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.
Any longtime LaRocca reader will recognize his signature embedded stories, but the main divulgences are perhaps the most intertwined to the protagonist and the core narrative in his oeuvre to date. An anonymous stranger writes letters to Rupert revealing his increasingly debilitating desires, which spread like a blight to the surrounding characters. Though on the outskirts of the novel lurks an enigmatic figure, Mister Jakes, whose site appeared in the trilogy’s first entry and who tells yet another horrible story here. A few other stories bleed into this book, which stray and slow the ramping hunger of the narrative, but offer glimpses of the town that will hopefully return in book three, currently slated for September 2027.
Like We Are Always Tender with Our Dead, much of this novel centers on thresholds. But here, the characters who once carefully guarded their moral and personal thresholds from deviants and abusers instead toy with crossing them. The confined setting of End House festers with the tortures that arise from an inability to cross thresholds one desperately wishes to pass. Beyond these thresholds lies transformation, be it the destruction of innocence and becoming what you once detested, or the freedom to become what you never knew you were all along. On the precipice balances the question: Which version is who I really am?
As the faceless family’s curse (trapping them in End House) drives Rupert and Gladys to cruelty to achieve temporary freedom, they suggest that the only path out of internal agony is the path to inflicting agony onto others. In losing our innocence, we begin to kill innocence in others. In this way, LaRocca’s novel is equally about cycles, from cycles of endless monotony to cycles of recurring tragedy. We Turn Gruesome at Night uses a sadistic kind of magic to literalize the process of brutality generating brutality, cycles of violence that spread on an individual level and through the entire community of Burnt Sparrow. LaRocca underlines again and again the self-actualizing dangers of dwelling in our degeneration, how society can submerge us in our darkest inklings of desire to breed increasingly worse versions of ourselves. These urges build and congest the novel’s characters in guilt, doubt, and even, disgustingly, excrement. They want out, but to get out, they must delve even deeper.
We Turn Gruesome at Night becomes a story of collecting, justifying, and perhaps righting our misdoings, even if it be through more depravity – thematically and structurally reminiscent of Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (1986). LaRocca allows his characters to break down barriers of morality and sexuality in ways they haven’t done so directly before. What results is a hyper-aware tragedy constantly redefining itself along with our protagonists, uninterpretable on any scale of good or evil.
In the audio edition, Triston Wright’s performance elevates the gothic sensibilities of the novel and smooths LaRocca’s ornate prose into something more purposefully theatrical and digestible if the reader, or listener, is willing to accept it as such.
I received an audio ARC from NetGalley and Dreamscape Media in exchange for an honest review.
Related: Kern Robinson’s essay on Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.
D.S. Burton is a horror and weird fiction writer studying creative writing at the University of New Brunswick. His fiction appears in On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Dead Ends: An Anthology of Suburban Gothic Fiction, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere. His most recent essay is on Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, published in MetaStellar. Learn more at https://www.dsburton.com/.
