We Turn Gruesome At Night

Burnt Sparrow #2

by Eric LaRocca

The nightmarish second installment of a new trilogy of provocative, disruptive and brutally poetic queer horror set in a small New England town.

From the Bram Stoker Award® finalist and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, an intense, claustrophobic literary horror that is perfect for fans of Agustina Bazterrica, Mariana Enriquez and Paul Tremblay.

Ten years after the devastating massacre that occurred on Christmas morning in 2003 and the community of Burnt Sparrow, NH struggles to move forward. Meanwhile, Rupert Cromwell and Gladys Esherwood find themselves trapped in End House and suffering unbearable monotony day in and day out. When a town courier named Pierce arrives at End House and introduces Rupert to a secret organization known as The Perdido Society, Rupert discovers a deeply intricate and intensely sinister web of secrets spreading through the town. It isn't long before more blood is spilled, shameful transgressions are revealed, and temptations are finally satisfied.

Captivating and profoundly unnerving, this is the story of two lost souls who are sent on an odyssey into the depths of depravity only for them to discover that it's quite easy to turn monstrous, to become the thing you once despised. Lyrical, nihilistic and brutally poetic, this is shocking, unflinching, must-read horror from an author at the top of his game.

Genres: Horror, Queer, Audiobook, LGBT, Fiction, Adult, Psychological Horror

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2026

About the author

Eric LaRocca (he/they) is a 3x Bram Stoker Award® finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and a 2x Splatterpunk Award winner. He was named by Esquire as one of the “Writers Shaping Horror’s Next Golden Age” and praised by Locus as “one of the strongest and most unique voices in contemporary horror fiction.” LaRocca’s notable works include Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, Everything the Darkness Eats, and At Dark, I Become Loathsome. He currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts with his partner.

Reviews

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eric LaRocca has remained the same. He still wants to shock and make the reader uncomfortable, and there is more under the surface here than in Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. But the material is also less impactful.

His characters are still obsessive, spending their time in chat rooms (this time, there is a curse that keeps the protagonists inside a house) or writing letters and sharing their macabre secret wishes. I can see the evolution, but something still didn’t click with me.

We Turn Gruesome at Night is the second book in the series, but it can be read as a standalone.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the free copy.

[Evie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am always conflicted when it comes to rating these more extreme horror novels cause they're never pleasant reading but you go into them knowing that, so you can't clutch your pearls and claim its a surprise. So does that mean it's good if it revolts you? Horrifies you? Makes you wonder if you're going to keep your lunch down? Cause I went through that whole spectrum while reading this.

I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed by this second instalment. When I finished the first one I had so many questions about Ruperts future, the faceless family and the secrets of the town of Burnt Sparrow and I feel like this entry did everything except explore those elements from the first book I was curious about.

While book one in this trilogy is one of the most fucked up things I've read, I still felt like all the many grotesque depravities made a certain sense in the context and were in service to the plot. This instalment felt like someone was running one of those bingo cages that randomly spits out something shocking, foul or disgusting, slaps it into the book, dusts off their hands and calls it a day.

I can't help but wonder if a more aggressive final edit might have provided the story with some tighter cohesion and wrangled some of the overwrought prose into a more polished sequel. I feel like LaRocca's more recent releases have sounded so interesting on paper but have just been missing the mark for me in execution, which is a bummer cause he really is putting in the work in this horrid little niche that I want to love.

Full disclosure, me and my sick bucket I will still read book three cause I need to see how it finishes, but gosh I wanted so much more from this. I'm not even going to speak about content warnings cause if you got through book one and wanted more you will be fine.

Thank you to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for the ALC of this release (the approval 6 days before the archive date was a little rough though guys, come on).



Consider following my instagram

[Char · Rating 4 out of 5]

We Turn Gruesome at Night is yet another example of Eric LaRocca’s brilliance with titles, right? I mean, what horror fan could walk past that title in a book store without stopping to pick it up? Luckily, it’s as bloody and delectable inside as the title indicates!

We return to Burnt Sparrow 10 years after the events in book one. We discover that Rupert and Gladys have been unable to leave End House during that time. The two of them are sick of each other and rarely communicate, each wrapped up in their own dark and lonely world.

Rupert gets a letter via the grocery delivery guy and gets wrapped up in something called The Perdido Society. Rupert makes one discovery after another and has soon pulled Gladys into his orbit again by the sheer gravity of his breakthrough. That’s all I can say about the plot, so let’s talk about the writing.

Eric is an evocative writer-he can easily take you from place to place emotionally and does so with ease. One minute we’re there in Burnt Sparrow, and the next, (usually in epistolary form, or as in one scene here, a tape recording), and you’re transported to a different time and place instantly. I absolutely love this technique and I think Eric is now my favorite author where this is concerned. (My previous favorite was Peter Straub, so that’s saying something.)

All of this to say I was uncomfortable with many scenes, uneasy, off-kilter and horrified.
I loved it! A book that makes you feel things is a treasure. I don’t really care much for slashers or extreme horror anymore, but when Eric writes it I do care. This is neither or a slasher or all that extreme, but its harsh looks at some of the worst of humanity never fails to somehow delight me.

Now the wait begins for the third book and I can’t help but think that Eric has saved his best for last.

4.5/5-Highly recommended!

*ARC from publisher

[Becky Spratford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starred review in the July 2026 issue of Booklist and on the blog: https://raforall.blogspot.com/2026/07... (link live 7/7 at 7am central)

Three Words That Describe This Book: crossing thresholds, extreme horror meets Gothic, engrossing

Other words: claustrophobic, epic, immersive, disturbing and yet, you cannot look away. Great use of stories within stories.

When you read this book, terrible things are happening. They begin bad-- Rupert and Gladys have been trapped in End House for 10 years since readers last saw them. Burst Sparrow is still a rotted, blighted, horrible place, a place that stands in opposition to all living things that wish to grow and flourish. A place where hopelessness has rooted itself like cancer. Readers come back and hope things will get better.

Well, again, listen to LaRocca with the book’s trigger warnings-- it won't get better and in fact it will get worse in ways you cannot comprehend. But also, you will be UNABLE to look away.

The claustrophobia of the story-- the two of them trapped in the house-- and we see what happens multiple times if you try to leave, it is not in their heads-- is building in a way that we readers know it is about to burst. I mean it has been 10 monotonous years. There is a temporary solution to their predicament that is figured out, but this is the story we are reading.

Regarding Crossing thresholds: There is a point in this book where Rupert mentions that the stories his mom told him are all about crossing thresholds and well--- that is this book as well-- literally and figuratively-- both the plot but also, this is book 2 in a trilogy. The job of the middle book in a trilogy is to build a bridge from book one to three, it is the book that allows readers to cross the threshold from the story they got sucked into and takes the far enough along that they are craving the third book. Many second books in trilogies fall flat because they have to be a good story on their own and do this heavy lifting-- carrying the reader. Here we get a fascinating story by an author who understands the work that has to be done.

This story allows Rupert and Gladys and their impossible situation to cross a threshold, one that once they cross, they cannot go back. It also allows the story to cross a threshold to move us all toward book 3. Well done.

The use of stories with the story-- this time mostly through confessional letters that Rupert receives as part of the secretive Perdido Society-- those letters create both a standalone story and service to move the plot forward. LaRocca does this frequently in his work and it is always engrossing but here it is particularly useful to the plot.

LaRocca's writing never ceases to amaze me. Every single time I read anything they write I go through the gamut of emotions-- intrigued and illicit things, disgusted, revulsion, sympathy, anger, sadness, rejoicing at things I probably shouldn't rejoice at. And the entire time, no matter how uncomfortable the writing makes me feel, I keep turning the pages. And when I look up, I blink and literally notice how many dozens of pages have flown by. Where did they go? How long was I held rapt by the storytelling? The pages literally melt away. And I remember everything I read. The images, the characters, the details that he plants and comes back to. It is quite remarkable.

I am waiting for this NOT to happen. If it ever does, he will get less than 5 stars. It has not happened yet. LaRocca draws readers into this dark, blighted, sickening world and like Rupert and Gladys, you cannot leave. But unlike them, you really don't want to.

Plants the seeds for book three-- this word choice is intentional. Not a spoiler but when you read this book you will understand that word choice.

I have shared VERY little about what happens here, but trust me, you want to read it. Also don't worry about re-reading the first Burnt Sparrow book. The major points you need to remember-- LaRocca shares. Now if you never read the first book, you might be a little lost, but if you read the back cover of book 1 and know that there was the massacre-- that is enough to ground you and LaRocca fills in enough of the blanks. But I will say, the Brunt Sparrow trilogy is many to be one book released in three parts, so go back and read We Are Always Tender With Our Dead

Also can I just say, I know Eric has great titles for his books but this one is particularly perfect for this book. Again, no spoilers, but *chef's kiss*

This book and the trilogy-- feeds off of the history of horror while still being wholly new. For fans of Shirley Jackson, Clive Barker, and Poppy Z. Brite.

[destiny ♡ howling libraries · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Sometimes you have to hurt someone to show how much you truly care," the thing pretending to be his father tells him.

Another masterfully disturbing story from one of my favorites. I love that there has been such a time gap between the first Burnt Sparrow installment and this one! It was fascinating to learn how much a decade spent in isolation has corrupted and broken these characters. As always with Eric's books, proceed with caution because there's a lot of pain and disgust woven into these pages, but I always have such a good time with them.

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy! All thoughts are honest and my own.

[JemeryInPrint · Rating 4 out of 5]

We Turn Gruesome At Night by Eric LaRocca is a compelling return to Burnt Sparrow, offering another disturbing glimpse into its depravity. While the first book focused primarily on Rupert, this installment gives equal attention to Rupert and Gladys.

LaRocca’s evocative writing remains a standout. The use of letters, recordings, and shifts in time and perspective effortlessly transports the reader between places and moments. It’s a technique I particularly enjoy, and LaRocca has quickly become one of my favorite authors in this regard.

The story effectively explores loneliness, isolation, and the darkness that exists within everyone. Although Gladys didn’t always hold my interest, her emotional isolation was well portrayed. There was one particularly brutal scene though overall this installment wasn’t nearly as dark as the first.

There are a lot of elements at play, but as the story progresses, more is coming together. Not every question I have has been explained but that just makes me look forward to seeing how the third book brings the strange and sinister world of Burnt Sparrow to a conclusion.

Thank you Eric LaRocca, Dreamscape Media, and NetGalley for the audio ARC in an exchange for an honest review. This was greatly appreciated as I wait for my physical copy to arrive.

[Mags C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Men really will do anything but go to therapy

[River · Rating 1.5 out of 5]

[world weary sigh]

Under normal circumstances this would be the point where I finally relent and decide to just break up with the author altogether, but much to my chagrin I believe there is still a third book planned for this series and my completionist nature means that I will probably end up reading that one too, if nothing else just to see if things can possibly get any worse.

In my review of We Are Always Tender With Our Dead (which I, perhaps a little over generously, rated 3.5 stars), I mentioned how much LaRocca's writing confounds me in that I KNOW he is capable of beautiful prose, spine chilling tension, and horror that generally makes me feel sick (compliment), and yet it just seems that with every novel he puts out, he is putting less and less effort into maintaining those early high standards. We Are Always Tender was fine, Wretch was hollow but passable, and now We Turn Gruesome has fallen into pure, empty repetition. Is it a consequence of being picked up by traditional publishing that he just no longer feels like he needs to put any effort into writing something horrifying? Is he under time limits to pump out multiple books a year and can no longer take the time to create something beautiful? Is it an issue with editing? I hate to even mention it, but is AI usage at play? I genuinely wish I had an answer because how I YEARN for those early days of LaRocca's writing.

Another thing I mentioned in my review of the first book was the overuse of the phrase "the poor man/boy/woman/creature/etc." which I had tried to keep a count of but ultimately gave up with. I did end up getting a hold of an epub version so I could do a proper count which came out at 69 (nice) instances in the first book. This time around I committed to keeping a count and We Turn Gruesome totalled out at a whopping 86 instances, twice the phrase was used three times on one page, once it was used twice in one paragraph. I find it hard to believe this is something that could get past an editor and yet TWO are NAMED in the acknowledgements.

I realise this review has barely said anything about the actual story in this book, but I defy you to read this and then get back to me with anything of substance to say about the plot. This book is just pages and pages of the awful wretched loathsome terrible someone thought of doing something terrible to the poor innocent helpless someone else and then lamenting the awful damned wretched loathsomeness of those wretched terrible thoughts. And I'm sorry if this all comes across as incredibly harsh but I need you to understand how much it genuinely breaks my heart to watch a talented author appear to give up in real time.

[Kate Victoria RescueandReading · Rating 1 out of 5]

First of all I didn’t realize this is Book 2 in a series, I think I was missing too much to totally get the characters/background during the story. Secondly it felt like it wanted to shock and disgust the reader with no real purpose. It was just gross and depraved. I didn’t get the reason for the actions taken and decisions and inner monologue of nastiness.

So, not a fan of this one at all.

Thank you anyways to the author, NetGalley, the narrator, and Dreamscape Media for a copy!

[Katie Jae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was over the moon when I got approved for this arc!! I have been down a LaRocca rabbit hole and had met my temporary end when the email came in.

This is book 2 of the Burnt Sparrow trilogy and, like book 1, this one did not disappoint!

The story starts off 10 years after the madness that was book 1. Rupert and Gladys are wrapped inside the prison that is End House, allowing the darkness to seep into their bones.

I really enjoyed this book! It was great revisiting Burnt Sparrow and seeing the depravity that would ensue. Although in book 1 Rupert was the main focus, here it was both he and Gladys.

Rupert gets looped into a secret society and Gladys is on the verge of calling it quits. Despite being housemates, they’re miles apart from each other. It was interesting watching Rupert slowly snowball into feeding his dark desires, and the mystery letters played a role in it.

With Gladys… she was sort of meh a good portion of the book but what do you expect when you’re drowning in loneliness. I think the story captures the feeling of loneliness and isolation very well, it also does a great job of showcasing how everyone has a darkness buried inside them.

There is one scene in here that was a literal gut punch but outside of that it wasn’t nearly as dark as book 1.

There were a lot of elements going on but the deeper you got in the story, the more pieces started falling into place. Not every question was answered but I expect book 3 will be wrapping the black hole that is Burnt Sparrow very nicely.

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

The Worst Pen Pal in New Hampshire

TL;DR: The most airless thing LaRocca has written. Two people sealed in a rotting house, a chain of anonymous confessional letters, and an argument that monstrousness is not born in the atrocity but in the eight thousand identical afternoons before it. The prose over-explains itself. The dread does not. It got under my skin and stayed.

The scariest thing in this book is a row of garbage cans.

Rupert Cromwell has been sealed inside End House for ten years. He cannot cross the front threshold. He has tested this. He pokes his fingers past the line until the skin sizzles and unspools and comes back gnarled, and then he does it again, because pain is at least a thing that happens to him. In the meantime he has memorized the fetid stain by the bathroom door in the East Wing and the moth hole in the carpet outside Gladys Esherwood’s room. He cuts his own hair with a bowl and a rusted pair of clippers and after a decade he has not improved. Out back the trash has gone soft and candied and the smell comes through the walls, and he doesn’t notice it anymore, and that’s the part that scares him. He would worry if it stopped.

Early on, Rupert remembers a high school unit on the Western Front and how the men who came home ruined were not ruined by the shelling. They were ruined by the waiting. That is the thesis, and Eric LaRocca puts it on the table in the first chapter and then spends the rest of the book proving it: what turns a person monstrous is rarely the atrocity, it’s the eight thousand identical afternoons before the atrocity. Boredom as a moral solvent. I have never read a haunted house novel that understood the house is not the problem.

This is the second Burnt Sparrow book and it is a smaller, meaner, more airless thing than the first. Where We Are Always Tender with Our Dead had an entire town to work with, this one has two people, one dying mansion, and a mail slot. The mail is the plot. A grocery courier starts bringing Rupert letters from something called The Perdido Society, an anonymous confessional chain running quietly under the town, strangers typing their worst private thoughts to strangers. Rupert’s correspondent is a man frightened of what he might do to his adopted infant son. The letters keep coming. They go where you are afraid they are going and then they keep going, and the truly upsetting thing is not the content of the letters but that Rupert starts living for Mondays.

Here is where I have to be honest, and I came to horror sideways out of playing in bands, so understand this is a musician’s complaint. LaRocca has one tempo. The sentences in Rupert’s chapters are built the same way over and over: a clause, then the clause restated with adjectives stacked on it, then a qualifier. Vile, loathsome, monstrous. Perhaps. Almost as though. He wonders if. The man writes a beautiful sentence and then writes it again slightly wider in case you missed it, and Rupert is forever explaining to himself the thing the scene has already shown you, and every time he does it the scene loses a little blood. It’s maddening, because when LaRocca shuts the fuck up and trusts the image he is genuinely hair-raising. A faceless thing wearing his father’s shape tells Rupert that sometimes you have to hurt someone to show how much you truly care, and somewhere behind it a children’s choir is singing Christmas carols in a different cell of his mind. That gets no gloss and needs none. More of that. Fewer perhapses.

The best writing in the book is smuggled in sideways. A man calling himself Mister Jakes arrives in town on the first cold wind of October, and his chapters are short, and what he does is tell stories, and what he thinks while telling them is that all storytelling is a transmission of cancer. He tells one about a woman, a handsome antique alarm clock, and a thing she did at twelve years old that she has never been able to explain to herself. Later Rupert plays a tape his dead mother recorded for him and we get a story about a woman who wakes with a small cut on her thigh that opens wider every time she speaks. I read that one twice. It is the most exact thing about love and self-erasure I have found in a horror novel in years, it has next to nothing to do with the plot, and I don’t give a shit. This is LaRocca the novella writer breaking into his own house. He is better at that length and he knows it. Whether the nesting reads as load-bearing or as a guy who couldn’t stop writing short fiction depends on how generous you feel. Some nights I feel generous.

He has been building toward something this size for a while. LaRocca broke out in 2021 with Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, a novella about an online correspondence that curdles, which tells you precisely why the letters here land: he has been writing epistolary damage his entire career. Esquire named him one of the writers shaping horror’s next golden age, Locus called him one of the strongest and most unique voices in contemporary horror, and he is a three-time Stoker finalist and Splatterpunk winner whose stated instinct with any project is to ask how it can be told as efficiently and succinctly as possible. Burnt Sparrow is him losing that argument with himself on purpose. He has said he could not tell this story in one book, that condensing it would be a severe detriment to the art, and that the whole thing is built around thresholds and what a person is willing to sacrifice to cross one. Of this installment he has said he was working on a much smaller canvas and going for something intense, claustrophobic and discomforting, running on surreal nightmare logic. He got it. He has also said that with the rise of fascism in the States these novels feel timelier than when he started them, and I would ordinarily roll my eyes at a man making that case for his own haunted house, except this is a book about a town that keeps its dead pinned to the pavement under chicken wire as a civic exhibit, and about ordinary people talked into atrocity one small permission at a time. Point taken.

Gladys Esherwood is the better character and I suspect he knows it. Her first chapter opens with a fistful of pills in her palm, and what she loves is not death, it’s the staging: Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, froth on the lip, something lush and operatic. That’s an entire woman in one paragraph. She is vain and abused and cruel and desperately lonely, and she misses having ghosts, misses the specific discomfort of being watched by something, because the phantoms have all cleared out and even they would not stay in a house this joyless. Her chapters have weather in them. Rupert’s have footnotes.

The violence, when it arrives, is not stylish, and thank god for that. LaRocca has never confused carnage with cool. It is clumsy and takes too long and everyone involved is humiliated by it. There is a one-eyed stray dog in this book. I am not going to tell you anything else about the dog. I am still angry, which is the correct outcome, and the fact that the scene made me angry instead of merely queasy is the whole difference between a writer using cruelty and a writer meaning it. He means it. There is a content warning in the front matter, and unusually it is not marketing. Believe it.

The last page says End Of Book II and it means that literally. Nothing resolves. Things tighten. Middle books get graded on a curve they didn’t earn, and this one has the standard middle-book shape problem, which is that escalation is not the same as structure. But it escalates honestly. Nobody arrives anywhere they were not walked to by degrees. And the late stretch does something I found almost impossible to sit still for, which is to watch a person begin painting a flattering version of his own history on the wall while the evidence is still warm.

I wanted it tighter. I wanted about twenty percent fewer qualifiers. It’s still the one I’ll be carrying around in December, and I have thought about that alarm clock at least once a day since.

Nobody in this novel becomes a monster. They just run out of other things to do.

[heptagrammaton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obsessive horror. Very much a novel where most that is said is inside a person's head, in a way that reads - to me, sometimes - as over-explanatory/expository, or repetitive, but is also consistent with the poetic-affective whole.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

dark, brutal and unforgiving. Another banger from the goat of sad, gay horror.

[luceski · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second instalment in the Burnt Sparrow trilogy returns to End House a decade after We Are Always Tender With Our Dead, where the lingering curse continues to shape the lives of those left behind. New arrivals, unsettling letters, and old secrets slowly peel back another layer of Burnt Sparrow’s strange mythology, while raising even more questions about the town and the people trapped within it.

LaRocca’s writing is once again beautiful, lyrical and deeply unsettling. Every page carries that signature blend of tenderness and horror, where even the quiet moments feel like they’re hiding something rotten beneath the surface.

This book leans further into the mythology of Burnt Sparrow, introducing fascinating new ideas that expand the world without ever fully explaining it. I loved learning more about the town and its strange traditions, although I finished this one with many of the same questions I had after book one… and a whole new set besides.

The characters continue to blur the line between victim and villain. None of them are particularly likeable, yet they’re written in a way that makes it difficult to completely condemn them. I constantly found myself caught between frustration and sympathy, which made for an uncomfortable but compelling read.

If you’re looking for neatly wrapped answers, this probably isn’t the book for you. It feels very much like the middle chapter of a larger story, building the mystery rather than resolving it. I’m hoping the final book pulls all of these threads together because the pieces are certainly intriguing.

If you enjoy literary horror filled with unsettling imagery, morally complex characters and stories that leave you turning theories over in your head long after you’ve finished, this series continues to deliver.

Now comes the hard part: waiting for book three…

Thanks to Titan for the ARC!

[everybookadoorway · Rating 3 out of 5]

We Turn Gruesome At Night is a disturbing exploration of grief and isolation as it dives into the minds of our characters and exposes their vulgar thoughts and desires.

Just like We Are Always Tender With Our Dead, this book continues to explore some very uncomfortable and gruesome topics, so I would definitely check the trigger warnings before picking this one up if you need to!

Again, like book one, I enjoyed the eerie setting and the unlikeable characters in this story. I also liked the whole idea of people writing anonymous letters to a stranger, revealing their deepest darkest and most vile confessions.

We Turn Gruesome At Night was a solid second instalment in the Burnt Sparrow series.

Overall, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the first book, though I will still be picking up book three in this series when it is released!


Thank you Titan Books and Netgalley for an ARC!

[Steven West · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eric LaRocca confirms once and for all that being totally obsessed with a hot mailman never ends well, and calling a baby "Scythe" possibly seals its fate.

[Wren Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting follow up to the first installment… minor spoilers for We Are Always Tender With Our Dead are ahead.

As the story of the odd New Hampshire town of Burnt Sparrow continues, we find Rupert and Gladys ten years after the massacre on Christmas Day, and the loss of Rupert’s father and Gladys’ husband.

They have fully succumbed to the curse left behind by the family of faceless murderers, a curse of isolation that keeps them bound to End House, lest they attempt to leave, and be shredded to ribbons by some cosmic, unknowable force.

Both of them are harboring their own mountains of grief, Rupert’s being highly conflicting with his feelings about the wretchedness of his late father, and the conditions that led up to his execution at the hands of the elders in book one.

One day, with a seemingly harmless grocery delivery, Rupert receives an anonymous letter, and he is told that it is from a member of The Perdido Society: a group of individuals that send and receive letters of confessions to their own perversions, perilous invasive thoughts and gruesome actions.

Rupert is thoroughly enamored with the fact that he of all people was chosen to receive letters from another wretched soul like himself, to revel in the thought that he’s not alone in the wretchedness he feels he inherited from his late father.

Through all their grief and isolation though, Rupert and Gladys both begin to learn quite a bit about themselves, eachother, and the lengths they are willing to go to to try to gain even a shred of temporary freedom from this mansion of a house that has become their prison of unwavering and forced solitude.

So with the first book, I didn’t really know how things were going to flesh out into a second installment, but with this one, I am very eager for the third book to come out. There are loose ends that need to be tied up and I will be patiently waiting.

As always, in true Eric Larocca fashion, the writing was beautiful, the thoughts and stories within spilled out in endless lyrical prose littered with gruesome scenes of body horror and deeply uncomfortable thoughts from the mind of two clearly very broken individuals. I still stand by the sentiment that nobody does intrusive thoughts and grief quite like Larocca.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ We Turn Gruesome at Night is the second installment in the series, and things are still very, very weird in Burnt Sparrow.

Rupert and Gladys have now been trapped inside End House for ten years, and the mundanity and isolation of their existence begins to push them toward a bleak kind of madness. The story follows their daily struggles to survive while introducing us to even more of the strange people who become caught up in the cycle of misery, absurdity, and oddity surrounding the town and the house.

I found the first book deeply disturbing, but I was so intrigued by the horrific imagination behind it that I knew I had to continue with the series. Book two was just as disturbing, but personally, I found it much more digestible. I struggled with some of the content in the first book, while this installment felt a little easier for me to settle into, although there was one scene involving animal abuse that was an absolute no-go for me. Check your TW!

There’s something fascinating about the way this series takes the mundane and twists it into something so perverse unsettling. The misery of the characters, the strange edges of Burnt Sparrow, and the bizarre circumstances surrounding End House create a world that is so weird you can’t turn away.

Just know that if you came into book two hoping some of your questions from the first book would finally be answered… they don’t. In fact, you’ll probably leave this one with several more questions than you started with. And somehow, that has only made me more curious. I’ll definitely be continuing on to the third book, especially with that ending, and I’m already looking forward to exploring more of Eric LaRocca’s backlog.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the advance audio copy.

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well…that was a waste of my time. From enjoying the first book in this trilogy, I was excited to see where we would go! So many questions needed to be answered from book 1. However, this did none of that.

A repetitive, boring, lifeless book that could have been done in maybe 100 pages or less. Nothing happens in this almost 300-page book. It’s full of depravity and inner monologue and random side stories. I started skimming at the 50% mark because nothing was happening. It truly felt like a filler to get to a third book. That being said— I’m not sure what is the point of a third book. I genuinely have no idea what a third book could bring. I’ll still read the conclusion, but I’m disappointed in this second installment.

[molslittlelibrary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder if reading the first book in this trilogy would significantly change my opinion on this one. Will revisit when i get round to reading.

Thank you to Titan Books and Netgalley for access to an Advanced Reader Copy.

This was a twisted novel, divulging into the minds of Rupert and Gladys. There was a balance of twists and turns that were expected and unexpected and as with all of LaRocca’s wonderful novels, plenty of horrific discomfort in the detail and depictions of situations and thoughts.
Despite the average rating I am looking forward to the next instalment, and getting my hands on the first to see if that would benefit my experience.

[Alisa Saiko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, I liked this one way more than the first instalment. We've got a gothic mansion where there is no leaving (or is there...). There is depravity. Despair. Grief. Deeply questionable people making deeply questionable decisions. Basically, all the things I want from an Eric LaRocca book.

This one is definitely tamer than the first, but I actually think that worked in its favour. There's more of an actual story here, more setup, and so much more to sink your teeth into. Don't let "tamer" fool you though. The trigger warnings are still very much alive and well!

And as always, Eric LaRocca's writing is BEAUTIFUL. It's almost offensive how beautiful they write such disturbing shit. There's something so unsettling about the way they explore these characters and just how far they can descend.

And now I'm even more excited for book three because there are SO many loose ends. I genuinely have no idea how this is all going to work out for Rupert and Gladys... and honestly, I'm very concerned.

Thank you to Netgalley and Titan Books for the ARC in exchange for my review.

[Risshan Adele · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are reunited with Rupert on his journey of sorrow at End House. Dreary and poetic like a nightmare that you somehow find comforting. The real horror is the thoughts we keep and LaRocca drags us through them. Good to lovers of dark poetic and quiet horror.

[the BOOk Ghost · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think we lost the plot

[myreadingescapism · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm never really shocked by this authors writing, mostly just annoyed.. *insert eye roll*

[Lori · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes! This book made zero sense to me.

[Brooke]

DNFing at 20%, too disturbing

[NS · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received an ARC review of the audiobook for my honest review.

Non-spoiler review.

This is my third Eric LaRocca book. This may just not be an author for me is the realization I've come to.

This story wants to scare you with the overall depravity and the depth someone may go to to get out of a 'prison' is how it comes across to me. The two main characters are cursed to stay in a home and have not been able to leave for 10 years.

The world is an ugly place via the authors eyes and it deserves to be defiled and treated as such. The opening of the book mentions the main character thinks about CSA of children to prepare them for the type of world they live in. The book is just filled with that kind of language and 'feeling'. Mentions of ritual, baptism by blood, sacrifice, offerings are throughout the text which gave it a more occult vibe. This is definitely in the lgbtq+ sphere, but I think saying that brings down the literature inside that category this book shares with others.

Had this not been generously gifted to me as an ARC I would not have likely made it past 25%. But I try to hold up my end to all requests I receive.

Trigger warnings galore. Mentions, themes, descriptions, or commenting on: animal abuse (dog & rat), gratuitous sex, self-pleasuring, violent murder, violent sex, CSA, self harm, planning of self-deleting all are mentioned.


****Spoilers Below****

The whole book below essentially.
You've been warned.

The narrative opens with a set of two people cursed to not be able to leave this mansion they have been stuck inside for ten years.

The non-binary main character who engages in self-harm, is sharing a house with a female who is planning suicide within three days. Another pair, a same-sex couple living outside the home, adopts a son out of a desire not to feel left out by their friends who recently have had children. Throughout these early scenes, characters discuss the perceived toxicity of conforming to traditional gender roles, interleaved with commentary on online webcams, chat rooms, and adult explicit themes.

The storyline introduces a secret organization known as the "perdito society," where members write anonymous confessions detailing loathsome indiscretions and marital betrayals. The first letter is sent to the main character effectively saying they constantly think about ending their adopted child's life.

As the protagonist reads a second letter from this anonymous sender while watching pornography and broadcasting on webcams, while doing sex acts upon himself he daydreams about a 'delivery boy' that brings the letters.

A third confession letter arrives, detailing a parent's plan to abandon their infant in a park near a tree, having dug a hole to leave the child behind due to overwhelming homicidal urges. They think this is better than to unleash their violent desires upon the child (instead of giving him back up for adoption?)

Reflecting on these letters, the main character questions whether their own past actions and sexual exploitation desires make them as cruel as their father or even worse than the letter writer. Meanwhile, the two housemates conspire to entice the delivery boy into a sexual encounter.

Upon the delivery boy's arrival, the female decides she wants to have intercourse with the boy. The encounter quickly turns violent when the "delivery boy" attempts to strangle the female housemate with his belt during the act. The protagonist intervenes and stabs the delivery boy to death with a letter opener—uncertain if the act was driven by jealousy or a desire to protect their housemate. Rather than feeling remorse, the protagonist discovers a disturbing gratification in inflicting harm. This sacrifice of blood and life allows the curse that keeps them in the house to leave him. Neither house mates have any feelings about the murder of this man. It is justified immediately.

The perspective shifts to the letter writer abandoning their baby in a freshly dug hole, an act described as a ritual that would result in the infant's death. The protagonist observes this ritual, retrieves the alive child, and brings it indoors.

Believing a second life must be sacrificed to lift a supernatural curse trapping them in the home another day, he thinks perhaps we can kill this child. Meanwhile, the female housemate undergoes an internal spiral, harboring deep-seated resentments toward her husband who tried to convince her to have children that he could then CSA them and gain further control over her and the kid(s). In that contemplation she once again begins contemplating suicide via hanging or overdose. However, upon the main character's return, the two suddenly engage in a sexual encounter completely out of left field.

Realizing that she too must perform a sacrifice to gain her freedom from the house, they begin experimenting with smaller victims, starting with the gruesome killing of a worm, then a rat before deciding a larger sacrifice is required.
After attempting to lift the curse by violently killing a passing dog, the protagonist discovers that that bloodier sacrifice successfully grants temporary freedom.

Wandering outside, the main character encounters a young man and lures him back to the house under the pretense of using the bathroom. The encounter rapidly escalates into a chaotic, violent sex act between the three individuals, culminating in the female housemate slitting the man's throat and repeatedly stabbing him.

Free from the home's barrier, she discards her suicidal thoughts and runs naked covered in blood into the night woods. She encounters the original letter writer—the man who abandoned his infant—and invites him back to the house, an invitation he bizarrely accepts without hesitation.

As the narrative nears its conclusion, the protagonist listens to an unhinged family tape recording featuring a story narrated by his mother. Intercut with this is a side story involving a character named Lorelei, who suffers from a sentient, widening cut on her thigh that eventually causes her body to tear completely apart during a meal with her girlfriend.

Returning to the main house, the protagonist finds the female housemate gone and the abandoned baby has died.

The following day, the couple who abandoned the child arrives at the house. The occupants swiftly murder the first man, leaving the reader with the grim thematic takeaway that 'the world takes pleasure in breaking delicate things that cannot fight back."

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fantastically bleak trip to Burnt Sparrow!

This was a very disturbing character study focusing on the despair and depravity humans can be reduced to. While I enjoyed how unsettling it was overall, I did find myself wondering where the story was going at times. I became a little bored waiting for something to happen beyond hearing the main character’s thoughts.

I don’t remember feeling that way with the first book, which felt darker and much better paced overall.

I would still highly recommend this, and I can’t wait to return to Burnt Sparrow.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There's an uncomfortable stillness lingering over each and every chamber, every cramped passageway of End House before the dawn breaks-a prolonged gap between embarrassed confessions, a bitter, corroded note held for a beat too long. Rupert often finds himself unable to sleep during this time, especially early in the morning after another night of restlessness-an evening wasting away in the privacy of his bedroom, alternating between anonymous webcam chats with underage boys on his laptop and quietly lamenting the fact he'll never leave End House again."

Wow. God-damn, Eric LaRocca really knows how to write some incredibly bleak shit. We Turn Gruesome At Night is a special blend of horror genres, I'm not quite sure what to even call this thing, it's grief horror but, somehow, even more isolating of an experience than you'd expect, it's splatterpunk but, has gorgeously gothic elements to it, too. Whatever it may be that you want to call it, We Turn Gruesome At Night is a fucking lonely feeling novel, this one really, really hurts. Written with LaRocca's signature highly evocative, if, grotesque style, We Turn Gruesome At Night is, just what you'd expect from a LaRocca novel, horrific, brutal, completely fucking unhinged and perverse - this is one hell of an uncomfortable reading experience. It sort of makes you feel like you want to peel your skin clean off.

We Turn Gruesome At Night feels a lot like reading a long-form confessional, there's just so much shit in here that you know you shouldn't be reading. LaRocca's refusal to shy away from anything nasty, his commitment to showing us just how wrong a town can be - it makes this book more than just another horror novel, it makes it an abomination. This is, what reading is all about, finding a book that makes you feel something, even if that something is revulsion, even if it makes your stomach churn or your soul shrivel up and die. LaRocca has shown with his return to the town of Burnt Sparrow (a town about as inviting as the town of Silent Hill) that he has not changed (complimentary) - despite his belief that there is no nice or elegant way to navigate the topics he writes about, there's something deeply, horrifically poetic about this book.

"To him, the end of life seemed like an impossible deed-something that would inevitably cause so much excruciating agony. Perhaps that's why he has spent so much time pleasuring himself or seeking pleasure from anonymous young men in those internet chatrooms he frequents on his laptop late at night. If some were underage, if some were mere children, who would he tell? In fact, part of him preferred to never know their real age, the truth of his own monstrousness. Sometimes he imagines what he might do if ever trapped in a room with one of them-one of those young, nubile faceless torsos he meets with on video chat. He wants to believe that he would muster the courage, the will to fuck them the same way so much of the world has already decimated him. Perhaps once Rupert might have hesitated at the thought of fucking a little boy-a frail, powerless child. But now it feels like the only honorable thing to do."

Once again, cracking open an Eric LaRocca novel, an author who is at his best when he's writing perverted, sad, surreal gay horror, has exposed to us the very worst parts of the human experience. This book is, simply put, unapologetically disgusting, it's almost a Dennis Cooper novel for the splatterpunk readers. It's sort of like being circled by vultures in the desert, knowing it won't be long before they pick clean your bones. See, LaRocca wants to push his readers, he wants to test them, he wants to find their limits and push beyond what they ever thought they could stomach - it's all gorgeous descriptions of a stuffy, secluded manor with layers of suicidal ideation. Which is wonderful, really, sometimes its nice just to revel in how fucking nasty a book can be.

"Even though he might be loath to admit it, there's something so exciting about his new letter-the very notion that poor little Scythe is out there somewhere, wriggling uncomfortably inside the open grave his father dug for him, not realizing that he is going to die. There's something almost poetic about it-how utterly charming, how fascinatingly gruesome to know that there's a small child suffering somewhere in the world."

[D.S. Burton · Rating 3 out of 5]

We Turn Gruesome at Night (released September 8, 2026) 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-tread 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 our protagonist and 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 into 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 centres around 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 you desperately wish to pass. Beyond these thresholds lay 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: What version is who I really am?

As the faceless family’s curse drives Rupert and Gladys to cruelty for temporary freedom, they impose 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, the novel is equally about cycles, from cycles of endless monotony to 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.

The story becomes one of collecting, justifying, and perhaps righting our misdoings, be it 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 so directly before. What results is a hyper-aware tragedy constantly redefining itself along with our protagonists, uninterpretable on the measure 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.