At Dark I Become Loathsome

Like every genre, there are several aspects to Horror that you can focus on. My preference is the supernatural, something big and scary, preferably not overexplained. There is another subgenre, one that is arguably far scarier. I call it the horror of the mundane. Those killers that live among us, there is no rhyme or reason to their actions, but they kill nonetheless. The dead as much a victim of wrong time, wrong place, than anything else. At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca is one such novel, a mundane life made worse by grief and a protagonist’s wrongheaded solution to cope with their own pain. 

Ashley Lutin provides a unique service to those who seek it. If you feel like you are at the end of the road and need a spiritual reset, he will aid in this. The act, to simulate your death and then revival. Ashley’s philanthropy does not come from a place of kindness, but from pain. His wife dead, his child missing, Ashley’s only solace is to see other buried and dug back up again. However, when his live begins to unravel even further, the darkness that Ashley works so hard to keep at bay begins to truly take hold. 

It takes a lot to shock me, and your average transgressional fiction will try but won’t achieve it. I was reading books I shouldn’t have since before I was a teen, so I have had my shock reflex pretty much deadened. At Dark, is only the second book that I have read as an adult that has left me uncomfortable enough to recommend against reading the book.  

Please do read the themes that trigger in this book, there are many. Ashley’s tale is dark enough, but the novel also holds a couple of short stories within that are even more disturbing. Even these did not bother me too much, despite gratuitous violence and their sexual nature. For me, it is the concluding part of the book that had me regretting this story. Graphic depictions of child abuse are beyond the pale for my tastes. 

In the right context, even these scenes can be justified. They are powerful. Powerful enough to disgust me, but I do not think that this book justifies them. This is a book about a man in grief. Grief for their wife and their missing child. It is horrible what happened to Ashley, but this type of thing happens to people the world over and they do not descend into the level of navel-gazing that Ashley does. Everything comes back to him. A mundane, little man who takes out his pain on the innocent. 

Ashley is not the only character on this path, another is introduced who is worse still. Another pathetic subject who takes out their inadequacies on others. I do not need to read about overthinkers trying to justify their evil. Ashley is certainly the more sympathetic of the two but should have given his head a wobble at some point. No matter of hurt can justify his actions and certainly not the actions of the other character in the book. 

I would classify the book as more horrible than horror. This is the type of visceral response that LaRocca was probably aiming for by writing a transgressive novel. I think the issue may have been that the book was too nihilistic. The likes of Chuck Palahniuk, one of my favourite authors, mixes their disturbing fiction with a dark humour, At Dark is just bleak. It all felt a little sad to me, characters who punish the innocent because they themselves are lacking strength. I imagine some readers will enjoy the controversy and bleakness of the novel, I for one like my horror with some of the awe and not just the shock.