They Were Here Before Us

They Were Here Before Us is Eric LaRocca's novella in pieces: six short, interlinked horror stories meant to be read as a single, cohesive work. Each piece uses an animal or natural-world lens to examine how love curdles into violence and devotion into destruction, including a beetle in love with the corpse it inhabits, a bird helpless as a boy attacks her eggs, and a father and son facing down horrors both mundane and cosmic. The collection's emotional center is Bird and Bug, an older lesbian couple: Bird is an artist losing her memory, and Bug is the wife caring for her. LaRocca's prose is graphic and unsentimental, treating cruelty and tenderness as inseparable.