FINAL BOY

This is a collection of three novellas in the horror genre, and they’re in the territory of very unsettling and giving you images and ideas that linger after the pages are closed.

The first story involves two women, Agnes and Zoe, who meet online in the year 2000, and strike up a correspondence – initially about Agnes’ desire to sell an antique apple peeler and the history of the object and why she’s selling it. That doesn’t sound like the most inspiring opening, but the writing and the voices here are so rich and compelling that you just get very rapidly drawn into the relationship that builds between them; which starts off really rather sweet and kind. It accelerates into something far weirder and every time you think you have a glimmer of where this is going LaRocca just says ‘oh, you thought that was the summit just ahead of you? You sweet thing, that just over there, that’s base camp’

It contains also a refrain which is haunting and visceral and powerful “What have you done today to deserve your eyes?” – that really does stick with you.

The second story is a story of two parents who have separated and come back together because of tragedy and then find themselves on a pretty remote island being caretakers of a building. During a storm, they get a visitor and once again things keep getting more peculiar. There’s some oblique undercurrents to something in the world at large having been scientifically proven and that just keeps being intriguing.

Here’s my situation with this book at this point. After about twenty pages of the opening story, I thought that I was going to absolutely love this book. Then when I finished story 2, I thought that this is an author who is so skilful and talented and inventive that they’re definitely GOING to write a book that I would love, but that this wasn’t quite it. It wasn’t far away but I just wanted something a little more. And it feels harsh to be disappointed with a book that I was feeling was around 9 out of 10 – but it is because I was getting sufficient glimpses that this writer could deliver a ten out of ten.

Then I read the third story, the shortest of all of them. A man finds a bone in his back garden and gets it into his head that his neighbour is involved. And then things get very very odd. This for me, tipped the collection back to a ten out of ten and it became a book that I loved. I don’t know that this third story is going to be most people’s favourite – the title story with that incredible refrain is probably going to be the attention-grabber of the collection, but for me the escalation and economy of prose in the final story was just so good and the observations so sharp and clean I just loved it.

It’s a very unsettling book – I don’t imagine that it is for everyone. It has the sort of feel to me of when Jeanette Winterson was at her very best and you get very realistic and grounded characters suddenly thrust into more and more fanciful situations and watch how the story and the characters unfold, but also with a very textured sort of horror. LaRocca doesn’t just want to show you a knife with blood on it, but make you feel the weight of the handle, the stickiness of the blood, the metallic smell in the air. It’s all very vivid. But also all of the stories have the human heart at their centre – the distance between people and what they will do to build a connection or preserve the one they have.

Really looking forward to reading more from this author, and I know there’s a new hardback just come out. Also, look at this cover, it is absolutely gorgeous.