our humanity and depravity in constant concert with one another, then what does it mean when those feelings merge into one frightful act? What does it mean when good intentions also include sanding away the faces of victims and masking their identities in layers of cruelty? How far can we go into the darkness we claim to repel and still retain something of our souls?
These are questions asked frequently in Eric LaRocca fiction, but never before have they been asked this eloquently, in a book this focused, mature, and starkly beautiful. We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is a new level for one of horror’s most important rising voices, and deserves to be remembered as one of the most important novels in the genre in 2025.
To read an Eric LaRocca story is to reach out and let the darkness take your hand. To read this particular Eric LaRocca story is to know that darkness and light are never as far apart as we think.
We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is available September 9 from Titan Books.
Summary
We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is a new level for one of horror’s most important rising voices, and deserves to be remembered as one of the most important novels in the genre in 2025.
Categorized:Horror Lit Reviews
