Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

By: Eric LaRocca

Narrated by: Laurie Catherine Winkel

Length: 2 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Sadomasochism. Obsession. Death.

A whirlpool of darkness churns at the heart of a macabre ballet between two lonely young women in an internet chat room in the early 2000s - a darkness that threatens to forever transform them once they finally succumb to their most horrific desires.

What have you done today to deserve your eyes?

©2021 Eric LaRocca (P)2021 Fireside Horror

kinda gross

this was shorter than I thought. yes parts are disgusting but I was waiting to evolve even more. not as disturbing as I was expecting. I'm intrigued that this might be part of a real case?

Very intriguing but would work better as a book

The story is overall pretty interesting and well told however does not lend itself well to an audiobook format as it’s mostly exchanges between two people over email.

Something that annoyed me about the performance was that the narrator kept saying Ray instead of RE when talking about a response email. Example:

Subject: Ray: I’ve been thinking of you.

It was very annoying.

Disappointing execution of interesting premise.

Things Have Gotten Worse Since Last We Spoke suffers from a lack of growth and fruition of its premise. What could have been chilling and captivating becomes rather mundane and diminishing. There are elements of interest in it, but it does not fulfill the promise of any of these elements.

Hmmm…

It starts out really great. It’s intriguing and the characters feel genuine and fleshed out.

When things begin to take a darker turn it feels like a setup for something truly horrifying. But instead of following through on what is being put together it seems like the author either grew bored with the story or just couldn’t deliver and copped out.

(Spoilers?)
The character of Zoe is built up to have some deranged intentions and Agnes is malleable enough to be convinced into doing a couple of terrible things. This situation had potential to be pretty frightening. But Zoe suddenly develops a conscience in the last 5 minutes, her personality doing a 180 and the narrative is just left there to dangle.

Definitely disappointing given what it could have been.

Interesting enough

While the narrator was really engaging with her reading and the decent into madness through messages was intriguing the story fell flat. I imagine the physical copy is better, especially since the reading out of the entire email address made me want to quit within the first 20mins of it. It was very unnecessary and frustrating hearing it every couple minutes. You are already told who is sending the message before the email address is read and there is only two named characters in the whole book.

Waste of my life

I am not usually one to say “this was a waste of two hours of my life” but here I am. I love the horror genre, but this book just felt unnecessary, dumb, and not entertaining. I caught myself rolling my eyes at most parts. There was literally no rhyme or reason to anything that happened, but not in a scary way. Sometimes, no motive or reason really works for the plot in making it scary. This was not one of those times. I was relieved when it was over. The only thing that made this book good was the creativity of the emails/chats telling the story. Then again, this is also just lazy writing by letting dialogue tell the whole story.

Jesus Christ

I knew exactly what I was signing up for going in, because a friend warned me of the content, but I still managed to be completely left horrified.
An enjoyable horror experience, I'll be left haunted by it for the rest of my life, thank you.

Why

Literally just why. Why why why. It wasn’t even “scary” until the very end and even then it didn’t make any sense

it's okay I guess

I finished it relatively quickly as it isn't that long. everything happens far to fast to build any real tension and the format through which the messages are read is so repetitive it became like nails on a chalkboard for me. I actually contemplated not finishing it, but if was so short it'd be a waste not to. there's some disturbing imagery and dialogue, but the end didn't feel all that shocking to me. Overall it was okay but really fell flat.

I don't want my review to be as high as it is...

Okay. I read it because Tiktok made me. Did I enjoy it? Yeah a little bit. Paused to talk to my fiance about it several times, it was a conversation starter. Boy did it become a HUGE conversation starter at the end of the book!!! I didn't see that coming at all. Was it the lesbian representation we wanted? No. Was it the lesbian representation we got? Unfortunately, yes.