Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

In the year 2000, on an online forum, a lonely woman named Agnes lists a family heirloom — an antique apple peeler — for sale. The buyer, a woman called Zoe, is captivated less by the object than by the person selling it, and the two strike up an intense correspondence that quickly deepens into desire, devotion, and control. Told entirely through their emails and instant-message logs, their relationship becomes a closed loop with no one else in it.

Eric LaRocca's Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is a slim, unsettling queer horror novella about intimacy pushed past every safe limit. As Zoe assumes a dominant role and Agnes surrenders more and more of herself, the escalating demands between them tip from tender to grotesque, and the reader watches a love story curdle into something monstrous.

Spare, transgressive, and deliberately hard to shake, the novella made LaRocca a name in contemporary horror. It is a study of loneliness, longing, and the terrible things people will do to be wanted — a book that uses the flat intimacy of early-internet chat to make cruelty feel horribly close.