by Eric LaRocca
First published 2023
Agnes and Zoe find each other in an internet chat room sometime in the early 2000s. What begins as companionship curdles fast. One woman holds power; the other surrenders it, piece by piece, until surrender becomes the whole point. The relationship between them is a contest of will dressed up as devotion, and the further it goes, the harder it becomes to say who is destroying whom. That novella anchors a collection of three stories. In the second, a couple retreat to a remote island after their teenage son dies. A storm rolls in. A young man knocks on their door. Grief has already hollowed them out, and now something worse moves in to fill the space. In the third, a man notices a strange object in his neighbor's yard. He asks about it. That question pulls him into a game with no clean exit. All three stories share the same conviction: ordinary loneliness is the door, and something terrible is always on the other side of it.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, collections, horror, psychological-horror, dark
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, dread-filled, intimate, psychological, unsettling
Tropes: power-dynamics, slow-burn-horror, toxic-relationship, unreliable-narrator
Setting: internet-chat-room, remote-island
Period: early-2000s
288 pages · Paperback · Titan Books
Content warnings: emotional-abuse, toxic-relationship
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