J.R. Larriba Scared Me Once. Now He’s Just Breaking My Heart on Purpose.
(By Olive Steven / Just Reading Nook) Little backstory: I found J.R. Larriba through Itsy Bitsy Spyder, the reason I kept a lamp on for the better part of a week. So when I heard the same guy put out What the Hands Remember, a “vignette collection for the times” built around a West African proverb about hands and memory, my first thought was: since when. Horror writers don’t just wander over into inspirational prose poetry. Cosmic dread and tenderness usually keep separate hours. I picked it up mostly to be nosy, half expecting the sincerity to curdle into something ironic somewhere around page fifty. It didn’t curdle. I was wrong about that, and I’m kind of relieved I was.
One more thing before I get into it. The book is dedicated to his wife, “whose hands taught me what to remember when everything else is lost.” I read that line before I read anything else in the book, and then I found it again, in some form, in almost every vignette that followed. This wasn’t a concept he borrowed for the marketing copy. He built the whole thing around something that’s actually his.
So, What’s It Even About?
There’s no single plot here, which took some getting used to. What you get instead is five thematic movements, all interconnected, circling the same idea: that our hands hold on to what our minds eventually drop. A polar captain grips his pipe before leading his crew into the ice. A prehistoric chieftain skips his own dinner so the kids in his tribe can eat. A dying woman’s brother carves both their names into a tree, so, in his words, their names will be the last thing anyone sees. On paper that’s a lot of heaviness back to back, and it is heavy, but Larriba keeps sneaking in these smaller, human gestures that stop you from going under with it.
The chapter that actually got me was the one set at the Somme. Three soldiers, one German, one British, one French, each write a letter home the morning of July 1, 1916, hours before all three die. I’m not going to spoil where the story goes from there, but there’s a later thread involving a mute orphan girl and a boy who gives her a name in charcoal on a train, and it wrecked me in a way I wasn’t braced for. A scene about naming a kid should not hit like that. It did anyway.
The book’s first section is where most of the roughest material lives. There’s a scout tied to a tree, forced to watch raiders wipe out his own family. There’s a woman in the Rockies holding her cabin with a rifle, alone, waiting on someone who might not make it back. And then, right after all that, the same section closes on this oddly funny, nostalgic bit about kids running wild backyard BB-gun wars in the late sixties, the whole operation governed by exactly one rule: no face shots. It’s such a small, specific detour, and it works precisely because of everything it follows. He knows when to let the reader exhale.
Why Can’t I Stop Thinking About This
My best guess is that Larriba refuses to let any single story sit inside its own genre. He’ll give you the unvarnished, ugly sound of a mother dying in “The Prayer Warriors,” then turn around and hand you a baker kneading dead dough in a cold oven, because for him, stopping the kneading is worse than the ache of it. That contrast, tender right next to grotesque, is clearly deliberate, and it’s the same muscle that made Itsy Bitsy Spyder work as horror, just pointed at something else entirely. Once I noticed that, this stopped reading like a random inspirational collection and started reading like proof the man who scared me half to death has actual range.
There’s a quieter current running underneath all of it too, about parents and the kids they don’t get to raise, and that thread snuck up on me harder than any of the war chapters did. There’s a girl named Queeny, handed off to a social worker and an elderly woman named Matilda, who ends up kneeling on the asphalt outside a county building praying over her like it’s the last thing she has to offer. Then there’s “Da,” which opens like it’s building toward some scandal and turns out to be an adoption letter, written by a father the day he brought his daughter home. Not the chapter I expected to well up over on a random Tuesday.
One more scene worth flagging, mostly because it’s such a direct hit for a book with this title. A land surveyor named Guiteau sits down with an old mapping quill to draw a line splitting his family’s land after generations of keeping it whole, and Larriba spends an absurd amount of care on the ink, the nib, the smell of it, all in service of one man’s hand permanently breaking his family apart. It’s a quiet, almost throwaway scene, and it might be the single clearest example of what this book is actually about.
Part of the appeal, too, is just timing. We’re all a little too plugged in, a little too far removed from anything we build or make with our own two hands. A book that keeps arguing the body remembers what the mind forgets reads differently when most of your day happens on a screen.
Who Should Actually Read This
If you’ve read his horror and you’re wondering whether he can do sincerity without it feeling like a costume: he can. It’s also a solid pick if you like interconnected short fiction that rewards patience, the kind that treats history as a series of small, intimate moments instead of a timeline of events.
One real caveat: this is not a gentle book, tenderness aside. There’s a brutal frontier massacre, a child’s abandonment, a graphic deathbed scene, an ecological grief chapter that’ll ruin your week in a good way, plus detours into addiction and cartel violence, and a family literally split apart over inheritance. It asks a lot of the reader, vignette after vignette, without much room to catch your breath between them.
Okay But How’s the Actual Writing
This is where the craft really shows. The prose is muscular and sensory in a way that catches you off guard, iron-gall ink described as “familiar as old blood,” a pilot’s landing rendered as a “gentle kiss of tires on tarmac.” Larriba will sit inside one physical detail for a beat longer than feels comfortable, and that’s exactly why the collection holds together as a whole instead of reading like a string of nice individual pieces.
If I have a complaint, it’s that five movements and this many overlapping characters is a lot to keep straight, and a couple of the shorter vignettes read more like connective tissue than fully realized chapters on their own. I wanted more room in a few of them. “Root Whispers” especially, which had the bones of something I wished he’d let breathe longer.
The book closes on a poem, “The Weaver’s Covenant,” built around thread, looms, needles, and it lands the whole collection somewhere soft rather than somewhere bleak. One line from the ending stayed with me for days, about love outlasting whatever it was stitched into. After everything the book puts you through, that’s the note it leaves you on. Not resolution, exactly. More like permission to set the book down gently instead of just shutting it.
So, Was It Worth It?
I’ll admit I went in bracing to feel a little secondhand embarrassed for him, like watching someone try on a completely new personality in public. Instead I came out thinking he might actually be better at sincerity than he is at dread, which is a strange sentence to write about a horror author. This isn’t a fast read, and it isn’t always a comfortable one, but it’s a genuinely moving one, and I’d hand it to people who’d never touch his horror books. Come for the novelty of a horror writer going soft. Stay because it turns out he’s just as good at breaking your heart on purpose.
Read J.R Larriba on Spotlight: From Prison Yards to Purple Prose — The Unlikely Journey of J.R. Larriba
WHAT THE HANDS REMEMBER
by J.R. Larriba
From polar ice to the Somme, from unearthed love letters to myrrh-kissed stitches of covenant, these vignettes trace what the hands never forget. Piece by piece, then as a whole, J.R. Larriba explores survival’s sharp edges, fragile legacies, and enduring love. Concise yet aching snippets of Humanity—leaving the heart longing for more of What the Hands Remember.
Hands that knead barren dough, turn a breech child in a buried wagon, clutch the last ember in a century of dark, stitch a covenant that outlives the cloth.
Piece by piece, then as a whole. What the Hands Remember — A vignette collection for the times.
/ANTHOLOGY
Available in Kindle and Paperback
Olive Stevens is an agency copywriter and managing editor of Just Reading Nook. She also writes book features and news articles.
You can follow her at x /@olivesstevens
