We Can Never Leave This Place

By: Eric Larocca

Narrated by: Savannah Gilmore

"When you're given a gift, something else gets taken away."

A precocious young girl with an unusual imagination is sent on an odyssey into the depths of depravity. After her father dies violently, young Mara is surprised to find her mother welcoming a new guest into their home, claiming that he will protect them from the world of devastation and destruction outside their door.

A grotesque and thrilling dark fantasy, We Can Never Leave This Place is a harrowing portrait of inherited grief and familial trauma.

©2022 Eric LaRocca (P)2022 Journalstone

Critic reviews

"We Can Never Leave This Place is the apocalyptic 21st century Grimm's fairy tale you need in your life. Eric LaRocca plucks images directly from the muck and mire of our id and fashions them into something grotesquely beautiful." (Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club)

"We Can Never Leave This Place is a bleak and tender, monstrous and visceral fable of family and loss, and the courage it takes to confront them both." (Kathe Koja, author of The Cipher)

Dark and Foreboding

An absolute crazy fever dream dripping with creepy crawling creatures and sewage. Completely original and surreal.

5 Stars *****

Intriguing core story, but doesn't quite come together

This was tough to rate. I wanted to appreciate the core story, following the main character truth any number of harrowing experiences while being stuck in a claustrophobic setting. But the whole thing is based in a surreal, somewhat fantastical environment with strange animal people, that feels underexplained in a way that takes away from the story. It feels weird for the sake of weird, in a way that pulls me away from the dark and serious things that are taking place. Overall I didn't dislike it, but I generally felt disconnected from the story it felt like it wanted me to engage with.

At least it's short...

Y'all, mind the warnings for this one, it is dark, child death, murder, rape, abuse by parent, animal deaths, incest and even more things.

spoilers abound

So in this tale we have Mara, a teen who in the first chapter has to clean the body of her murdered father.

It does not get any better after that.

This story had great, vivid descriptions of the sewage covered apartment, but the people here are paper thin.

I did not feel the horror that I should have as I could not really care about what was happening to Mara.

The narration was awesome though, I enjoyed that immensely.

Well.

The story was confusing. The imagery was traumatizing. The narration. Really good. I just want to ask the author - you good ?

Wonderfully spun

The perspective of this from the eyes of a child and the amazing descriptive nature of that point of view, is wonderful. A quick morbid tale, will probably listen to more from this author.