Happy Goat Horror

The lives of those residing in the isolated town of Burnt Sparrow, New Hampshire, are forever altered after three faceless entities arrive on Christmas morning to perform a brutal act of violence—a senseless tragedy that can never be undone. While the townspeople grieve their losses and grapple with the aftermath of the attack, a young teenage boy named Rupert Cromwell is forced to confront the painful realities of his family situation. Once relationships become intertwined and more carnage ensues as a result of the massacre, the town residents quickly learn that true retribution is futile, cruelty is earned, and certain thresholds must never be crossed no matter what.

Dark bleatings, my tender tribe! For anyone concerned, this is a spoiler-free review, which means I’m going to be vague about the details.

This book is sooooo interesting. We begin with a massacre, which is very shocking, though we don’t see it. What we do know right away is that the murderers are immediately caught, and what’s more shocking than the crime itself is that the culprits are not only a family, but they’re faceless. Literally. No facial features. I was hooked immediately, because how wonderfully weird.

What kept me obsessed is that the town doesn’t quite know what to do about this tragedy, or the faceless family, and so the town elders come up with a form of justice that they think fits. The world of ethical, moral, and practical questions that this opened up was vast. I really spent a lot of time wondering if I’d be able to participate in what they decide to do (I think not, but I don’t know for sure…), if the road they take is actually justified, what the alternatives could be, etc. I also was fascinated by why this crime was committed.

LaRocca’s handling of these themes was flawless, in my opinion. Making the murderers faceless was a stroke of genius because I am still, a week after reading this, going back and forth on whether or not the details actually matter, and how differently I might have responded to the story had the author imbued these killers with mean faces and grisly expressions. There’s always a lot of heavy subtext in LaRocca’s stories but I think he excelled himself here.

Beneath our primary narrative layer, we’ve also got questions of identity that undercut the more obvious suggestion of this theme, and continuous metaphorical representation of limits and thresholds. What is your threshold? And for what? How many do you have physically, emotionally, intellectually? What happens if you push past those thresholds? What’s on the other side, how far can you go, what does that mean? No one else’s books have me swimming with questions like this!

The main plot was already engrossing and interesting enough, but of course LaRocca won’t let us off that easy – his characters are so layered. Even the characters that are only talked about but not present in the main narrative have depths to explore and ponder on.

If I had to try to summarise this, I might say that this book, thematically, falls somewhere between Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, and Clive Barker (in general). The horror is there, but oh so beautifully and uniquely executed.

When I finished this story, I felt pensive and kind of sad overall, but also weirdly like I’d tapped into some level of empathy I hadn’t previously stumbled across. This is another of LaRocca’s strengths as a writer, and he was particularly strong this time around. I think this might be his best and most interesting work to date, and I can’t wait for its official release so I’ll have more people to talk about it with.

If you’d like to check out the book or author, I’ve popped some links below for you:

WE ARE ALWAYS TENDER WITH OUR DEAD

ERIC LAROCCA

Bleeeeat!