At my local and brand new Barnes & Noble, I was walking around checking out covers and titles, when Eric LaRocca’s newest novel caught my eye. With a name like At Dark, I Become Loathsome, and a distorted devil-like creature gracing the cover, how could I not be intrigued?
But as with most books I check out, I wasn’t going to buy it on the spot. Instead, I went home and was able to instantly borrow it from my digital library – huzzah! I was surprised at how brief this book was, but there was still plenty to entertain, engage, and shock in those pages. I appreciate that LaRocca didn’t drag things out specific points or constantly repeat himself just to get another fifty pages of text in its binding. Naturally, as I’ve come to find in most things I read, there is a certain degree of repetitiveness that is necessary, but I found that LaRocca added small details in each one of those revisits.
Ashley Lutin is a monster during the day, at least visually, and he becomes loathsome at dark. We are continually reminded of this throughout the book. For me, it was a great way to reenforce the depression Ashley feels after having lost his wife to cancer and then his son. At first, we aren’t privy to those losses. He first explains why he’s transformed himself into something that people avoid. Apparently in his grief he found some sense of relief in adding metal piercings to his face as well as some degree of plastic surgery. It’s almost as if he’s replicating a demon during daylight hours, and at night he just matches how he feels.
Though Ashley did start adding the piercings to his face after his wife died, he compounds on that after his son is taken. He feels especially grief-stricken by this because it’s his fault that he left him alone outside while he went back in a store to look for a lost credit card. It’s been two years now and suddenly the police find evidence that likely means his son was killed. As much as he knew that was likely the case, hearing something like that still manages to break a person further than they knew was possible.
Perhaps it’s not the best time to be carrying on with his rituals. In an effort to further combat his grief, Ashley has been taking up rituals to help people who feel like they want to die but also want to live by burying them alive for a short period of time. Most people come out of the ritual fully changed. In turn, Ashley is also changed, but at the news of his son, he decides he wants to now start helping people finish themselves off. He claims he knows it’s what they really want, so why not just leave them in the ground. Part of me believes something like this truly exists out there. Maybe not the killing part, but burying people alive. The world is a strange place.
This book has its disturbing parts, and maybe those with children won’t enjoy this too much, but the twist at the end, while not necessarily that surprising, was still wonderfully executed. I’m intrigued to find more of LaRocca’s work!