I discovered Eric LaRocca last year with a one-two punch of The Trees Grew Because I Bled There are We Can Never Leave This Place. Here was a bold, uncompromising, utterly original voice in horror. Those adjectives absolutely apply to LaRocca’s forthcoming collection of four stories, This Skin Was Once Mine, and LaRocca himself adds a couple more in the author’s note that opens the book which also doubles as an essential trigger/content warning: claustrophobic and distressing. Make no mistake, LaRocca is not fucking around. These stories will dig their hooks into your brain meat and start to rip.

The four stories—This “Skin Was Once Mine”, “Seedling”, “All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn”, and “Prickle”—push the envelope in terms of content. It’s not that they’re awash in gore, with body parts slapping wetly through the air, but they are psychically, emotionally scarring. LaRocca writes with a kind of brittle formality that makes the horror that much more disturbing. In each story, at the point where you say, “I know what’s going to happen next,” you will be absolutely wrong; and in each story, at the point where you say, “there’s no way LaRocca is going to go there,” you will be wrong as well.

And that’s really all I’m going to tell you as far as the stories themselves. One of the chief pleasures in reading This Skin Was Once Mine is discovering the horrors for yourself. I remember how I felt when I read Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse for the first time, that feeling that here was an author who was positively fearless. It’s not that their writing styes are similar—I don’t think they are—but much like Brite, LaRocca is beyond fearless. I can’t wait to see, and read, what they do next.

This Skin Was Once Mine will be released on April 2nd, and is available for pre-order now. If you’re a fan of extreme horror, of challenging books that may make you uncomfortable, then this is a must.