Eric LaRocca's THEY WERE HERE BEFORE US: A NOVELLA IN PIECES

The tension between humanity and the rest of existence that we usually call "the natural world" is kind of implicitly the core theme of all of our stories, so it's a little weird how powerfully affecting it is when someone comes along with a book like They Were Here Before Us: A Novella in Pieces that just rubs that tension in our faces. We're really good at ignoring the harm we do to our environs, and the harm that all the other inhabitants of this world are doing to each other while we're wringing our hands/telling each other it's not so bad over the latest oil spill or waste dump, though, so maybe it's not that weird.

As the first few "pieces" of the novella unfold, the reader gets the feel almost of, say, Patricia Highsmith's wickedly fun animal revenge tales, though a bit more anthropomorphized; the beetle who narrates the opening "All That Remains is Yours to Keep" and the chimpanzee telling us of "Delicacies from a First Communion" both share their stories in colloquial American English from a first person perspective, for instance. But by the third "A God Made of Straw" we shift to the third person and we get our first hints of something more explicitly in the realm of speculative fiction going on, allowing us to ask how it is we have become privy to these creatures' thoughts and feelings and internal dialogue, even as the tension amps way up and the scenes of wanton cruelty start multiplying. And oh look, that bird on the very attractive book cover has elements of the Biblically accurate angel about her, doesn't she?

We're nice and softened up and probably still a little in shock as "Bug and Bird are Happy" begins, suddenly concerned with human characters who happen to have cute nicknames taken from the animal world. But look at that cover again; while Bug is our point of view character in this piece, and as we come to understand the pair's bittersweet relationship and the changes cruel time has wrought on it, well, it's not the beetle who's in control of the situation on that cover, is it? Or is this maybe meant to be the beetle who told us the first piece, maybe being punished for its gloating possessiveness? Could that bird with eyes in her wings be a reincarnation of some of the other pieces' victims, getting their own back before the whole story is told? This "novella in pieces" thing demands that we come up with our own way of putting those pieces together. I wonder how many of us end up with the same contraption at the end?

By the time things wrap up with "When It's Dark Out" all of these themes of cruelty and consumption, of metamorphosis and decomposition and brutality come together for a speed run through a scenario straight out of a story in, say, Cosmic Horror Monthly,  in which a man and his son confront monsters within and without on the way to say a final farewell to a beloved family member. The simple narrative is now elegantly amplified and elevated by the material preceding it, making it feel both claustrophobic and cosmic - a neat trick, that. 

I'll be looking for more of this gentleman's stuff.