Yesterday, I had my 8 reviews from the current issue of Library Journal, which included a STAR review of At Dark, I Become Loathsome, the upcoming 2025 novel by Eric LaRocca. And spoiler alert: I have a copy of the ARC of that books for one of 6 winners this coming Thursday.
As part of my plan to bring back some of the very best of my archive of Why I Love Horror essays, I thought LaRocca was the perfect choice for today. Please enjoy this moving piece from October 2021:
By Eric LaRocca
I’ll never forget the indescribable terror of knowing there was something inside me that I could not remove no matter how much I had willed it to be gone.
When I was very little, I would often write short stories by hand while kneeling in front of a large armchair’s hassock. I would carefully sharpen my pencils and arrange them beside the small notebook. I can still distinctly recall how one morning I had returned to the hassock with a handful of sharpened pencils. For some reason, I set them down on the carpeted floor and not in their usual place beside my fresh sheets of paper. Perhaps I was too enthralled with the music I could hear drifting in from the kitchen where my mother cooked breakfast. Perhaps I was simply an absentminded eight-year-old.
Regardless of the reason, I had neglected to recall that the freshly sharpened pencils were lying on the ground beside my bare feet. Just as my mother called me into the kitchen for breakfast and I turned to make a dash out of the living room, my foot crunched over one of the new pencils and the needle-sharp tip stabbed my foot. Of course, a panicked child can scarcely concentrate, especially in agonizing pain. I do recall my bewildered mother helping me over to the loveseat and then sprinting into the kitchen to call our local doctor. I remember cupping the bottom of my foot and peering inside the small hole I had opened there, the tip of the pencil wedged deep inside and tucked between cushions of sinew like a small speck of tinfoil.
After hobbling out to the car and making the ten-mile trek to the nearest town, I was carried into the doctor’s office and seen immediately. I recall my foot throbbing, my body seeming to become very aware of the presence of an uninvited visitor. I can still recall the feeling of dread that filled me, that made me wonder if they would ever remove this thing from inside me. Much to my surprise, the doctor was stupendously efficient and yanked the small graphite tip out of my foot with a clean pair of tweezers.
I was free.
The thing inside me had been removed. But something lingered. Something horrible I couldn’t explain until recently—the dread that it could and might happen again. The only thing that seemed to calm me was watching and reading horror. For a reason I wouldn’t come to understand until later in life, I was captured with stories of fear and dread.
Horror has consistently endured as a source of therapy in my life. I often see myself reflected in the tortured, uncomfortable characters the horror genre seems to regularly highlight. When asked to write about why I love horror so unabashedly, the story of the sharpened pencil arrived in my thoughts almost instantly. It’s a perfect way of describing the revulsion and the attraction we feel when presented with works of the macabre. Although I was disgusted with my body’s unexpected visitor, I was equally enraptured with it. Moreover, it entered my thoughts regularly after the ordeal had long been done. Horror has the ability to be therapeutic, to be extremely cathartic if executed properly.
For me, the horror genre is the tip of a small pencil wedged in the bottom of my foot—something that’s painful and agonizing to endure, but something from which I cannot pull myself away.
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