The novella is nightmarish and dreamlike in almost equal measures, and the story, as much as there is one, is increasingly fraught and intense.

As the mother becomes increasingly under the charms of this mysterious figure, the girl finds her own feelings becoming wrapped up in a different mysterious figure. One day a man shows up at the door, apparently some kind of circus performer who also seems to be a spider? and offers the two women some kind of relief from their trauma. Our narrator is a girl whose father is missing or who has disappeared, and her mother seems to be fracturing at the seams as well. This is a kind of fantasy horror novella, that also feel post-apocalyptic in its own way as well. “There are times when I look back on moments from my life as if my recollections were living things, little organisms confined to glass vases I’m meant to nurture and care for.” I once ended up dating someone for six months who messaged me on MySpace, and the weird, growing intensity (combined with the specific life situation I was in at the time) really did blow quickly in both good and bad ways. Sure there are things like OKCupid and other dating sites, but the specific ways in which a budding between two people not ostensibly looking for a relationship or not on a site that is designed for this really changes things. What this best captures for me is the intensity of the early 2000s (and late 1990s as well to a lesser extent) of life online and the way that these growing intense feelings made between two people who might possibly never meet. The tone and genre implications here really sell the horror in this story as the relationship grows and grows in intensity. The most of this novella takes place on line in various communications between two people in a kind of fledgling and then growing, and then increasingly obsessive relationship.

“I was going to begin this with some absurd comment about the irony of posting about an apple peeler in a queer discussion forum when most of us are probably upset by the mere mention of the word “fruit.” Things have Gotten Worse since We Last Spoke

Eric larocca things have gotten worse