Trigger Warning: This review discusses sexual assault, incest, necrophilia and body horror. Read with care.
The new book We are Always Tender with Our Dead by Eric LaRocca is possibly the most disturbing book I’ve read this year (and that includes at least two horror novels featuring cannibals). Set in Burnt Sparrow, New Hampshire, the book follows two protagonists struggling to deal with the horrific aftermath of a shooting on Christmas Day 2003. Rupert is a seventeen-year-old closeted gay man dreaming of escape from a town that until recently reeked of the sulfuric smell of a paper mill. When his chronically underemployed father pulls Rupert out of his bed, the boy has no idea that he’s about to become one of the “Preservers,” a group of people tasked with watching over the bodies of the recently murdered townsfolk. The town elders have determined that each of the deceased from the shooting will remain where they lay without burial. Those blamed for the shooting are a family -a man, woman, and teenage boy- but they have no facial features and only a small hole where they eat and breathe. In another tax bracket, Gladys is the wife of a horrifying wealthy man who insists that the town imprison the faceless family in his cellar where the townsfolk can each take their turn assaulting them as punishment. Gladys’s husband almost immediately begins a reign of sexual assault on the faceless woman, much as he does to his own wife. The residents of Burnt Sparrow must face their own dark behaviors and the supernatural forces that follow them with lingering tragedy.
We are Always Tender with Our Dead features sexual assault, incest, necrophilia, body horror involving blades and sheers, and all with fairly graphic description. Even Eric LaRocca warns most readers off in their introduction to the book. I’ll admit I made it about halfway through the book before having to set it down for a very long rest. The book forces the reader to confront personal dark and horrifying thoughts, brutally cutting directly to the heart of LaRocca’s arguments about the cyclical nature of violence without trying to hide it inside a pretty package. While other authors have compared this book to Twin Peaks, Eric LaRocca is far more brutal with delivery than David Lynch or Mark Frost ever dared, and there’s none of that charming quirkiness.
We are Always Tender with Our Dead is now available from Titan books.
