At Dark I Become Loathsome is a splatterpunk which explores the weird side of grief, death and sexual desires. I honestly couldn’t tell if this was deep or just miserable.
Quick Info
- Title: At Dark I Become Loathsome
- Author: Eric LaRocca
- Publish Date: 28th January 2025
- Genre: Horror
- Sub-Genre: Splatterpunk
- What to Expect:
- Strange ritual
- Weird sexual desires
- Dark and disturbing themes
- LGBTQ+ representation
– Rating: 2.75 stars –
Trigger Warnings
Pedophilia, murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, rape, sexual exploitation, disturbing themes, cancer, self harm
If I have missed any out or you feel like something should be added, please leave a comment.
Synopsis
Ashley has lost everything; his wife, dead, his son, missing for a year. He helps people by completing a strange ritual – he gives them a death-like experience to learn to love life again.
But when he gets a particular client who has an disturbing story to tell, he starts to realize maybe life isn’t worth living for.
My Thoughts
I wanted to like this so much but this just fell flat for me in a lot of ways. We are thrown into the deep end and I was intrigued and gripped from the beginning. Yet, if I hadn’t listened to this as an audiobook, I don’t think I would’ve finished this.
First though, I did like the concept of this. Ashley was an interesting character and I love how menacing his narration was, especially in the earlier chapters. I was instantly brought into his world. The repetition, language, the small hints at what’s going on, honestly impeccable. But this would also be it’s downfall to me, which I will go into later. The ritual rules and the ritual itself were very cool, I like that it wasn’t a supernatural ritual. It’s not something we see a lot in horror, but most rituals are not ‘evil’ summoning rituals or talking to the dead. The side stories were very disturbing but I enjoyed that about them. I won’t spoil them but the one about the man whose husband has cancer was really messed up but in a good way.
However, all that being said, this just didn’t land for me. The repetition gets really annoying, if I have to hear or read “At Dark I become loathsome again” I will cry. It stops being menacing and becomes almost pathetic – which one could say that’s the point but I don’t think it really came across as intentional. There was also repetition in the story, where I felt like sentences were repeated. A character will tell us the same thing twice, which I could usually look past but when there was already so much repetition it really got to me.
My biggest issue though was this felt like it was trying to tie everything together thematically, but it all boiled down to “everything is messed up” or “people are just messed up.” I think I am just bored of this message in horror – we already know this. It wouldn’t bother me as much if there were other themes that are explored but there isn’t. It just felt a little flat to me, I felt like you could take the rituals out of the story and replace it with business accounting and it wouldn’t change all too much.
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