Review: 'My Darling Dreadful Thing' by Johanna van Veen

Roos only has one comfort in her life, Ruth, her spirit companion, who helps her through a childhood of neglect and hurt. That is, until Roos meets the enigmatic Agnes. Told in hindsight, My Darling Dreadful Thing tells a dramatic Gothic tale of love and death. Thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 5/14/2024
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Spirits are drawn to salt, be it blood or tears. 

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos’ life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos’ backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.

Soon, Roos is whisked away to the crumbling estate Agnes inherited upon the death of her husband, where an ill woman haunts the halls, strange smells drift through the air at night, and mysterious stone statues reside in the family chapel. Something dreadful festers in the manor, but still, the attraction between Roos and Agnes is undeniable.

Then, someone is murdered.

Poor, alone, and with a history of ‘hysterics’, Roos is the obvious culprit. With her sanity and innocence in question, she’ll have to prove who—or what—is at fault or lose everything she holds dear.

I have been reading up on narrativity theory the past few months and a big element of recent narrativity theory was the idea of consciousness, if I understood it correctly. Narratives are ways in which we share our perception of the world, ways in which we try to give others an actual, real insight into our minds, our consciousnesses, our ideas. What struck me most was that realization that we can indeed never show someone else exactly how we feel, that we are, in some ways at least, forever stuck on our own in our own heads. I'm bringing this up because My Darling Dreadful Thing is so utterly infused with a sense of loneliness, with a desire to be seen, understood and perceived, and with a fear that true understanding is impossible. The story Roos tells us, one of spirits, seances, and hauntings, is one which screams for connection and I think it is delightful how Johanna van Veen kind of gives the reader a choice to either follow Roos in her version or take a more detached, cool distance. Gothic novels are what I like to call Capital Letter Books. They are about Romance, about Fear, about all the things we could write large. And in My Darling Dreaful Thing these big things, bit emotions, all come up. How we engage with them, is up to us, but we always have the choice to follow Roos in her story, to take whatever peek we can into her life and her mind. 

Roos helps her Mama make money through seances. While the ghosts she calls up are fake, her spirit companion, Ruth, is not. She has been Roos' one comfort for years, as her mother's behaviour moves between neglect and abuse. Everything shifts, however, when Agnes Knoop visits and the two become tied to one another. In moving to Agnes' dilapidated mansion, called Rozentuin, Roos is given space to become her own woman. And yet she finds herself ever more drawn to Agnes and the tragedy that suffuses Rozentuin. One act leads to ever growing tension as the novel hurtles towards its dramatic climax. Told mostly through Roos' perspective, My Darling Dreadful Thing in fact switches in perspectives. Roos narrates large parts of the story in retrospect, occasionally interjected with excerpts from a transcript of a doctor interviewing her after something dreadful has happened at Rozentuin. The transcript shows us how Roos attempts to explain what happened and then smoothly transitions into Roos actually explaining it. I did enjoy this back-and-forth and thought it was a really interesting strategy to also deal with the spirit/ghost-side of things and the way readers may think of it. It builds up a nice image of Roos as well, because we get her own thoughts and then the doctor's assessment of her and her story through the transcript. Agnes' story is also really interesting, especially as it includes her background as an Indo person and her experiences living in the Netherlands. 

Johanna van Veen is Dutch, but wrote this novel in English, so it is not a translated work, if I'm correct. If it had been, I would have liked to read it in Dutch, because despite leaning heavily on the British Gothic tradition, My Darling Dreadful Thing is steeped in Dutch tradition. From the names, to the state of Rozentuin, to Agnes' history and the Netherlands' colonial past, it was great to read a novel which engaged with all of that. While I think that at times the writing could have been a little sharper, I do also appreciate this might be a genre thing. Gothic novels are often a little dreamlike, a little dramatic, full of crumbling mansions and evil forces. That is what My Darling Dreaful Thing reads like as well and if you're in the mood for it, excellent! However, as I said, van Veen does also build up a really interesting character in Roos who, for me at least, seems so suffused with a sense of longing and desperation that it is almost unbearable. I look forward to seeing how Johanna van Veen's writing develops and am absolutely on board for future novels by her!

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen is a beautiful queer Gothic novel of spirits and loneliness, hauntings and connections.