Blood on Her Tongue
"I'm in your blood, and you are in mine…"
The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband's grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister's condition, but it's clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.
Then, the worst happens. Sarah's behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angry… and hungry.
Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth, or risk losing her forever.
Johanna van Veen
Johanna van Veen’s work lives in the shadows, where the eerie and the emotional dance together in a space both beautiful and unsettling. A fresh voice in contemporary gothic fiction, she is reshaping what it means to blend horror with queer narratives, challenging conventions while still embracing the tradition of slow-burning dread. In her debut novel, My Darling Dreadful Thing, she pulls readers into a world of possession and psychological terror, where the haunting is as much internal as it is supernatural. It's a book that lingers, where the heartbeats of its characters echo long after the final page.