I loved this weird, amazing, creepy book. I liked that it went back and forth between the present and past. I loved Roos and Agnes relationship and how they understood each other and their spirit companions

(4.5 rounded to 5)
Thank you to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I don’t think I’ve met a gothic horror story that I didn’t like, and My Darling Dreadful Thing is no exception. I was immediately drawn in by the cover, the blurb is what sold me, and I was so surprised and excited when I found out my request was approved!!

My Darling Dreadful Thing is dark, unrelenting, mysterious, and heartbreaking. I absolutely loved van Veen’s prose and her characters. They are so tragic and deeply flawed, but I also wanted to sweep some of them up in a hug and give them some love, especially Roos, Ruth, and Agnes. I really enjoyed how the majority of the book was told in first person through Roos’s eyes, which is something I never thought I’d say. Roos’s internal monologue broke my heart and watching her learn and grow through her eyes as the story passed made it feel like I was an active participant in the story.

Stripped down to its core, My Darling Dreadful Thing is a love story and love (of all kinds!) is the throughline that connects all of the characters, for better or for worse.

There were some spots where the pacing could’ve been a bit tighter, but when there was action, it was page-turning and I couldn’t read fast enough! (There was a scene that reminded me a bit of the topiary animals scene in The Shining which made my heart RACE!!)

My Darling Dreadful Thing was a fantastic read and I can’t recommend it enough if you’re a fan of queer gothic horror!!

2.5 stars.

What I liked about this book was how unique the story was. Spirit companions who appear as partially decomposed/mummified corpses, making cracking noises as they absentmindedly move their broken jaws back and forth, able to possess their bound hosts, yet viewed as well loved bosom buddies? So perfectly horrible! The suspense leading up to learning why Roos is being evaluated by a physician to judge whether or not she is fit to stand trial was well done, too.

But there were so many places where the writing was just lacking. Most characters were extremely one dimensional (villains especially were evil through and through, with nary a redeeming quality among them). I was never sure exactly what time period the story was supposed to be taking place in (as soon as I thought I had it pegged, some anachronistic detail would show up and throw me off). And all that suspense ultimately built up to a climax that just kind of fizzled and fell flat, in my opinion.

Some very good ideas here, but unfortunately the execution did not work for me.

I love love love any book with a gothic setting and Im also a fan of horror so this seemed right up my alley. The beginning was fantastic but through the middle I was left a little bored. I'll admit I lost interest some but I did enjoy it. Thanks so much for offering me this review copy.

4.5 ⭐️ rounded up!
Let me start out by saying I don't usually enjoy Gothic horror stories, as I normally find them a bit too slow paced for me (I feel like my need for fast-paced stories is higher than the average reader). So why did I want to read this VERY Gothic book? Because everything else about it sounded amazing! Wow am I glad I stepped out of my comfort zone for this one! I picked it up for the sapphic love story, the atmosphere, the ghosts, and because I love when an author just seems so into what they are writing. And Johanna van Veen clearly has a deep love for Gothic story telling, because this story was absolutely dripping with atmosphere and everything there is to love about the Gothic subgenre: vividly creepy ghosts, a dark and cold mansion with a graveyard and a mysterious past, and atmosphere that oozed off the pages! This reminded me of my two favorite Gothic stories (that absolutely DID work for me) combined, which are "Crimson Peak" (movie) and "the Haunting of Bly Manor" (an amazing TV show). "My Darling Dreadful Thing" even had nods to "the Turn of the Screw" which "the Haunting of Bly Manor" was based off of, so I loved it. The reason these shows and this book in particular worked for me (even though Gothic tends to not be my thing) is their endearing characters, unique love stories, atmosphere, and the way the dead are portrayed. I loved how Johanna describes the ghosts in this book! It was so unique and vivid and creepy while still somehow making me love them and fear what they may do all at once! It was the best part for me. I also loved the exploration of Sapphic love during a time when queer love was not accepted and seeing the main character grapple with trying to figure out her feelings. My other favorite thing about this book was the interview sections set in the present (while most of the book was set in the past, as if the main character is telling the story to you). These sections are what really kept the pace moving and kept me so engaged! And the reveal at the end of part 1 had my jaw on the floor! It was so dramatic and I swear I could here the violins ratcheting up as the character dropped the bomb of a reveal that changed how I read the remainder of the story. I don't even know if that makes since, but it was so good! All in all, I really loved reading this book and will definitely be buying it for my shelf on release day! It was scary and heartbreaking and really atmospheric! But most of all, you can feel the care and love that the author put into the story and I just cannot wait to see what she will do next! I know I'll be buying it, whatever it may be! :)

3.5 rounded up. I feel this book has potential to great, but some parts it just dragged on. I kept wondering when the point would be made and it just kept droning on. The attention to detail and the gothic elements were very well written. I didn’t really see it as a horror type book, but others may argue otherwise. Overall not a bad book, but also, not one I would read again! Thanks NetGally and Poisoned Pen Press for this ARC

I honestly don't know how to recap this story. If you want to read a dark, gothic, queer story that includes spirits, then this is for you. This book is about love, but I would definitely not call it a romance. It has mystery, horror, mind-fuckery and good writing. It switches between Roos telling her story from her own perspective, and Doctor Montague interviewing her after everything, and this is how the story is slowly pieced together. It's pretty much up to the reader to determine whether the characters are telling the truth or if they are "mad", and it is very intriguing.

Thanks to Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Press for this arc!! What the heck did I just read?! The reason I gave it 3 stars is mainly because it isn’t my normal kind of read. However, it’s still very well written and while it is a weird story, it was decent. Parts of it seemed to drag along but again, it isn’t my type of read. But I know there will be many people that love it!!

My Darling Dreadful Thing is a very unique and wonderful Gothic story.

Set in an atmosphere of achromatic narration and moods the story is one of quiet unsureness but also shimmering dialogue and intrigue.

The story is told from the view of a woman who happens to have a spirit companion. She is compelled, shall we say, to perform seance and live s strict life until a turn of events lands her in another home, with a woman where attractions develop (romance is extremely light, left up to the reader really), and soon there is a murder, doctors and the need to know the truth.

I really loved the way the story flowed, the tensions, the revelations, the characters… everything really. This was a Gothic piece of fiction that felt like it had been written in the time in which it was set, not a contemporary piece and that is a difficult thing to accomplish! I loved it.

I received an ARC via Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Press and I am leaving an honest review.

my darling dreadful thing was a very interesting, horror-filled slow-burn gothic romance of sorts. without giving away too much, we have roos, who has her spirit companion ruth. roos is constantly used by her mother to scam grieving customers into believing they're talking to their deceased loved ones through her possessed daughter, until agnes enters the picture, who is also battling demons of her own, and decides to take Roos with her to her home.

things take a downfall after this, and we are thrust into a world so dark and miserable for both women that it makes you wonder how love can grow in such circumstances, but it does, until once again, tragedy strikes.

the dynamic between roos and her spirit companion, ruth, as well as the investigation into roos' innocence and sanity, adds complexity to the narrative. I loved the interview elements at the end of certain chapters, which allow us to look into roos' mind from someone else's point of view and explore the tension between believing these horrors could be true or attributing them to the decaying mental health of an abuse survivor.

while the story moved quite well at times, at others, I felt like it dragged on, with unnecessary conversations or descriptions that bored me and made me eager to finish the chapter. I do believe that this was an amazing read and should get the recognition it deserves once it's published, though!

thank you netgalley and poisoned pen press for the arc in exchange of an honest review!

an explosive beginning with an inevitable, winding fall. how gothic!


general thoughts:

quite enjoyed the interviews interspersed throughout the story. this sort of format doesn't always work for me, but i was tickled by the consistent "doctor, you'll simply have to let me finish if you want to to learn how the body ended up in such a state..." *cut to next chapter*

loveddd ruth and roos's classic toxic codependent homoerotic girl friendship. sometimes your obsessive best friend is a several hundred year old bog body and that's ok!

looked the author up after finishing and was delighted to see that she's a shirley jackson fan. i recently finished jackson's hangsaman and definitely see the inspiration. shout out crazy women in literature, you guys are so real

additionally, this book had me thinking a lot about the early modern dutch art class i'm currently taking. can't put my finger on what it is exactly but a certain early modern sensibility in the imagery/general vibe definitely comes through! cool to see that the author is an early modernist, would love to see some horror and/or wlw romance set in the early dutch republic from her

in conclusion: what can i say, i love books about deranged young women in the midst of a breakdown

really excited to see what comes next from van veen! i shall be tuning in

I absolutely loved this book!!

It was a wonderful haunting, eerie gothic story that was told with such delicacy and love about strong themes of abuse, mental illness, lesbianism, and misogyny.

Roos, when she is a young girl is raised by "mama" who forces her to conduct tricks at her seances.
While under the floor where she hides to play those seances, she meets Ruth, a spirit that attaches to her. They go on like this for many years. And then Roos moves in with Agnes and someone is murdered

I highly recommend this book if you are a horror fan, especially of gothic horror.

I just finished reading, and I honestly loved this book! It's a unique and tragic story about a young woman and her spirit companion in the 1950s and their journey through a series of unfortunate events. I personally seek out books with dark content/horror/ghosts and this book was right up my alley. I couldn't put it down at night, I stayed up late reading because I had to see what happened next! Though a harrowing tale, this book is filled with love. I think that's what I liked most about it. The love Roos had in her heart for Ruth and Agnes and the lengths she would go for them. This one will stick with me I can already tell.
I have to mention the cover and title are perfect! I am so glad I came across this book. Thank you NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for letting me read it! I'll be getting a physical copy May 14th!

Wow!! I fell in love with the cover of this book and just had to read it! I usually read more suspense and thrillers but every now and then I like a good horror story. This was a fantastic, gothic story that made me sad in a lot of ways but was so, so entertaining. The writing really flows and I ended up loving Roos so much and felt like I totally understood the reasons for every single thing she did. I hope Roos and Agnes find each other again. (And I kind of think Wilemijn got what she deserved.)

First I would like to thank NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for an eARC of this novel.

I was very excited when I was approved for this title it check the boxes of a good gothic horror book braided with a love story. While I found the novel very creepy at times yes I will be honest there were parts of this novel that were for lack of a better term stale with the horror. Creepy yes, keep me up a night horror no. But that book cover is amazing! I do look forward to future titles from Johanna van Veen!

Now this is a real gothic sapphic novel. It doesn’t just have gothic packaging (crumbling house, sexually repressed women, etc) but substantial, meaty, juicy ambiguity and a true-blue lesbian protagonist. Not to mention, postcolonial critique that I will admit is out of place in a novel that mimics the 20th century form (too much self-awareness), but which I found nevertheless charming. We’ll never go back to the past, so why bother even trying to create an ‘authentic’ representation? I think we should just play with what we have and retroactively lend a voice to the minorities from that time. It’s not like their perspectives were given much thought or documentation in the annals of literature.

Having just read ‘The Girl and the Ghost’ by Hanna Alkaf, I was given whiplash by this novel’s version of a girl and her ghost. Roos Beckman has spent all 21 years of her life knowing nothing but starvation, exploitation, and abuse by her guardian, a woman who makes a living by pretending to be a spirit medium. Roos is the key to her success as Roos has a real spirit-companion who can crawl into her mouth and possess her, lending her supernatural strength and stamina. She was bound to this spirit when she was a small child and accidentally flicked some blood onto the creature. Since then, this spirit has been her protector and only friend. Interestingly, the language used suggests a bond that borders on romantic—at the time, Ruth says, “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.” Roos also describes Ruth’s actions as finding a someone “to love and hold.” Definitely sapphic, no matter how you spin it.

Roos recounts her story to a Doctor Montague, whose job is to assess whether or not she can be deemed mentally fit to be charged for murder of Agnes, fifteen years older than Roos, recently widowed, and of Javanese descent (she identifies as Indo). Agnes took a liking to Roos and took her in because Agnes also has a spirit-companion, whom she named Peter Quint (as in, from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw). The way both Roos and Agnes love their spirit-companions is beyond rationality, possibly manic, almost as if these spirits were vital parts of themselves and they could not carrying on living without them. I guess if you really wanted to, you could say that it’s the manifestation of the split between the Ego and Id, similar to another classic like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Of course, you can also agree with Montague/ the rest of society and see them as figments of a very lonely imagination. What’s attractive about this story is that you’re invited to renounce the safe and conventional in exchange for the improbable and extraordinary.

Montague’s reports of their sessions intersperse Roos’ narrative and show us how she responds to his attempts to pick apart her recount. Montague’s questions often reek of misogyny as he seems to be trying to trick her into revealing her insanity or deviance and his psychoanalytical influences lack any subtlety. For example, he asks Roos if being possessed by Ruth “brings [her] pleasure” or “arouses [her].” His reasoning is that she used sexual imagery:

“Possession as penetration. The salty taste as you swallow her down, the need to submit or else bleed and be in pain . . . Any psychoanalyst would conclude that Ruth is your love object and you wish to have intercourse with her, to put it bluntly.”

The funny thing is that Roos and Ruth are both women, or at least coded as women, and Roos especially has only ever had any kind of physical reaction to Agnes, never a man, but Montague is unable to envision love between women as anything more than a warped expression of heterosexuality. There is absolutely nothing remotely heterosexual between Roos’ bond with either Ruth or Agnes. He is simply projecting a tired fantasy of the hysterical woman seeking the phallus onto her.

We come to see Roos’ strength of will when she repeatedly resists these attempts to pigeonhole her into the Mad Repressed Lesbian box. She also accuses Montague of deliberately sexualising her words and turning his accusations against him: "It’s nothing like that, and you’ve a filthy mind for thinking it could be . . . Would you have intercourse with your mother, Doctor? Or with your sibling?” If Montague can certify that Roos is schizophrenic, she will be acquitted, but if he finds out that she is merely a consummate liar, she will stand trial for murder.

The twist, when it comes, brings to mind the incestuous undertones of 18th century gothic fiction (‘Castle of Otranto’, I’m looking at you) and which was recently made lurid in Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Crimson Peak.’ I do think it possible to read incest and inbreeding as metaphors for racism and exclusionary politics—these white people want so badly to consolidate power (and in this case, land rights/ property/ the right to existence) that they end up imploding. Willemijn exemplifies this as the infant she conceived with her own brother dies within mere hours, after which she requires a hysterectomy that renders her barren and the damage from which ensures she is terminally ill.

The key question in this novel is the same as in Henry James’ work: so are the ghosts real or not?

Montague seems to think that they are definitely the result of untreated psychosis. Even when Roos says that Willemijn also saw her brother’s ghost, Montague believes that they were simply having a shared hallucination since Willemijn was doped up on morphine and the other two were crazy to begin with. There is some evidence to support this: when Agnes and Roos take medication, they become unable to see their spirit-companions anymore. This does suggest that the spirits never existed in the first place. Roos rebuts this by saying that there are pills that can make you see spirits, so pills making you unsee them does not prove their non-existence.

At the same time, there is also evidence to suggest the contrary. A lot of stuff happened that does not seem possible without supernatural help. We’re talking about three women, one of which is a skinny waif, one is middle-aged, and one is one cough away from dying from late-stage tuberculosis. How would they be able to move so many life-sized stone statues across the estate grounds all by themselves? How would any of them be able to break off pieces of it and throw them through the windows? Lastly, after Roos is the last one standing, how would she have the strength to transport Agnes’ corpse all the way across the forest to the bog? We read previously that Agnes is much taller than her and her head only comes up to Agnes’ sternum. There is no way Roos can carry her fresh corpse over such a long distance by herself.

The ending was more forgiving than I had expected and I was relieved to find out that Montague was not a horrible person. He really wants his patients to just be able to support themselves and live an okay life, and to that end, he gave Roos employment and allows her to keep her ghost, which in his books, is to allow her to continue to be schizophrenic and rely on her delusional coping mechanism without forcing treatment on her. I found this ending way more radical than anything else in the novel because it centred on acceptance. Not incarceration, not lobotomy, but acceptance of her condition and helping her integrate into larger society. This in turn allows Roos to continue loving Agnes into re-existence. Even if it’s not real, it’s real to Roos, and that’s all that matters.

"My Darling Dreadful Thing" delicately navigates the tumultuous journey of a young, sheltered girl grappling with both the tangible and ethereal realms. In a narrative adorned with eloquent prose, the author intricately weaves themes of love, loss, and the profound essence of human connection. Through the lens of the protagonist's ability to see spirits as companions, the story transcends mere paranormality, delving into the depths of emotional resilience and the transformative power of empathy. Each page resonates with a haunting beauty, inviting readers to immerse themselves in a world where the boundaries between the seen and unseen blur, ultimately revealing the universal truths that bind us all. A captivating read that lingers in the heart long after the final page is turned.

This book was a really solid read and a strong debut novel and I will definitely have my eye on this author moving forward.

I really enjoyed the inter-character relationships going on in this book and I really loved the world-building. You can tell that the author really took time to develop the relationships in this book, especially those between Roos and Ruth and between Roos and Agnes. The ghost/spirit lore established in this book was so intriguing and unique. The level of intricacy in this lore of relating not only how someone dies, but where their body resides to how a spirit comes to be and has to be reawakened was really brilliantly done.

As typically expected when reading a debut novel, there were some craft issues with this book. While I did really love the inter-character relationships in this book, I did think that the character development of singular characters could have been explored more. I also thought that the pacing of this book was a bit off, this book felt very slow and drawn out for the level of plot and character development that were happening within this book, but I think learning when to draw out or condense parts of a story typically come with practice so I'm usually a little more forgiving of debut authors on pacing. My biggest complaint about this book is that even though it was a horror novel and there was a level of anticipation as certain points, I felt that this book was greatly lacking in suspense. For me, the interview framing device was taking suspense out of this story rather than adding to it and I wish that the framing had been done a little differently so that I still felt suspense going through this story.

Overall, this was a very strong debut and the character relationships and lore building generally outweighed the craft issues for me.

Wow...what a beautifully haunting, gothic story. I honestly didn't know what to expect with this book but I loved it! Roos is a young woman who has been at the mercy of "mama" who forces her to conduct seances which aren't real. The only thing that is real, at least to Roos, is the spirit named Ruth that has attached to her.
One day Roos life changes when she meets a widow named Agnes. Her life takes a drastic turn once she goes to live with Agnes. As it turns out, she and Agnes have a lot in common!
I loved the chilling and haunting way this book was written. The story is told from Roos POV but towards the end of some chapters there are some transcripts of the psychiatric sessions that Roos attends. This makes you look at the story from a different perspective but really adds to the story.
I really enjoyed this book and recommend it for anyone who likes a chilling and haunting gothic novel. Thank you Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Press. All opinions are my own.

What a lovely story. It’s both lovely and gruesome which most true gothic tales are, and it really evokes a lot of feelings in the reader. I was hooked with this story of seances and ghosts, and treated to a love story and a revenge tale as well. What a fantastic way to weave together all of these points. It’s got medical drama, and legal drama as well. I didn’t know you could put so much into a book but I devoured every page. This doesn’t come out for a little bit but when it does, if you like true gothic novels, check it out. It’s worth it.

4.5 rounded up to 5.