Johanna Van Veen has a way of writing horror that makes it almost comforting. So, if you are looking for a book to merely scare you, this is not it. But if you liked Blood on Her Tongue I am pretty sure you will like this one, too, as it has much the same feel (both being gothic and sapphic and set in waterlogged dutch mansions and all). While not scary in the flashy sense this book still IS horror. It just gets presented in a rather peculiar way as our narrator and main character Roos does not experience most of these grotesque things happening as horrific at all. Which is why it seems almost comforting at points. However, Roos is an unreliable narrator if I’ve ever read one. The whole book is, really, and at the end it’s up to you and your interpretation to decide what really happened. I liked that a lot.

I really do feel like this book rekindled my love for reading. There is something so uniquely and deeply unsettling about this story, at the same time I find it so beautiful and rich. It really feels like the story is alive, it almost feels like it fills every sense you have in your body. I'm so glad I picked this up. It sat on my shelf for months before I dared to give it a shot, but I'm so glad I did.

My Darling Dreadful Thing reads less as a mystery than as a Gothic study of attachment and fractured identity shaped by prolonged abuse. Roos Beckman is a narrator defined by survival rather than choice. From childhood, she learns that love is conditional and safety must be earned through obedience, a belief that structures every relationship she enters. Agnes Knoop offers protection and material stability, but her care relies on isolation and emotional possession, turning what appears to be rescue into another form of confinement. Ruth is the novel’s most unsettling presence, and I read her as a split or dissociated aspect of Roos’s personality. She acts where Roos cannot, enforces safety through violence, and demands exclusivity as protection. Whether Ruth is supernatural or psychological is left unresolved, but the text consistently presents her as a response to powerlessness, a self formed to endure what Roos cannot confront directly. The narration recalls The Turn of the Screw, particularly in how it frames devotion as danger. Ruth functions much like Peter Quint, not simply as a threatening presence, but as a figure of intimate influence whose closeness erodes autonomy. Agnes, like James’s governess, believes herself a protector acting out of care and moral duty, yet her love depends on possession and exclusion. Roos, caught between Ruth and Agnes, must navigate competing claims of loyalty, each insisting it knows what is best for her. The framing of Roos’s conversations with the doctor also strongly recalls We Need to Talk About Kevin. In both novels, explanation becomes a form of judgment, turning testimony into interrogation and memory into something that must be defended rather than trusted. The ending reinforces this logic. Roos is confined, examined, and offered an explanation that would allow her to relinquish Ruth. She refuses. This choice is not framed as madness or triumph, but as continuity. Ruth is the structure that made survival possible, and abandoning her would mean abandoning the self that endured. Rather than a story about defeating a monster, the novel becomes a meditation on how identity fractures under coercion, and how those fractures can feel safer than wholeness. Like The Turn of the Screw, it leaves the reader without certainty, and with a lingering unease about love and protection built on fear rather than freedom. P/S: Since the novel carries Indonesian influences, one additional reading came to mind. In some Indonesian beliefs, a saka is a spiritual inheritance passed down through generations. Read through this lens, Ruth and even Peter Quint can be seen as inherited presences rather than chosen ones, adding another layer to the novel’s fixation on continuity, inheritance, and survival.