March Book Reviews: Wretch by Eric LaRocca
I received a free copy from Saga Press via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Release date March 24th, 2025.
I saw this queer horror title on Netgalley and thought that the premise sounded interesting enough to give a new author a shot. In Wretch, Simeon Link is contemplating suicide after the premature death of his husband. When an eccentric group that claims to find your loved one's face in photographs reaches out to him, Simeon attends their meetings, where he's sucked farther and farther into the hallucinatory, unnatural world of Porcelain Khaw.
Wretch opens with the protagonist sitting on the toilet at work contemplating slitting his wrists with the razor he keeps in his pocket, and the rest of the novel follows in tone. Simeon is intensely self-centered and mired in loathing. The narrative tends towards pages and pages of Simeon's navel-gazing for each single line of dialogue or action. The verbose style might be partially due to the novel's litfic roots, but also neatly characterizes who Simeon is as a person. In Wretch, the real horror isn't based on any supernatural elements—it's based on being trapped in Simeon's repulsive narration for the entire book. In addition to a penchant for unpleasant perspective characters, LaRocca also shares the litfic talent for writing exquisitely awful sex scenes. Boy, nobody is having fun here. Can we take a moment to appreciate the talents of genre romance authors?
Throughout the book, the narrative is hallucinatory and disjointed. It has a tendency to leave Simeon's narration for extended sequences that aren't quite coherent, including plays, diary entries, and chatroom logs. As the book nears the end, it dissolves slowly into incoherence, with the plot floating purely on the impression left by the prose. It actually reminded me a bit of the gorier bits of Rakesfall, except I trust Chandrasekera is getting at something, and I'm not sure LaRocca is. The reader is left with Simeon's increasingly nightmarish dream sequences, a dubious photograph, and a concerning quantity of beetles.
In short, three hundredish pages of being trapped inside a vain, self-destructive thirty-something's head. While the slow dissolve into incoherence was artful, it's not quite my cup of tea, nor what I'm looking for in a horror novel. Interesting, but unpleasant.
