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!
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Content Warnings: abuse, sexual assault, child loss.
Rachel Friars received her doctorate in English Literature Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada in 2024. Her current research centers on neo-Victorianism and lesbian literature and history. Her work has been published with journals such as Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.
You can find Rachel on X @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.
