You know when a bunch of factors work together in your favour to make a book particularly immersive for you? This was my experience, earlier during a holiday weekend (late October), when I read Carmella Lowkis’s sophomore novel A Slow and Secret Poison (February 10, 2026). A wonderfully atmospheric and twisty, somewhat slow-burn sapphic horror thriller set in the 1920s English countryside, the book and my enjoyment of it was improved greatly by my particular situation at the time. I was visiting my cousins in near-countryside Bengal, it was a chilly autumnal evening, and I had just finished writing a paper on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as part of my thesis coursework. It was the perfect combination of setting and interests; away from the city, I was itching for a really well-written, good ol’ fashioned queer Gothic novel, complete with crumbling manors, remote estates, creepy hidden passages and dollops of florid, romantic melodrama. A Slow and Secret Poison gave me exactly that, plus much more.
It’s a pretty classic premise: in 1922 Wiltshire, Vee Morgan arrives at Harfold Manor, where she has been hired as the new gardener. Far-flung in the English countryside, the stately old manor, once home to the aristocratic Lascy family, now only has one surviving member: Lady Arabella Lascy. The rest of its owners have died over the years, in a series of terrible events—sudden ailments, accidents, war. (You know, nothing unusual.)
As for Vee, she is fascinated by all of it: the rumors that the Lascys are a cursed bloodline, the strange incidents she witnesses on the estate grounds, and of course, her new owner, the dreamlike, ethereal Arabella herself. But when her duty matures into devotion, which further ripens into a dark, sensual obsession, the two women’s pasts collide in an unexpected way, bringing to light a sinister revelation about the manor. In the coming days, Vee—and the reader—will start to question: is it merely human follies that caused the ruin of the Lascys, or is there something more sinister at work?
Lowkis’s biggest strength is her prose. The writing in A Slow and Secret Poison has a languid, sensory quality to it—the type of vivid, earthy, sun-drenched descriptions of late autumn found in the Thornfield chapters of Jane Eyre, making you feel like you can smell and taste and see all of it: fallen orchard apples, dried leaves, old clothes covered in mothballs in a musty, locked room, and the mud drying on your boots. The first half is pretty slow, but really keeps you hooked—there is a sense of unease even in the idyllic passages following Vee around Harfold’s ornamental gardens and dusty, dimly lit corridors, a feeling that something is being hidden from her, that there is more to her conversations with the manor staff and the handful of people she meets in and around the town. In some ways, the slow-burn feels reminiscent of early episodes of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor.
However, no Gothic thriller is complete without some wild twists and denouements, is it? To be honest, I expected this story to unfold in one way, but it pivoted to a completely different narrative angle—in a good way. Put it this way: if the first half of A Slow and Secret Poison evokes Bly Manor and its melancholic, haunted house cottagecore sapphic love story, the last act of the novel distorts, and ultimately shatters that image, veering into psychologically dark, Sarah Waters territory (if you know, you know). It is boldly misleading, it is disturbing—and yes, for those who enjoy depraved sapphic shenanigans, it is tons of fun!
But nothing—not the generational curses, not the haunted hares, not even all the narratively relevant poisons—can hold a candle to the best thing about the novel: the narrator, Vee Morgan, herself. What a delight she is to read! Her retelling of the events at Harfold Manor is crisp, blunt, and endearing, sans any of the cloying sentimentality that often dampens modern Gothic stories. Sure, she falls hard and fast for her mistress, and rest assured, she makes plenty of questionable choices over the course of the novel, but even so, her sense of self-preservation and the acidic bite to her personality remains solid… even at rock-bottom. To make things even better, as the novel progresses, Vee herself is revealed to be a deliciously unreliable narrator, with secrets of her own, which she skilfully withholds from the reader until the very final hour. Ultimately, it is these revelations that make the final denouement so much more complicated, and the ending leaves you feeling like you’re somewhat of an accomplice to a morally grey, dubiously ethical situation.
To me, A Slow and Secret Poison is Sapphic Gothic at its finest: it tricks and deceives the reader, charms you into one version of the story, frightens you with omens of a certain kind of evil, then flips the table over and makes you question everything—and everyone—you believed, and the nature of evil itself. Anyway, I said it on my Instagram review, and the author liked it, so I will say it again: I stand with my cancelled butch!
If you are into cottagecore and problematic historical sapphics, this might be the perfect read for you. Please add A Slow and Secret Poison to your TBR on Goodreads and follow Carmella Lowkis on Instagram (@CarmellaLowkis).
A Slow and Secret Poison releases in spring 2026. I read an ARC via the Lesbrary.
RATING: *****
TRIGGERS: death of loved ones, depictions of vehicular accidents, murder by poisoning (attempted), abusive/toxic relationships, classism, animal death, brief mentions of body horror and gore, mentions of war.
