“Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke” (2021)

I heard a lot about this long story by Eric LaRocca when it came out, on twitter, on booktube, all over the place. I’m glad I got to it because it’s pretty good—deeply creepy, and maybe trying a little too hard on that score. The approach is epistolary, that old-fashioned style (see Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, and many many more). But LaRocca makes it work by updating the idea and using internet exchanges as his primary documents, largely email and chat transcripts. I thought it was cheeky to make the two principals both female-presenting, pursuing a lesbian affair, but the two never meet in real life (“irl”) as far as we know. It remains perfectly possible that one or both are men, all things considered, and perhaps even more likely given that the time setting is the year 2000. LaRocca has a pitch-perfect sense for how these exchanges went in that timeframe, the wild years I knew between Netscape (1994) and smartphones (2007). “Things Have Gotten Worse” has all the hallmarks of the loneliness and desperation encountered everywhere online then (and likely still, wherever it’s happening, I’m long out of it now), and, just as it does online (or did?), it slips seamlessly into internet BDSM dynamics with all the rules of tops and bottoms. And the story is particularly good there, leaning into the stilted master / slave language and even throwing in a brief but convincing cybersex passage. Now, yes, in the ever-ratcheting grossout sweepstakes of horror since approximately Stephen King, or at least Clive Barker, or maybe E.F. Benson’s obsession with worms, I must report it goes too far. I won’t spoil the things that happen here (or “happen,” as it’s all online reports). They are creative, I’ll say that, though I don’t know enough to say with certainty how original they are. I also thought it ended abruptly. It could be longer. There’s more to know. Maybe I just didn’t want it to end. It was mesmerizing to read, like finding a diary with super-secret confessions. What makes it work above all is that LaRocca has captured perfectly the wreck and wrack of alienation that was the lingua franca of cybersex scenes in 2000. These two are both singularly needy, hopping from one online relationship to the next and/or managing multiples. The alienation was true in 2000 and I bet a version of it still is now. “Things Have Gotten Worse” has been through two publishers, even seemed to disappear for a time. Now it’s available packaged with a couple more LaRocca stories. I’d say this strange and juicy tale is worth hunting down, though note well that it is not for the squeamish. P.S. I totally adore the title. It’s what drew me to it in the first place, along with the amazing cover artwork by Kim Jakobsson in the original Weirdpunk Books publication (above).

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.