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A review by jonezeemcgee
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca
3.0
2.75
Definite Trigger warnings for abuse and animal cruelty.
Very disturbing. Good writing style, but not the most fleshed-out short work of fiction. I had high hopes for this piece of work. I went into it having a vague notion of what it was about. Sites like 4Chan and Reddit are peppered with lost fools willing to heap all forms of cruelty and torture upon themselves at the behest of others (either for the karma, the infamy, or some other deeply traumatic psychological reasoning), so it is not as if this isn't plausible in some capacity. I guess I hope this would go beyond the sharing of disturbing little anecdotes sandwiched between correspondence. I hoped maybe it would touch more on the push and pull between participants. I feel that the anecdotes were thrown in to add to the horror of the story, and it is clear this was done for the shock factor. I find it to be the cheapest form of horror to shock for the sake of shocking, even in short fiction, instead of paying close attention to what you can accomplish in your limited narrative. There is a way to shock while still creating a full enriching story in a short page count. I think why I am a little harder on this than other short slash em' horrors I have read is I could tell the author could do so much more, and this clearly inched so close to the edge of being an iconic work of short fiction.
Definite Trigger warnings for abuse and animal cruelty.
Very disturbing. Good writing style, but not the most fleshed-out short work of fiction. I had high hopes for this piece of work. I went into it having a vague notion of what it was about. Sites like 4Chan and Reddit are peppered with lost fools willing to heap all forms of cruelty and torture upon themselves at the behest of others (either for the karma, the infamy, or some other deeply traumatic psychological reasoning), so it is not as if this isn't plausible in some capacity. I guess I hope this would go beyond the sharing of disturbing little anecdotes sandwiched between correspondence. I hoped maybe it would touch more on the push and pull between participants. I feel that the anecdotes were thrown in to add to the horror of the story, and it is clear this was done for the shock factor. I find it to be the cheapest form of horror to shock for the sake of shocking, even in short fiction, instead of paying close attention to what you can accomplish in your limited narrative. There is a way to shock while still creating a full enriching story in a short page count. I think why I am a little harder on this than other short slash em' horrors I have read is I could tell the author could do so much more, and this clearly inched so close to the edge of being an iconic work of short fiction.