[Book Review] You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood (2022)

The eons-old and oft-spouted phrase, ‘you should never judge a book by its cover (or title)’, may be true for a lot of authors - but not for Eric LaRocca. 

LaRocca is quickly making a name for himself as of the most exciting and innovative authors in horror fiction at present, maintaining momentum since receiving deserved virality in the community with his novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. With their cryptic and morbid single-sentence titles and Francis Bacon-esque covers from Swedish artist Kim Jakobsson, assuming a LaRocca title will be a descent into horrors unlike any other put to page would be a just judgement.

It’s best to approach You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood with a hefty level of ignorance of its content (the details of which will be skipped over in this review), but even without detailing specifics, fans of dystopian tech-horror anthology series Black Mirror or Shinya Tsukumoto’s raging cyberpunk epic Tetsuo: The Iron Man will find a lot to love in LaRocca’s ouroboreal nightmare. The part-true-crime-part-total-headfuck novella traverses a labyrinth of coiling twists and centipedic turns, centering on an ambiguous narrative of two missing lovers - Martyr Black and Ambrose Thorne. The only clues to their fate are an expertly assembled exhibition of intriguing set pieces that fit together in a cyber-Gothic mosaic and presented to the reader as a dossier of lyrical cruelty. From the narrative main artery of the story springs an offshoot of spiralling veins in the form of transcripts, editor’s notes and poetic vignettes that explore the futility of human nature with a revelling nihilism reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk’s best (and least pretentious) work.

Then there’s You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood, the metatextual novel within a novel referred to by the title. With a cast of cohesively nuanced and diverse characters, LaRocca has captured a world just aching for a faithful film adaptation from a director who isn’t willing to skimp on body horror grotesqueries that Cronenberg himself would be proud of. The story of game designer Tamsen, her younger brother Presley and the pair’s arrival at a mysterious manor is spellbinding - an immersive tale (in very literal ways) of dissolving digitally into cycles of trauma. 

Unpredictable, haunting and wildly imaginative, You’ve Lost a Lot Of Blood is a story that not only rewards, but demands multiple readings. Each revisit to this world of sadism and sorrow will have you parsing new theories, discovering new horrors and – more frighteningly – uncovering those that have always been there, waiting unchanging in the shadows for you to start all over again.

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