The Company We Keep With the Dead

Wretch: or, The Unbecoming of Porcelain Khaw · Saga Press, 2026

There is a scene, roughly a third of the way into Wretch, that is as good as anything Eric LaRocca has written. A pair of destitute parents sit for tea with a courtly gentleman who wants to buy their twelve-year-old son. The man is unfailingly polite. He offers a biscuit filled with strawberry jam. He apologizes for the heat, for the insects, for the primitive accommodations of the country he is visiting. In the same murmuring register he explains, without ever once raising his voice, what he intends to do to the boy. The horror lives in the gap between the manners and the meaning. Nobody in the room can afford to say the thing plainly, so it gets discussed as though it were an employment contract.

The setup is grief, dressed as cosmic horror and wired for the internet.

That gentleman is Porcelain Khaw, and if the novel operated at the pitch of his tea party, this would be an unambiguous rave. It does not, and so this is something more complicated. But let me be clear from the outset: the good in Wretch is very good.

The setup is grief, dressed as cosmic horror and wired for the internet. Simeon Link has lost his husband, Jonathan, and the loss has hollowed him out. We meet him on a bathroom floor at work, a razor in his hand and a suicidal thought he keeps rehearsing but cannot commit to, and within a chapter he has lost the job too. What is left is a man with nothing to do but grieve, and grief, in this novel, is not a passive condition. It is an appetite. Simeon does not just miss Jonathan. He wants to reach the dead, to hold them, to keep them. The book's governing idea is the "reverse haunting": the notion that the living are the ones doing the tormenting, that a mourner who refuses to let the dead rest is a kind of parasite feeding on a corpse. It is an unsettling inversion, and it gives the book a moral spine that a lesser grief-horror would lack. The question Wretch keeps asking is not whether the dead can hurt us. It is whether we have any right to keep hurting them.

Simeon finds his way, through a grief forum and an anonymous chat partner named babyfacexoxo, to a group called the Wretches. They are camera enthusiasts. They photograph ordinary objects and search the images for the faces of their departed, and the practice is as sad and as seductive as it sounds. From there it is a short walk to Porcelain Khaw himself, an ageless entity who will grant a grieving person one last intimate audience with the beloved dead. The price, as always with such offers, is the self.

When the form is working, it works the way found footage works: lending the horror the authority of the document.

LaRocca built his reputation on the epistolary novella, on the way dread accumulates through chat logs and letters and things people type when they think no one is watching. Wretch extends that method to novel length, and the interpolations are among its best parts: forum threads, instant-message transcripts, a checklist of ritual instructions, a run of increasingly desperate emails between Simeon and his ex-wife. When the form is working, it works the way found footage works: lending the horror the authority of the document. The class dimension is the other achievement. Porcelain is not a generic void. He is a rich foreigner who cannot abide discomfort, who speaks of comfort the way an addict speaks of a drug, and who proposes to solve the problem of insects by coating a peasant child in jelly and letting the bugs feed on the boy instead of on him. Cosmic horror usually floats free of economics, but this one is soaked in it. The monster's evil is inseparable from his wealth, and the people he consumes are the ones the world has already decided are expendable.

So much for the case in favor. Here is the reservation.

There is a version of this novel, perhaps two thirds this length, in which that repetition would read as obsessive incantation.

The prose almost never stops performing. Nearly every sentence reaches for the ornate, the baroque, the profound, and reaches with the same gesture every time, so that the reader gradually stops feeling the punch in the prose. Simeon's interiority circles a fixed set of abstractions, comfort and suffering, cannibals and consumption, being hollowed out and possessed and unspooled, and it circles them so many times that the words wear flat. There is a version of this novel, perhaps two thirds this length, in which that repetition would read as obsessive incantation. At full length it reads as a single grey tone held too long. A book about numbness should be the last book to go numb, and Wretch goes numb in its middle stretch, where much atmosphere is deployed in service of not very much event.

The novel also distrusts its own images. It tells you that ghosts are mirrors, then tells you again, then explains what it means. The metaphors are good enough that they do not need the captions, and every caption is a small vote of no confidence in the reader. Most seriously, for a book that opens with a razor and returns to suicidal thought throughout, the despair is rendered so lushly and so recurrently that it starts to function as decor rather than as the texture of a mind in pain. There is a risk in making anguish this beautiful, and it is not only an aesthetic risk. When suffering becomes the wallpaper, it stops frightening and starts soothing, which is the opposite of what this novel, at its best, is trying to do.

The result is a book at war with itself, one whose voice is both its greatest asset and its most persistent antagonist. When LaRocca lets an event carry the weight, the tea party, the closing turn, the writing snaps into focus and the fear arrives clean. When the event thins out, the voice fills the vacuum with adjectives, and the reader is left hacking through the hedge to reach the thing underneath.

When it works, it is among the more upsetting horror of the year, and its refusal to let the cosmic float free of class and money gives it a weight most of its shelf-mates lack.

The turn (spoilers from here)

What lifts Wretch above its own excesses is the shape of its cruelty, and the shape only becomes visible at the end. Simeon does reach Porcelain, and he is consumed, reduced to a soul lodged inside the entity's eye and then expelled, reborn as one of the silver beetles the ritual required him to keep. And then the book delivers its knife. The anonymous stranger who lured him into all of this, babyfacexoxo, was his own son. Carter, sixteen, estranged, engineered his father's destruction and called it a mercy, a coup de grace, borrowing the vocabulary Simeon had used about his own longing to be put out of his misery. The child gives the father the death the father kept asking for, and dresses it as love.

It is a vicious stroke, and it recontextualizes everything. The grief support group was the delivery mechanism. The tender online voice was the executioner. And the frame closes into a circle: the novel had opened with a different woman walking into Porcelain's room, and it ends with Evelyn, Simeon's ex-wife and Carter's mother, arriving with the same photograph, hearing the same words Porcelain says to all of them. "Because you're going to have to suffer." Simeon, now an insect on the wall, tries to warn her and cannot. The machine simply runs again.

This is where the novel's obsessions pay off. All that circular language about cannibals and consumption and parents who sell their children turns out to have been the engine, not the ornament. The Porcelain-Khaw jelly-boy nightmare, the diary fantasy of a parent contemplating an unthinkable act at a zoo, the reveal of what Carter did: these are the same story told three times, each about a parent and a child and the ways love curdles into disposal. When the third telling lands, the earlier two stop feeling like padding and start feeling like foreshadowing. It is a good trick, and it nearly redeems the sag. Nearly, because you still had to cross the sag to get here.

Verdict

Wretch is a flawed and real thing, and I would rather spend an evening arguing about a flawed real thing than praising a competent empty one. When it works, it is among the more upsetting horror of the year, and its refusal to let the cosmic float free of class and money gives it a weight most of its shelf-mates lack. When it does not work, its own beautiful voice is the problem, aestheticizing the very despair it means to indict. Read it, read it quickly, and forgive it its adjectives. Readers already inside the LaRocca tent will find this his most ambitious structure yet. Readers standing outside it may want to enter through the novellas first, where the same gifts arrive without the excess. Mind the edges. There are a great many of them here, and not all of them cut where the author intended.

Deeper Cuts

If Wretch leaves its hooks in you, three roads lead out of it.

Start where LaRocca started. Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes is the Splatterpunk-winning collection that made his name, and it is the purest distillation of the epistolary dread that Wretch stretches to novel length. Everything the new book does, this one does leaner.

Then follow the novel's own confession. In its back matter LaRocca names Clive Barker, Dennis Cooper, and Chuck Palahniuk as his holy trinity, and cites Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening among the works he consumed while writing. Rijneveld's International Booker winner is the closest cousin to Wretch on that list, a novel about a child's grief that curdles into something feral and unspeakable, told in prose every bit as committed to discomfort as its title promises.

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