D.S. Burton
We Turn Gruesome at Night is the second installment of Eric LaRocca’s Burnt Sparrow Trilogy following 2025’s transgressive small-town horror We Are Always Tender with Our Dead. Here the horror returns to the body; not the dead, but the living body’s place in the world and with others, and what we do to satiate our need to occupy that place.
We return to Rupert and Gladys after a decade of imprisonment in End House, no longer only degraded by their warped families and community, but also themselves. End House doesn’t just feel lived in, it feels used and exhausted itself, from its too-thin walls to the familiar yet often foreign feel of worn leather and well-trod hallways. The claustrophobic atmosphere leeches into the narrative, sucking threads and characters into the house, not outward, and physicalizing the increasingly internal struggles of the series protagonists.
