At Dark, I Become Loathsome
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
From Eric LaRocca—Bram Stoker Award–nominated and Splatterpunk Award–winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke—comes At Dark, I Become Loathsome, a grim yet gentle, horrifying yet hopeful, intense tale of death, trauma, and love.
“If you’re reading this, you’ve likely thought that the world would be a better place without you.”
A single line of text, glowing in the darkness of the internet. Written by Ashley Lutin, who has often thought the same—and worse—in the years since his wife died and his young son disappeared. But the peace of the grave is not for him—it’s for those he can help. Ashley has constructed a peculiar ritual for those whose desire to die is at war with their yearning to live a better life.
Struggling to overcome his own endless grief, one night Ashley finds connection with Jinx—a potential candidate for Ashley’s next ritual—who spins a tale both revolting and fascinating. Thus begins a relationship that traps the two men in an ever-tightening spiral of painful revelations, where long-hidden secrets are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light.
Only through pain can we find healing. Only through death can we find new life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This unsubtle outing from LaRocca (Everything the Darkness Eats) follows in the growing trend of queer horror in which the characters' queerness directly contributes to the manifestation of the horror element. In this case, widower Ashley Lutin, a self-proclaimed "self-loathing bisexual," is haunted by the disappearance of his eight-year-old son, Bailey, whom he is afraid he drove away by calling a slur in response to perceived feminine behaviors. As a way of coping with his depression, Ashley renders a strange service to those contemplating suicide: he buries clients alive for 30 minutes, then digs them back up. As Ashley learns more of what may have happened to his son, however, the purity of his rituals becomes harder to maintain. The narrative's graphic and violent sex scenes illustrate Ashley and other characters' depravity, but there's disappointingly little substance among all the shock value. Frequent clichés and few genuine scares don't help. As an extended metaphor for the destruction caused by denying one's sexuality, this falls flat.
