Everything the Darkness Eats

Larocca (We Can Never Leave This Place) hinges the plot of his disappointing latest on the farfetched premise that God is a glowing orb of energy sequestered in the basement of a Connecticut mansion, waiting for Heart Crowley, the mansion’s devious owner, to return it to Heaven. At least that’s what Crowley tells grieving widower Ghost Everling. Crowley has been abducting locals from the town of Henley’s Edge to act as sacrifices in this obscure scheme to no avail, but believes that in skeptical Ghost he’s found the perfect supplicant. Larocca’s tale unfolds with the promise of a classic small-town horror story, but it frequently bogs down in purple prose: one character walks out of the room on another, “abandoning him the way napalm-scented civilians would single-file march from their burning homelands, forming a glorious diaspora”; another despairs to find “her mind, once a lavish rose bed, now reduced to an emptying gutter that swine wouldn’t even consider drinking from.” Combined with a (literal) deus ex machina ending, this book is strictly for the author’s most dedicated fans. Agent: Priya Doraswamy, Lotus Lane Literary. (June)