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A review by allthings
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes by Eric LaRocca
1.0
This book gets one star for making me squeal at a gross-out scene, but otherwise it just pissed me off.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
In the titular story, two women who are supposedly in their mid-twenties in the early 2000s start writing emails to one another as though they're penpals in the Victorian era. We watch as the "relationship" between these people who we know nothing about immediately escalates for no reason. There is no character development, no sense of progression, and half the time I couldn't even tell the characters apart from one another. Scattered among the awkward IM conversations there are some graphic descriptions of violence against children and animals, then there's one fairly memorable gross-out event, and then it ends.
I can see why this went viral on TikTok: it's the kind of thing you find online as a teen then pass around to your friends because it's gross and edgy, like blowfly girl. Except that, instead of staying in the grimy backwaters of a personal blog or online micro press, this is now a professionally published short story in a gorgeous hardback that sits on bookshelves around the world.
The Enchantment
This is not a short story; it is a treatment for a short film or something similar. Towards the end, I think the author was just writing notes to themselves. You cannot convince me that the sentence "She cranes her head beneath end tables, sofas, etc." was written to be published.
None of it makes any sense. The characters have zero motivations. It also reuses things from the first story, to the point that I thought they were going to be connected somehow, but they weren't. I found it particularly strange that two out of the three stories featured women who, upon suddenly deciding, with no prior hint at this mindset, that they want to "carry life" inside them, will stop at nothing to fulfil this goal. It's a bizarre view of pregnancy, and the way it was written made it seem like the only justification for this behavior was because they're women, and women = children.
You'll Find It's Like That All Over
Boring and ridiculous, this short story commits the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing to the extent that at the end there is literally a paragraph summing up what the story was about. Except that the story itself doesn't even fulfil its stated theme; we're supposed to take away from this that Mr. Fowler's politeness that gets him into trouble, yet he's also being offered large sums of money to continue engaging with the bets. Talk about an exercise in pointlessness.
On top of all this, I thought the writing was badly crafted. I spotted so many repeated words and phrases, grammatical and tense issues, and the excessive use of "seemed to" and "seemed to realize" was incredibly distracting.
All in all, I hated this book, but it also inspired me, because if this can get published then surely I have a chance too?
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
In the titular story, two women who are supposedly in their mid-twenties in the early 2000s start writing emails to one another as though they're penpals in the Victorian era. We watch as the "relationship" between these people who we know nothing about immediately escalates for no reason. There is no character development, no sense of progression, and half the time I couldn't even tell the characters apart from one another. Scattered among the awkward IM conversations there are some graphic descriptions of violence against children and animals, then there's one fairly memorable gross-out event, and then it ends.
I can see why this went viral on TikTok: it's the kind of thing you find online as a teen then pass around to your friends because it's gross and edgy, like blowfly girl. Except that, instead of staying in the grimy backwaters of a personal blog or online micro press, this is now a professionally published short story in a gorgeous hardback that sits on bookshelves around the world.
The Enchantment
This is not a short story; it is a treatment for a short film or something similar. Towards the end, I think the author was just writing notes to themselves. You cannot convince me that the sentence "She cranes her head beneath end tables, sofas, etc." was written to be published.
None of it makes any sense. The characters have zero motivations. It also reuses things from the first story, to the point that I thought they were going to be connected somehow, but they weren't. I found it particularly strange that two out of the three stories featured women who, upon suddenly deciding, with no prior hint at this mindset, that they want to "carry life" inside them, will stop at nothing to fulfil this goal. It's a bizarre view of pregnancy, and the way it was written made it seem like the only justification for this behavior was because they're women, and women = children.
You'll Find It's Like That All Over
Boring and ridiculous, this short story commits the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing to the extent that at the end there is literally a paragraph summing up what the story was about. Except that the story itself doesn't even fulfil its stated theme; we're supposed to take away from this that Mr. Fowler's politeness that gets him into trouble, yet he's also being offered large sums of money to continue engaging with the bets. Talk about an exercise in pointlessness.
On top of all this, I thought the writing was badly crafted. I spotted so many repeated words and phrases, grammatical and tense issues, and the excessive use of "seemed to" and "seemed to realize" was incredibly distracting.
All in all, I hated this book, but it also inspired me, because if this can get published then surely I have a chance too?