The protagonist of this story is caught in an unhealthy relationship – his husband is a racist, and his neighbor is foreign, and stand-offish. People want to be part of a bigger whole, to ‘get along,’ and be accepted. The final story of the three, “You’ll Find it’s Like that all Over,” has a similar theme, but again, from a new angle. This new collection adds two vastly different tales to that novella, “The Enchantment,” a story of yearning for an empty faith, isolation, and again, desperation, as a lonely woman fights the world, her husband, and other powers for something she can’t quite understand, but craves with all her soul… if she has one? This story is dark in different way from the first, much more sedate in its delivery, which makes the darkness insidiously sneaky. LaRocca, of course, takes it to its extreme, and just far enough beyond that extreme to be certain you will never forget to be certain you have done all that you can to earn your eyes. It’s also a mirror of the darker truth that this sort of shared devotion is rare, and often fleeting. On the surface, it’s a story of manipulation and desperation, but as is the case with most fiction based on deeper themes, it’s a microcosm of the human desire to be recognized, and loved, to please another and have them reciprocate. I listened to the audiobook edition, and, despite the odd formatting, a story told through private messages and chat room conversations, that performance was, at first odd and casual, and then spiraled into a very unexpected, very dark place. Also, it is just a great title.The original novella release of Eric LaRocca’s “Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke,” was my first experience of the author.
#Things have gotten worse since we last spoke. full#
This is well worth reading given the hype around the title story, particularly if you’re interested in how people connect over the internet and some of the horror potential for that, and I do like the novella format for horror that isn’t a full length thing. Overall, I enjoyed these less than the title story, though I think a lot of that is because I’m just particularly interested in the internet angle of that one. The final story is shortest and is quite straightforward, though with some intriguing undercurrents like the protagonist’s never seen racist husband he doesn’t think he’ll stay with. The middle story has slightly The Shining vibes in terms of setup, and had an interesting engagement with religion and belief (and felt like you could adapt it into a film quite well). The two “other misfortunes”, aka the two shorter stories that follow, are quite different, though in the afterward LaRocca does explain the logic behind bringing them together in their representations of humans needing connections. The horror in the story is more underlying and uncertain (though there is a couple of gory bits too), and I liked how it had the vibe of an internet urban legend. The format of telling the story through posts, emails, and instant messages, with a few mysterious redacted comments, worked well to show the actual relationship between the two women and leave you guessing what each of them actually wanted. I’ve been wanting to read ‘Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke’ for a long time as a horror fan who loves fiction set over the internet and thinking about the internet of the past, and it didn’t disappoint. In the second, a couple end up on a remote island after the death of their son, where they are plagued by a strange young man, and in the final, shorter story, a man ends up in a confrontation with his reclusive neighbour. In the first story, set on the internet in the early 2000s, two women are caught in a strange interplay despite never meeting. Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes is a collection of three horror novellas including the virally famous titular story.
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