by Eric LaRocca
First published 2022
Someone is speaking directly to you. They have been through something they cannot name cleanly, something that involved blood and loss and a night that ended two people at once. The narrator of Eric LaRocca's You've Lost a Lot of Blood holds out objects like offerings, each one a fragment of a shared catastrophe. The central tension lives in that address, the intimacy of it, the way the speaker refuses to let the listener go even while describing an act of separation, combing someone out of their hair, watering the moon with their blood. LaRocca, the author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, builds his terror from the inside of a relationship rather than from outside threat. The horror is relational. The horror is tender. The narrator catalogs what remains after mutual destruction, and each item in that catalog costs something to look at. This is a book about what survives when two people destroy each other, and whether survival is the right word for it at all.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, horror, dark-romance
Vibes: haunting, intimate, introspective, psychological, tender-yet-disturbing
Tropes: fragmented-storytelling, second-person-address, toxic-relationship, unreliable-narrator
Period: 21st-century
209 pages · Paperback · Eric LaRocca
Content warnings: death, toxic-relationship, violence