Witty Reviews: The Trees Grew Because I Bled There

Eric LaRocca’s hugely successful Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke has been followed up by his collection of short stories, The Trees Grew Because I Bled There. I wanted a bit of horror in my life, and I thought that some short stories would be a nice change from the longer prose I’m more accustomed to reading. One thing I did learn about the short story format was how quickly I got through the book. It only took me about 9 days to complete it. Albeit, it was only a short book at just over 200 pages, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t rich with some excellent prose.

            It’s beautifully crafted. You can tell LaRocca really knows how to shape the language around the storytelling. One of the biggest challenges in horror is to avoid cliché, like throwing in some unnecessary gore to give the shock factor for the sake of it. I found that LaRocca managed to create slow burners that didn’t throw you in at the deep end, but rather led you out into the ocean step-by-step until you couldn’t touch the ground any more. Gradual, but horrible.

What was more impressive was the ability to cram it all inside the short story format. Naturally, some were longer than others, but even the shorter stories contained excellent pacing that lead to a twist or shocking outcome. One tool LaRocca uses in these stories is the potential inevitability of outcomes. In one story, the protagonist, a pyromaniac, is looking after her infant nephew. She is constantly toying with ways to set him on fire. She even sets up some scenarios, going as far as finding the matches and a flame. With every turn of the page, you are begging that the baby gets out of it alive. This isn’t horror in the sense that the baby is actually getting burned, or the house is actually haunted etc., but rather the idea for what could potentially happen. To hold us in that grip through much of each story every time, LaRocca is toying with us brilliantly.

            I remember some great advice from Neil Gaiman (I think), of a rule for short stories. They are supposed to pick up or leave off from a much larger novel. It’s the acknowledgement that the characters lived their lives before and after this story in dramatic fashion, but we are looking in on them for this short while. LaRocca’s stories do this well. Particularly the piece with the same name as the book’s title. Once you get to the end, you know that the story, yet not necessarily the characters, has been continuing over and over in a cyclical manner, making you feel weighed down by its gravity. It’s a novel length idea without needing to write the novel.

            All in all, the stories were great. I felt the horror in all of them. They gave that unnerving sense of wanting to turn the page but also not wanting to the turn the page – the feeling only the horror genre can give you. The pacing was particularly impressive. It never juxtaposed or became superfluous. The right words were used in the right place. During one story, I sat for too long at the train station when I should have been heading to work, instead glued to the book. If that wasn’t an indication of a good book, then I don’t know what is.

This book has helped me decide that I’ll not only be reading more LaRocca, but more short stories in general. Big thumbs up.