A dark and often grotesque story about people going through terrible things. A story about people wishing to inflict harm on one another and trying to come to grips with that. It made me uncomfortable in its lengthy descriptions but I suppose that is the point. I am intrigued to see where LaRocca takes the series next.

Thanks to Titan and NetGalley for an eARC of We Are Always Tender With Our Dead by Eric LaRocca, which left me utterly speechless and shocked after finishing it. The novel is about utterly visceral darkness and how it affects everyone around them, enveloping everything in its wake. I definitely recommend it to readers who love the more grotesque side of horror.

Find a full review and reflection at The Ink-Stained Desk https://cmreid1.substack.com/p/we-are-always-tender-with-our-dead
We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is less a book to be read and more an experience to be endured. LaRocca deeply explores themes of guilt, prompting questions such as: Who is truly guilty? Who has the right to punish the guilty, and how should punishment be meted out, if at all? While these themes are occasionally overt, at times feeling a little didactic, they undeniably form the core of the narrative.

For the profound questions LaRocca poses, I have no definitive answers; I don’t pretend to be a philosopher. However, the greatest triumph of this story is its ability to make us think (—and hopefully speak) about these complex issues.

Overall, I did enjoy We Are Always Tender With Our Dead. Despite some issues with pacing and the integration of storylines, I have high hopes that these will be resolved in book two, which I will definitely be picking up, if only so that I can find out what the hell is going on in Burnt Sparrow!

I must send thanks to Eric LaRocca and his publishing team at Titan Books for allowing me to read an advanced copy of We Are Always Tender With Our Dead. If I haven’t scared you off it too much, it will be released on September 9th.

I requested but can’t read it because it’s been archived. However if it becomes available again, I’ll definitely check it out. I wish the author the best of luck in advance.

I want to extend my sincere thanks to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read and review an ARC copy of this.

As a reader and writer from a small town in New England, the unsettling town of Burnt Sparrow, New Hampshire comes alive off of the page. LaRocca delves into disturbing and grotesque themes, peeling back the veneers of small town mentality and exposing the macabre horrors that fester beneath. I personally enjoy exploring the dark parts of humanity in fiction, and I’m not at all surprised that We Are Always Tender With Our Dead accomplishes the skin crawling, hair raising moments I’m looking for.

The various characters and storylines could tie together more smoothly, but I’m keeping in mind that this is only the first installment of a trilogy and there is plenty of room for the plot to do just that in the next two parts.

I’m starting to think that none of this authors books are for me besides of thinking of ending things. I have found the last two to have too intense of scenes for myself! Although this one was so crazy I almost want to read the next part despite finding it to be a lot for me to handle!

We Are Always Tender with Our Dead is a raw, grotesque, and haunting exploration of grief and how the aftershocks of a traumatic event can spread through a community and affect everyone in it in different ways. This book takes place in Burnt Sparrow, a town that barely hides its awfulness just under the surface of a veneer of respectability and congeniality. This book follows several different stories and timelines, but mainly focuses on Rupert Cromwell, a 17-year-old who does not feel like much of a man and is not sure how to connect with his father.

I really enjoyed all of the differing storylines that were presented in this book, but I wish that they had come together a bit more in the end. This book is the first in a series, so I hope that we will explore more of these connections in later installments, Overall I did enjoy this book and think that it will be a good, deep read for those who do enjoy extreme horror.

"Life is nothing more than a series of thresholds," writes Eric LaRocca, having tenderly (and not so tenderly) strode past every single one his characters face.

I don't think I can emphasise that enough. If some small part of you thinks he'll shy away at the last minute, that part will be deeply disappointed.

By turns beautifully weird and deeply disturbing, We Are Always Tender With Our Dead somehow manages to blend extreme horror with elements of folk horror (eg, the small town governed by a shadowy cult-like group). LaRocca is very clear in his opening note that he writes to unsettle rather than entertain, and believe me this book is unsettling. It's a fabulous achievement.

The first in a trilogy, don't expect everything to be explained; there's so much more under the surface of this twisted place than I want to imagine.

I'm as eager to read the next volume as I am worried about myself for it. Top work, Eric.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this in exchange for an honest review.

2.5 stars? Maybe 2.75? Eric’s writing is some of my favorite, but this book fell as bit short for me. So many aspects of this was gripping and stuck with me, but the whole story felt like a set up for more. Even with there being more books in the series, it felt like a filler book that didn’t fully get where it was trying to go.

Definitely interesting. Definitely weird. Definitely disturbing.

Maybe I’ll pick up the next one just to see what the hell is going on.

really on a perverted gross horror kick these past few weeks so yay i guess. dont know if i would consider these contents being tender with the dead but i am also just filled with general disgust and confusion

A raw and unsettling dive into trauma, grief, and violence set in a cold New England town reeling from a horrific event.

LaRocca’s writing is intense and unflinching, with prose that is both brutal and poetic, pulling you deep into a world where pain and darkness linger in every corner. The story follows Rupert, a grieving teenager, and Gladys, whose lives intertwine amid a community drowning in secrets and madness.

This is not an easy read. The themes are heavy: loss, identity, abuse, and the grotesque, all explored with relentless psychological tension and vivid, sometimes disturbing imagery. The narrative does not shy away from difficult subjects, and it can feel overwhelming, but the emotional honesty and atmospheric weight keep you hooked.

The pacing is uneven at times, and some storylines feel fragmented or open ended, which might frustrate readers looking for clear resolutions. However, the ambiguity adds to the novel’s haunting, dreamlike quality, leaving you thinking long after the last page.

If you are drawn to dark, character-driven horror that challenges rather than comforts, this novel delivers a powerful, if harrowing, experience.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dark Regions Press for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

A very dark look into the secrets kept by small towns, WE ARE ALWAYS TENDER WITH OUR DEAD by Eric LaRocca is certainly not for everyone but a read that keeps you turning the page.

Thank you Titan Books and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Oof, this was a rough one. I enjoyed the writing style and I was hooked from the first page, and wanted to keep reading until I finished it. However, the trigger warnings are there for a reason. This is a book that I find hard to recommend to others, unless you’re a fan of extreme horror.

Set in Burnt Sparrow, a town maimed by monstrosities through time, Rupert and his father are hired to guard bodies of victims from a massacre on Main St. Rupert is a 17 year old boy who lost his mother and his father is a callous man who seems to soften as they spend time guarding the corpses. the culprits of the killings , three humanoid creatures without faces, are taken into custody, and the town decides they are to be dealt with through acts of violence masquerading as justice in the home of a benevolent man, Mr. Esherwood.

This book is not for the faint of heart. Please check the trigger warnings before reading. This book contains the death of a child, necrophilia, incest, rape, torture, and other disturbing elements not for all readers.

This book was hard to get into, and though I have love the previous works of LaRocca, this missed the mark for me. Many things were left unexplained (the bird?) the time frame felt mixed? This was supposed to be set in 2003, but read like folk horror- where was the justice system? What the heck is happening in Burnt Sparrow? What are the faceless beings?

This is this first part of a trilogy, so I’m sure there is much to be answered in the following books. I just wanted a bit more, answers, understanding, clarity? I mean are we stepping through a portal when we come into Burnt Sparrow?


Thank you to NetGalley and Titan Books for the privilege of reading this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’m a huge Eric LaRocca fan and this book delivered his usual dark and disturbing style. It deals with heavy uncomfortable topics and has a lot of shocking moments. The story jumps between many characters and plot lines, all connected to the cursed town of Burnt Sparrow New Hampshire where everything is deeply disturbed and unsettling. The only issue I had was that some parts were confusing and not everything felt fully tied together to me. I’m hoping more will be explained as the series continues. Overall, I enjoyed this wild ride and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series!

I just finished We Are Always Tender with Our Dead by Eric LaRocca. The first book in the Burnt Sparrow trilogy and I’m obsessed. I’m also mad, because this is an ARC and now I have to wait forever for book two.

I’m already a huge Eric LaRocca fan, and this book reminded me why. They write disgusting, shocking, limit-pushing horror, the kind that makes you wonder, Can I even handle this? I love every second of it. This one has faceless creatures that will crawl into my nightmares, real-life monsters that are even worse, and a modern-day small-town cult setting with a deeply gothic vibe.

LaRocca never shies away from going too far, and in this book, that boundary-pushing is exactly what makes it so deliciously unsettling. This was fantastic.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for this EARC and Thank you Eric LaRocca for writing the creepy stuff that heals my soul.

We Are Always Tender with Our Dead by Eric LaRocca is a haunting and visceral exploration of grief, trauma, and the monstrous within. Set in the isolated town of Burnt Sparrow, New Hampshire, the narrative begins with a brutal Christmas Day massacre carried out by three faceless entities. This shocking act sets off a chain of events that forces the townspeople, particularly teenager Rupert Cromwell, to confront their darkest impulses and the thin line between justice and vengeance.

LaRocca masterfully blends supernatural horror with psychological terror, creating an atmosphere thick with dread and unease. The faceless perpetrators serve as a chilling metaphor for the facelessness of evil itself, leaving readers to grapple with the unsettling question of what drives individuals to commit such atrocities.

The novel delves deep into the human psyche, examining the corrosive effects of unresolved grief and the lengths to which people will go when pushed to their limits. LaRocca's prose is both lyrical and brutal, capturing the raw emotion and horror of the characters' experiences.

While the book is undeniably disturbing and graphic, it's this very intensity that makes it a standout in the horror genre. It's a narrative that doesn't shy away from the grotesque, using horror as a lens to explore deeper themes of identity, morality, and the human condition.

For readers who appreciate horror that challenges and provokes, We Are Always Tender with Our Dead is a must-read. It's a disturbing yet compelling journey into the heart of darkness, showcasing LaRocca's prowess in crafting stories that are as thought-provoking as they are terrifying.

Not for me, I think. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

This is a tremendously pessimistic and dark book. There are trigger warnings for basically everything at the beginning of this book, and I wouldn't have minded knowing those before I requested this book on NetGalley if I'm being quite honest. I can't be particularly mad about it, because LaRocca does say in the introduction that they want to "provoke" a reader, over "entertaining", "amusing", or "enthralling". I was certainly provoked as I read this, usually with disgust and mild morbid fascination that the author was going 'there'. I didn't particularly enjoy the more taboo topics or think that LaRocca was engaging with them in a particularly interesting way, but it did provoke.

Where I'm at a bit of a loss is what exactly I was being provoked to feel. Thematically, LaRocca seems to be going for the ineffectiveness of punitive justice, specifically regarding the way that collective grief (I suspect specifically American collective grief, but that seems a bit) can paralyze communities and get them stuck in chasing that punitive justice. I think it works fine, but it feels VERY on the nose. Thresholds are also thematically involved somehow. I'm not particularly sure what's going on with them other than they seem a bit negative.

The relative flatness of the characters doesn't help things. They feel like vehicles for the themes to happen through, as opposed to being people. Same with the little digressions excerpted from in-universe articles or stories, except worse honestly, because I'm really not sure what some of them do other than add to the idea that bad things happen in this town, both before and after the main chunk of this story happens. The prose itself is fine, if slightly pretentious for my tastes. There were some moments I liked, such as Rupert's description of holding funerals in his head, but overall it felt (and this is perhaps harsher than I intend) like a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, or at least nothing particularly novel.

Overall, probably could have been a short story.

No one I’m reading right now is writing books like Eric LaRocca.

He is becoming well-known in horror circles for his anthologies of visceral short stories, but with ‘We are always tender with our dead’, the first in a new trilogy, the author has expanded his output into one larger, far-reaching story.

Set in the mysterious town of Burnt Sparrow, we follow a series of characters who after some unspeakable events start to pick up the pieces and try to live a new normal.

It has to be said ‘We are always…’ is not afraid to get down and dirty, with LaRocca really crafting some visceral horror that will make you wonder why more horror authors are playing it safe.

What sets this novel apart is the layers that LaRocca creates amongst his characters. They are flawed, they have hidden desires. There is no perfection in Burnt Sparrow.

The finest of LaRocca’s creations is Rupert, a young man thrust into an awful position following a tragedy within the town of Burnt Sparrow. The thing is Rupert isn’t squeaky clean, he is at odds with his family. He wants to do good but also has sexual desires that may not be considered ‘normal’.

The interweaving of the multiple characters is handled effortlessly by the author, with a convergence of stories which leads to some moral dilemmas amongst the townsfolk.

I haven’t read anything like this in recent memory. It was refreshing, dark and only had me clambering for the next in the series.

Mr. LaRocca you have my attention.

I really liked this and read it all in one day, but it's only a high 3* for me for a few reasons.

It feels important to start off by discussing the content. There is a list of trigger warnings at the start, and they are pretty brutal - there's at least 3 things on there that I would fully understand someone seeing and deciding the book just isn't for them. However, if you're a fan of LaRocca already you know he deals very much in the transgressive. There are many, many authors in the genre who deal with abhorrent subject matter for shock factor, for attention from the more extreme crowd, without any real reason or thought for its inclusion. Not the case here. This is a very dark story, and bleak things happen to characters and are carried out by characters, but they always feel very deliberately like part of the web LaRocca is spinning.

The main reason I flew through this so quickly was the quality of the writing. There's something about the way LaRocca writes, at times incredibly beautiful, almost cushioning the despair and anguish in the words themselves. I'm not the biggest splatterpunk or extreme fan, but I would read much more if the authors I had picked up books by had the same knack for wonderful prose. LaRocca reminds me a little of Ketchum, although not stylistically the same, in that the quality of their writing makes difficult subject matter very readable.

My main issues here are the fact it is the first part of a trilogy. There is mystery here, some untangled, some not. Elements feel like they're stared but not finished here, and some of the more esoteric moments can end up feeling confusing or unsatisfying by the end of the book. I imagine the next installments will shine more light upon them, and I'll have a higher opinion of this book once I've finished the second and third entries in the series, but for now there is a lot of promise here.

The biggest praise I can give the book is that I will be picking up the next Burnt Sparrow story as soon as I can. I've only read a few of LaRocca's books so far, but they have all been very good, and We Are Always Tender With Our Dead is no exception.