This Skin Was Once Mine and other disturbances by Eric LaRocca

I have recently remarked on how my reading brain seems to have pivoted away from classic/cozy murder mysteries to punchy short horror stories as a sort of mental palate cleanser between books, likely due to the shift of my literary consumption to a minimum of three mystery novels per week. So Eric LaRocca’s This Skin Was Once Mine came at the perfect time to help my brain reset, especially with the nip of fall entering the air as spooky season slinks into view.

First, I have to say how deeply grateful I am to the way this book is written. A collection of four stories of varying lengths, they almost all go by as smoothly and ominously as the serpent on the cover. Slick, absorbing page-turners with vivid imagery and weirdly recognizable — if sometimes more alluded to than spoken — emotions, these are bracing tales of madness and murder told in such a way that they seem outside the realm of the natural… even tho any student of the human condition knows that people can be exactly as damaged and depraved and awful as the characters that inhabit these pages.

The title story, which opens the book, is the strongest of the bunch, in my opinion. I was actually startled to realize how the stories are essentially ordered from my favorite to least. TSWOM tells the tale of Jillian, a young woman finally allowed to return home after the death of her father. Her exile has been unhappy, and one she blames entirely on her mother, who is now dying herself. But her homecoming unearths more than one secret, as she confronts the woman she believed sent her away out of hatred and fear.

The second story, Seedling, also features an uncomfortable homecoming. In an inverse of the relationships of the first story, the protagonist’s mother here has just died, and his dad wants him to come pay his proper respects to the corpse. Things get weird, as repressed emotions and beliefs come to the fore, erupting like the seedling of the title.

That same motif of repression and discovery rills through the third tale, All The Parts Of You That Won’t Easily Burn. Enoch is just looking to buy a knife for his culinarily-inclined husband when he meets a seductive shopkeeper and stumbles into a world of madness and pain. The volume closes with Prickle, where two old friends reunite to play a wicked game. That one wasn’t my favorite, feeling just a bit less developed than and connected with the first three, tho it’s still a strong entry on its own.

Mr LaRocca writes excellently at the boundary where human depravity feels too alien to be natural, rendering these works of horror the feeling of speculative fiction despite being very much grounded in the laws of objective reality. The people in these pages aren’t nice or even decent, but they hold up a mirror to our darkest selves and desires. And the writing is just excellent, careening along so that two hundred plus pages feel like a dark daydream. I know I’ve taken my time getting to this book, but reading it has serendipitously come at the perfect time with Halloween and the Northern Hemisphere cold just around the corner.

This Skin Was Once Mine and other disturbances by Eric LaRocca was published April 1 2025 by Titan Books and is available from all good booksellers, including