I have to say I think this collection is likely my favourite of LaRocca’s to date. All four short stories are beautiful, dark, visceral and showcase the worse and best of humanity. I have to say of the four I think Seedling and Prickle but all of them offer something to chill the bone and make you think.

As always LaRocca’s writing is perfection for the horror genre, they know how to make the horror creep or just jump out. They know how to shock and leave you reeling. I read a lot of horror and can honestly say some of their writing even makes me react due to the gore and viscera that is there. But LaRocca doesn’t just do the horror perfectly they do the humanity as well. The good, the bad and the downright deprived. A perfect collection for horror fans, fans of LaRocca or new to the genre but do be warned they don’t hold back with the horror and gore.

Thank you NetGalley and Titan Books for sending me digital copy to review!

I absolutely love Eric LaRocca’s short stories, I feel that is where they shine the most! I enjoyed this short story collection and being given the gift of LaRocca’s signature prose and depraved storytelling.

This Skin Was Once Mine
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This short story hooked me from the very first page, allowing me to connect with the initial themes so much that I was impossible to back out when the horror began. This was my favorite in the collection because of the mesmerizing storytelling and the excruciatingly slow reveal.

Seedling artfully personifies grief in this short tale of a daughter and her father as they cope with the loss of her mother. It’s painful and slowly morphs into a comic horror nightmare of tendriling voids. This story had some outstanding visuals that leave you wanting to pry open the edges.

All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn is such a wild ride that leaves you considering what you would do for an ornate cutting knife. An inviting incident unfurls into this accumulation of disturbing events that will leave you uncomfortable in your own skin.

Prickle is a game between two elderly friends that involves seemingly subdued forms of torture for other strangers in the area. This game is truth or dare, but deliberately avoiding the truth while delivering escalating dares until it gets out of hand.

Overall, a solid short story collection that I devoured in a single day! LaRocca does a great job delivering queer horror in a short format, effectively inducing disgust and discomfort to their readers. If this interests you, This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances comes out on April 2nd!

I know going into an Eric LaRocca collection of short stories that I’m in for a gruesome time. Reading one of their collections gives you the unsettling feeling you have after waking up from a nightmare. This collection has 4 short stories.

This Skin Was Once Mine - 4/5. The titular story is probably one of, if not the strongest, of LaRocca’s stories. The story gives you the setup for some “twists” in the story, so you think you’re one step ahead of our narrator, but then the rug is pulled out from under you.

Seedling - 2/5. This has an interesting concept and some pretty gross body horror imagery, but the premise felt underdone to me.

All the Parts of You that Won’t Easily Burn - 3/5. I’m disturbed! I don’t know what I read, but it was gross. This one feels very Clive Barker inspired.

Prickle - 2/5 - Like Seedling, this one felt like it needed a few more pages to feel completely resolved. The ending is wild and fits the collection well, but I wanted more information about our main characters. The beginning hints at something that never gets actualized.

Like a nightmare, sometimes LaRocca’s stories follow a traditional plot structure and sometimes they just shockingly end. There are definitely some stories I liked here more than others, but it can’t be denied that LaRocca has such a unique writing style.

Horror connoisseur here. This collection had some sharp, glimmering moments (quite literally) and some dry spells as well. The writing was quite straightforward and did not shy away from bloody and macabre imagery. However, the first two stories seemed a bit similar in setting and character association–it felt as though I read the same story twice, with different horror elements guiding the narratives forward. The last story was cruel in nature, as good horror often is, but the character development and our minimal understanding given of them–due to the short story format–made it difficult for me to connect to their relationship and motives. The third story in the collection, titled 𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘶𝘳𝘯, was my absolute favorite and I would definitely revisit it again. I loved its raw, brutal strangeness and the volatile nature of the way desire churned its dark language forward, crawling underneath the reader's flesh as though a wound has been opened–made to bleed–and filled with something beautiful.

Eric Larocca quickly has become one of my favorite horror authors. Their writing style is completely engrossing, makes the reader feel uneasy and a little queasy. Each of these stories get more disturbing than the next. Each push boundaries and creates a sense of dread. As always, I love the body horror and how it's done. Thank you netgalley and titan books for thr ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A brilliant short story horror collection. love anything this author write abd will read anything this author wrires.

A creepy, chilling and well written collection of short stories! Eric LaRocca is a well known horror author who delivers up unique, dark and fun to read stories. I've only read short stories by him but would be interested to read a full length novel. My favorite in this collection was the first story This Skin Was Once Mine, but everything offer up here was really well written and great to read. The stories are dark but not extreme and would appeal to a wide range of fans of horror. He is most well known for this book Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke so go and check that one out once you have finished this if you haven't already.

This is easily my favorite of LaRocca’s work! It’s dark, achingly sad, unsettling and morbid. Everything I have come to expect from LaRocca. This Skin Was Once Mine was my favorite of the stories with Seedling coming in at a close second but all of them were great and I couldn’t find anything missing. Many thanks to Titan Books for my eARC. This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances will be available 4/2.

Another dark and disturbing outing for LaRocca. Creeping beneath the skin this collection will tingle long after you’ve finished.

I was all in on the first--and I think, longest--story in this compilation (the eponymous This Skin Was Once Mine). You expect that something is wrong from the jump, but the author deftly leaves you uneasy through a slow burn to the reveal. The remainder of the collection felt a little uneven, but kept the intensity dialed up. The nature of the body horror in the second story (Seedling) was just too intense for me, which is honestly saying something.

This was definitely some of my favorite work from Eric LaRocca.!

This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances is a collection of four short stories that explores themes of childhood trauma, grief, and twisted companionship. For lack of a better phrase, this will quite literally get under your skin.

With short story collections, I always find myself preferring some over the others. This is one of those unique times where I enjoyed every single one a lot. It’s hard to say which is my favorite. Seedling’s ending made my stomach fully drop. All of the Parts of You That Won’t Burn made me gag out loud. I have a lot of respect for horror authors that can get a reaction out of me beyond just gratuitous gore, and LaRocca did not play around.

If you’re a fan of strange horror, I highly recommend this one.

Thank you to NetGalley and Titan Books for the e-ARC!

Y'all, buckle up because this ride is equal parts "gasp!" and "omg, I'm going to puke!" (affectionately). This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances by Eric LaRocca is chock full of body horror and surrealist metaphors that tap into real, human fear. I loved this short story collection, but realize it is definitely not for everybody.

These four stories explore dark themes including generational trauma, addiction, sexual abuse, and familial relationships, often using surprising metaphors to get the point across. The tension and pressure that built throughout each one propelled me to keep reading.

This was my first LaRocca story, and I'll be coming back for more.


Big thanks to NetGalley and Titan Books for this ARC.

Reading this left my eyebrows practically kissing my hairline, and my jaw firmly planted on the ground.

Among all the stories, the first one captured my interest the most. It's intriguing to contemplate how I discovered a sense of justice amidst such depravity.

"This skin was once mine, and other disturbances" by Eric LaRocca is a wonderfully creepy collection of tales, most revolving around elements of body horror. This was my second LaRocca read, and, although, I don't think it topped "It's been a while since we talked," it was an incredible collection, and I enjoyed all the stories.

LaRocca's writing is effective, through its surface level simplicity, to make you gasp at all the unexpected turns and horrible (but in a good way) ways the story progresses. His careful avoidance of using elaborate prose acts as an exemplification of how gory what happens in the story is. I didn’t have a monent to appreciate a beautifully placed word, and it would feel out of place for me to do that while reading the stories and being shocked at everything that happened.

There were 4 stories in this collection, and all of them were exceptional as horror tales. The two that stood out for me were "All the Parts of You That Won't Burn Easily" and "This Skin Was Once Mine.""

In "All the Parts of You That Won't Burn Easily," I really enjoyed the depiction of pain as a cure. Some parts of it are true as I can think of situations in which the cure is more painful than the illness, and you do it because you hope that once it's all over, it will all feel better. It also really made me think of a variety of practices that I heard older relatives say about how you can only remove one kind of pain but going through a painful treatment and hope, at the end, the original pain you feel will be gone. After reading this, I believe what they meant is that your tolerance for pain increases, and the previous issue appears smaller. Enoch's delving into massochism as a form of pleasurable pain was a self administered medicine from his incomplete life, which led him to more danger, in the face of an arsonist kidnapper (I think).

"This Skin Was Once Mine" (probably my favourite story) is about Jillian, a woman who returns home after her father's death and reunites with her mother. I was really intrigued by the family breakdown and was so surprised by the secrets that were revealed. For me, this was the most fast-paced story in the collection.

If you enjoy horror, nearly surreal, creepy stories, don't miss out on LaRocca's writing!

This is my first book by Eric Larocca and it is a collection of 4 short horror stories.

This is not my type of horror. I feel like there was not a lot of plot but it was also weird. I don’t think the stories were bad and there is definitely an audience for them. The writing was also a bit boring for me and it didn’t click for me. I do really liked the cover and title of this one!

I know certain people will really love this one. I didn’t hate it but didn’t love it either.

Thanks so much to netgalley and Titan books for the arc of this one in exchange for an honest review!

I am once again the minority when it comes to Eric Larocca. I’ve been seeing this one get glowing reviews so I wanted to check it out. Unfortunately….this wasn’t for me. This author isn’t for me. I think Eric is EXTREMELY talented and so creative and really has the ability to create beautiful art with his words and I never once thought any different. However, this is once again a case of “I was bored out of my mind because I didn’t want to do homework trying to figure out the hidden meaning of these stories.”

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

A load of short stories. A lot of them creeped me out and left me feeling ick. This will definitely find its crowd!

Yo, this collection was brilliant and wild. I have of course heard of Eric LaRocca all over the place, but had yet to read any of their works until this one when netgalley approved me for an ARC, and this will absolutely not be my last. The stories in this collection were absolutely mind bending, original, and incredibly grotesquely visceral. I can honestly say I have not read anything quite like it. My favorite story was the title story, but they were all really good. As I started each new story, I was low key nervous and asking myself “ok where the hell is this one going to take me? Am I ready?” The eeriness and sense of dread was visceral in each story, despite the fact that they were all wildly different. Incredible and detailed body horror is definitely one of the main themes in this book, so if you are a fan of that, LaRocca is a must read. I am already trying to decide which collection to pick up next.

This title comes out April 2, 2024. If you are a fan of body horror and uniquely grotesque stories, go ahead and read one of LaRocca’s other collections while you wait for this one.

4.5. This is an exceptional collection of stories. I've been a fan of Eric LaRocca for awhile now and This Skin Was Once Mine did not disappoint. The only major points I would dock from this book as a whole would be the first story introducing perhaps one too many characters and not completely tying everyone back in in the ending. I will say however that I appreciated the nod to another character in one of LaRocca's other works (You've Lost A Lot Of Blood). Ultimately, these stories got under my skin, no pun intended. I think my favorite of the four was All The Parts of You That Won't Easily Burn, in which we see a man go through a most bizarre and disturbing revelation and the subsequent decisions that he makes as a result. Prickle was also amazing; short, tense, and packing an extreme and ludicrous punch. This is definitely one to pick up if you're looking for thought-provoking short horror.

I had high hopes for this collection and it did not disappoint. The title story was the best one, in my humble opinion - but I enjoyed them all.

Thank you for the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC to read and review.