The Trees Grew Because I Bled There by Eric LaRocca

The Trees Grew Because I Bled There by Eric LaRocca
Buy The Trees Grew Because I Bled There by Eric LaRocca at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Horror
Reviewer: Alex Merrick
Summary: Reality can produce as many horrors as any fictional piece of horror. Eric LaRocca instils within The Trees Grew Because I Bled There a horrific image of reality. In this collection of short stories, life is filled with disease, grief and humiliation. His emotive and descriptive language gives each horror a beauty and one that will keep you reading until the dead of night.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 208	Date: March 2023
Publisher: Titan Books
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1803363004
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Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and how we react and process them. Most horror fiction features a Big Bad, whether that is a home invader, monster, or ghost, it is usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's The Trees Grew Because I Bled There is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any Big Bad.

LaRocca's horrors are palpable on the screen even though they are less tangible than monsters. His use of language imbibes them with a disgusting presence. Take the first story in the collection You Follow Wherever They Go, it deals with a father with cancer speaking to their child and trying to get them to play with the other children outside. The cancer has turned the father into something disgusting, he smear[s] threads of saliva across his mouth. However, LaRocca understands that although cancer can transform a person, it never completely destroys what makes them who they are. The father is still a father and only wants to ensure their child will not be lost when they are gone. Opening the collection with You Follow Wherever They Go, LaRocca provides the reader with an idea of the melancholic horror that resides within the pages.

Each story within The Trees Grew Because I Bled There seeps into your brain like the intrusive thoughts that push their way into the protagonist of the second story, Bodies are for Burning. A story that touches on OCD and how debilitating intrusive thoughts can become to their sufferer. LaRocca writes about mental illness with sympathy emphasising that it is an illness, just the same as cancer. It is something poisonous residing and uninvited residing within. Again, the imagery, such as, tissue blistering red and persistent as blind white maggots highlights the monstrousness of something that is firmly planted within reality. Similar to this story, The Strange Things We Become, the third story in the collection, is again one that deals with cancer. LaRocca decides to not implicitly describe how the cancer affects the lover of the narrator in this story leaving it up to the viewer to imagine how their body must be wasting away. LaRocca uses cancer as a motive throughout, even if the story is not implicitly about cancer, it looms large in this collection. The 'Emperor of Maladies' used as a motive throughout is a way to emphasise the horrors of real life and the randomness of it. Cancer can affect anyone, no matter how healthy. It is as Sontag stated, 'a demonic pregnancy'.

LaRocca understands that horror rooted in reality is far scarier than any ghost or ghoul. It is real; illness, whether physical or mental, is something we will all deal with at some point in our lives. He uses his stories to show us exactly what we will have to deal with and how unpleasant and horrifying it can be. I do not say this lightly, the stories within this short collection, and at 208 pages, and eight stories, it is short, are like the cancer LaRocca mentions throughout. They are real, horrific and once they have affected you, you will never be the same again.

If this book appeals, you might also enjoy You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin. You might enjoy The Haunting of Alejandra by V Castro.

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