I read this with high hopes. I usually love spooky books. The cover is gorgeous. The title is amazing. But, sadly, I had to stop reading it mid book because it just creeped me out too bad. It was a good premise and very intriguing but I just couldn't finish it. I was too scared. Something about the book just keep freaking me out too much. For those braver than me, happy reading.

My Darling Dreadful Thing is a classic gothic horror tale brimming with suspense and mystery. The story weaves an eerie narrative that follows Roosje, a troubled young girl with a spirit companion, while also presenting the reader with her doctor’s notes, which provide an analytical and unsettling perspective.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is its exploration of mental health. It raises profound questions about how mental illness can shape a person’s reality and whether a belief in spirits is a sign of madness or something more mysterious. Even after finishing the book, I found myself grappling with what was real and what was imagined—a testament to the author’s ability to craft a story that lingers.

The characters are beautifully developed, with the relationship between Roosje and Agnes standing out as a poignant thread in the narrative. Despite the dark and oppressive tone of the story, their bond offers a glimmer of hope and humanity, adding emotional depth to the otherwise chilling plot.

The structure of the book is another strength. The chapters are perfectly paced, and the inclusion of the doctor’s notes provides an intriguing break in the narrative. This clever format enhances the tension and keeps the reader engaged.

While I appreciated the haunting atmosphere and complex characters, the story didn’t fully captivate me to start which is why I’d rate it 3 out of 5 stars. However, fans of gothic horror and psychological intrigue will likely find My Darling Dreadful Thing a worthwhile read.

Dark, twisted, weird, and psychologically provoking! There were a lot of aspects that I liked about this book and appreciated the deeper meaning behind it. I especially liked the story being broken up with the main character speaking with a psychiatrist. It made the reader question what was real and what wasn't. Is this all a figment of the imagination? A defense mechanism to cope with abuse? Something more sinister? I had to take one point off since the book lulled a bit in the middle and the ending wasn't as intense as I'd expected. I figured there would be a cliffhanger to make you second-guess everything you thought you figured out. Overall, a creepy, yet loveable story with themes around friendship, motherhood, family, life, and death.

'My Darling Dreadful Thing' by Johanna van Veen is a macabre debut horror novel. The writer nails the gothic presence and tells an enthralling love story in the midst of murder and manipulation.

Definitely purchasing this for my YA readers! I don't usually read horror/mystery books, but this title really left me in awe.

A dark and moody gothic horror. Part possession story, part love story nd the way a mind deals with trauma. It was beautifully written and had some unique takes on the genre. I highly recommend this one at spooky season especially.

A medium paced gothic and said psychological horror. Absolutely recommend for horror fans. Rich in detail and atmosphere while also delving into the inner turmoil of the MC.

This book was beautifully written. It had gothic, dark, creepy vibes while also have romantic parts in our which I loved how the author was able to intertwine them. If you like haunted houses, ghosts, the haunting of bly manor, or wuthering heights, I think this book would be right up your alley!

I’ve been trying to spend the fall reading Gothic fiction, and as Halloween approaches, Johanna van Veen’s queer Gothic horror novel, My Darling Dreadful Thing (Poisoned Pen Press, 2024), is the perfect book for this time of year!

Veen’s debut novel follows Roos Beckman in the 1950s. Roos has a spirit companion, Ruth, has been dead for centuries, but the corpse-like girl has been Roos’s only comfort after years spent performing backroom séances with her abusive mother. Then Agnes Knoop, a wealthy young widow, attends a séance and asks Roos to come live with her in the house she inherited from Mr. Knoop. At Agnes’s sprawling, crumbling manor indicative of a bygone age, Roos attempts to make herself at home while negotiating the growing attraction between herself and Agnes, and the disturbing machinations of Mr. Knoop’s consumptive sister, not long for this world but still able to cause chaos. In the ensuing months, somehow someone ends up dead, and Roos is caught in the middle of a story she doesn’t realize the truth of until it is too late.

Told in narrative chapters and interview transcripts from the psychologist assigned to determine whether Roos is insane or not, the novel pieces together the recent events of Roos’s life and solves the mystery of the death at the manor—all with a supernatural twist.

I really enjoyed this book! It had the perfect balance between horror, suspense, and plot that kept me engaged and excited to read what happened next. I finished this in a single day because I just couldn’t put it down. I had guesses about how the mystery at the center of the book would work out, but everything was effectively paced and slowly revealed. Having the interview excerpts interrupting the main plot throughout the novel created intrigue and tension and was also useful in really cementing the 1950s setting. Roos was a compelling character who became the perfect Gothic narrator: sympathetic with just the right amount of unreliable. I loved the atmosphere of this novel: gory, romantic, terrifying—it had everything I wanted.

I did think there were parts of the end of the novel that were rushed or that could have been lingered over more. For all of the buildup in the first three quarters of the book, I had hoped for a longer conclusion that clarified the characters’ motives more thoroughly. For example, the character of the psychologist seemed a bit mixed up in terms of his motivations from the beginning to the end of the novel. But all things considered, My Darling Dreadful Thing was more than worth the read.

I highly recommend My Darling Dreadful Thing as the perfect queer horror read for Halloween!

Please add My Darling Dreadful Thing to your TBR on Goodreads and follow Johanna van Veen on Instagram.

Content Warnings: abuse, sexual assault, child loss.

This gothic love story with ghosts is such an atmospheric delight. The blossoming love story between our two MC's was perfectly paced and full of warmth. Johanna Van Veen's debut is perfection and I can't wait to read Blood on her tongue.

This book was eerie and bone chilling and gothic in all the best ways. The main character is compelling and interesting while the overall plot kept me in suspense of what was coming next. I definitely recommend this ghost story for anyone who loves a gothic horror story.

Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

This was an extremely engaging slice of sapphic gothic horror. I should say straight off, it had to do some uphill work with me, simply because of the séance/possession theme. Affinity, despite being kind of horrible, is one of my favourite books and lives pretty much rent free in the “lesbian spiritualists” part of my brain. Thankfully, though, My Darling Dreadful Thing is very much its own thing. I mean, for a start, it’s set the Netherlands in the 1950s (rather than Victorian England) and it’s also doing very different things with both its, err lesbians and its spiritualism. Which is to say, while both books definitely lean heavily into themes of trauma and mental health, Affinity is very much about the dangers of believing in things—including love—when you know you shouldn’t. And MDDT is more interested in asking but what if you did.

In any case, as I’ve said, MDDT takes place in the aftermath of the second world war. Its heroine, Roos, is an orphan who works as a medium under the control of a woman who positions herself as Roos’ mother but in is neither biologically related to Roos nor does she take the role of a caretaker. She’s cruel, exploitative and greedy. Needless to say, the seances she holds are shams, playing on the grief and vulnerability of the attendees. What isn’t a sham, however, is that Roos does, indeed, have a spirit companion—though, not one that allows her to speak with other spirits. Ruth is a no-longer-quite-human remnant of long dead woman, her body preserved in a bog, her spirit left restless from her untimely death. Roos has long believed she’s the only person to be possessed in this way, but then Agnes Knoop—rich, and recently widowed—comes to one of the seances and seems to see right through all of Roos’ tricks. Roos is expecting to be exposed as a fraud, but instead Agnes essentially buys her Valjean and Cosette style, and whisks away to her husband’s family estate, the Rozentuin, to act as her companion. This is because Agnes too has a spirit companion, who Roos can also see.

And, look, things just somehow get even more gothic from there. We have a crumbling mansion. A family with a dark history. A recently deceased husband. A sister dying of TB. Agnes herself, so beautiful and mysterious and haunted. Oh, and of course, a framing device whereby the whole book has been put together from interviews a psychologist conducted with Roos, in order to try and discern if she’s sufficiently compos mentis to stand trial for the murder of Agnes Knoop.

As you can probably tell just from my attempt at a summary, MDDT is a book that wears its gothic heart (bleeding) on its sleeve. I caught so many nods, echoes and references, to Jane Eyre, to Turn of the Screw (very explicitly), to Sarah Waters and Affinity, to Rebecca, to Camilla, to the work of Shirley Jackson, among others, that it’s kind of extra impressive that MDDT never loses sight of its own identity. But it doesn’t. I won’t say you don’t see exactly what’s coming, shambling towards you like the malignant remains of someone’s recently deceased husband, but that just adds to the sense of dread and doomed inevitability. I also think that MDDT has a specificity to it that stops from tumbling into a big melting pot of gothic vibes. For example, Agnes Knoop is Indo, her mother’s side of her family originally coming from Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies). And, while the book is generally more focused on people over places, it does nevertheless have a really resonant sense of place and time that permeates the whole story—whether that’s the descriptions of the Rozentuin, with its army of rotting plaster saints, to the lingering effects of Dutch colonialism, to the still-present shadow of the second world war, or even the fact that I think there were a fair few bog bodies discovered (unearthed?) in the Netherlands. Speaking of which, I absolutely loved the portrayal of the spirits. They were, indeed, both darling and dreadful – eerie, beautiful, intriguing, inhuman, and yet just human enough.

<blockquote>“Roos,” she whispers. Her breath smells like pennies. “You need never be alone again now, Roos. You have named me and let me drink from you. We are wedded to each other now, you and I. You’re my helpmeet and yokemate, and I am yours. I shall keep you safe.”</blockquote>

Also, as you can probably see from this little quote, the writing is exquisite, even just in the throwaway lines like this “The water had swallowed him whole and lay still as a silver salver.” MDDT is, across the board, almost shockingly assured for a debut. I will say, that if I had to nitpick (not that I do have to nitpick, I just … do nitpick), for me the only area where it falters is a slightly unevenness in the pacing. What has been a confidently comfortable and enticingly creepy slow burn becomes oddly rushed towards the conclusion, with the result that some of the final sequences don’t land quite as well as they potentially could. I also wish some of the overlapping inequities of the Roos and Agnes relationship had been teased out a tiny bit more. Roos has no money of her own and, as far as I can tell, Agnes doesn’t pay her any sort of salary so she’s wholly dependent on Agnes (just as she was wholly dependent on her ‘mother’.). Meanwhile, of course, Agnes isn’t white in a predominantly white world, and is carrying her own trauma, both from that and from her previous marriage. I do think there are more than a few indications that the love they share, while assuredly real, isn’t precisely healthy:

<blockquote>I readily admit it: in a way, I had already come to love her, and that love could never be quite free from need. I wish it were not so, but you must understand that, as a child, I only had Ruth to teach me love, and hers, though deep and fierce, was also a possessive love. What I felt for Agnes was right and true, yes, but it was not selfless.

Perhaps love never is. </blockquote>

But I also felt some of this complex dimensionality faded away once they’d sexed each other up—though this could have been as much to do with the awkward rush of the final sections of the book than the portrayal of the relationship itself. Given, however, that Agnes essentially demands of Roos the same betrayal her husband demanded of her (albeit in very different circumstances), I do think there could have been opportunity to draw out the dark and messy parallels here.

In any case, MDDT is a gorgeous and impressive debut. So much so that the first thing I did after finishing it was request the author’s next book on NG.

Gothic historical paranormal sapphic horror at its finest. I ate this up and loved every moment. The twists and turns are fantastic. The ending is beautiful. I love that everything was tied up neatly with a perfectly black and rotten bow.

# My Darling Dreadful Thing
# 11/5/2024 ~ 12/24/2024
# 5.0 / 5.0

I started this a while ago and put I down and completely forgotten about until now and I just finished this in one sitting!

I knew I would love this book due to the gothic vibes alone, but add ghosts AND sapphic on top of that, made this one of my favourite reads this year.

I adored the the way this was written, it was truly beautiful and the love story was so heartbreaking that I very nearly shed a tear and I have never cried at a book before.

I cannot wait for more from this author and I feel very lucky to have also been given an arc for Blood on her Tongue

🪦🪦🪦 / 5

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen

thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for early access to the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

it took me a little bit to get into this one, but once i found the audio, i became more interested in the story. i enjoyed the horror elements and gothic vibes as well as the addition of the interviews with the psychologist. this was a slow burn for most of the story, and i felt there wasn’t a lot going on, which made it a little difficult to follow. i did enjoy the ending and how everything came together in the end.

I loved the concept of this book and the individual variables such as the displays of intimacy, cannibalism and the queer love story. however I had trouble with the writing and the predictability of the book

This took me a bit to get into but overall I enjoyed it.

Gothic tales are always hit or miss with me. This story is pretty slow so it was hard to really get into, however, my curiosity about the characters and the story got me to the end. The characters and their relationships between each other are intriguing. The spirit companion was done in a way that I haven't seen before so that was refreshing. There are some heartbreaking scenes throughout but are necessary for the story but I recommend checking trigger warnings. Though on the slower side I enjoyed this author's writing and the overall themes (gay) in this book.

I love a good gothic horror book. The cover is what drew me in and convinced me to read it. I found myself intrigued and yearning to learn about about Roos and Ruth as the story unfolded. This was a four star read for me! The pace was perfect!

This is a beautifully written story and one of my favorites of the year! It's hauntingly beautiful and an absolute standout! I would highly recommend! Special Thank You to Johanna Van Veen, Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for allowing me to read a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Really enjoyed this one! Took me a while to read it, but I really enjoyed the setting and spooky bog elements. Would definitely read more from this author!