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Monday, October 11, 2021

31 Days of Horror: Day 11- Why I Love Horror by Eric LaRocca

Back on Day 6, I introduced you all to EmilyVinci and why she loves horror. Today I would like to use some of Emily's work for Library Journal as the preamble to an essay by one of the hottest and most talented new voices in horror right now, Eric LaRocca. 

LaRocca is the author of the buzziest novella of the year, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, which Emily gave a star to here and I reviewed on Goodreads here. LaRocca also just released the story collection, The Strange Thing We Become: And Other Dark Tales which Emily also gave a star to here.

Emily touched based with LaRocca for a Q&A in Library Journal which you can read here to learn more about him.

You can also watch Eric LaRocca with tomorrow's guest essayist, Hailey Piper, in this video from the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Horror  Studies: Expanding the Horror Cannon: Exploring Queer Horror

This is a whole lot of preamble, for a "Why I Love Horror" essay here on the blog, but that is because I want to make sure you learn as much as you can about this breakout author. His popularity has spiked without many knowing much about him. 

The essay LaRocca submitted to me reads like one of his stories, and it perfectly captures the appeal of a LaRocca Horror tale. It is tense and will make you squirm, but it is not icky. It is both lyrical and colloquial. And most importantly, he writes Horror in a way that you feel it taking over your physical body while you read it. I dare you not to check the bottom of your foot for a pencil tip after reading this, or at the very least not feel the pain when he describes it. 

Read why LaRocca loves Horror below and then make sure you have ordered his titles [reviews above]. You need them in your collections now.


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The Eight-Year-Old & the Pencil: Why I Love Horror
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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