BOOK REVIEW | WRETCH: or THE UNBECOMING OF PORCELAIN KHAW | ERIC LAROCCA

 

BOOK REVIEW | WRETCH: or THE UNBECOMING OF PORCELAIN KHAW 

DESCRIPTION 

From rising horror star and award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke comes a nightmarish, haunting, tech-Gothic thrill ride about sorrow, memory, and the unabashed complexity of love as a transgressive act.
After his husband dies, Simeon Link finds himself overcome by grief and seeking comfort in an unusual support group called The Wretches, who offer an addictive and dangerous source of relief. They introduce Simeon to a curious figure known as Porcelain Khaw—a man with the ability to let those who are grieving have one last intimate moment with their beloved...for a price.
Hallucinatory, fiendish, and destructively beautiful, Wretch transports us to a world where not everything is as it seems, and those we love may be the ones who haunt us most.

REVIEW

Simeon Link is struggling. His beloved husband has just died. Work has dismissed him due to him not meeting his quotas, and he is adrift in a sea of grief. 

Joining books like Linghun by Ai Jiang, or Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod, Wretch explores the emotional horror of grief, the terror of loss and the crushing weight of loneliness.

We follow the story through the lens of Simeon Link’s eyes as he struggles to cope with the loss of his husband, and the story becomes increasingly insular as the narrative progresses. Larocca eventually strips Simeon down to his base layers as we learn more about Simeon. 

Eventually, Simeon gets involved with the Wretches, a support group for those who have lost loved ones, and he learns of a way to gain some closure so that he can come to terms with his loss. 

The writing in Wretch can at times be powerful as Larocca explores various ideas. However, whilst there is the ever-growing dread that something may happen to the narrator, it can be in equal parts irritating as the story drifts on to other seas that seem to have nothing to do with the narrative. 

As a writer, Larocca for this reader, treads in the same shallows as Paul Tremblay, in that I can see the brilliance, but in equal parts the writing irritates me. I don’t know what it is, but it does! I think at times I may come at his book from a different lens, and what I expect and what I get are two different things. Don’t get me wrong the writing is fantastic, the characterisation of his protagonists have a ferocious intensity, but when it trundles off into the existential and the sublime my patience wears thin and I can quite happily throw the book down and simply give up. Maybe that is Larocca’s brilliance, take me out of my comfort zone, throw me to places I don’t want to go.

Whilst it is easy to admire the atmosphere and the emotional rawness that Larocca explores, ultimately the book doesn’t come into its stride until the final act and by that time attention spans may have drifted onto sunnier climes.