MY DARLING DREADFUL THING, sapphic Dutch Gothic horror...my first such...please not last, though

MY DARLING DREADFUL THING
JOHANNA van VEEN
Poisoned Pen Press
$17.99 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a world where the dead can wake and walk among us, what is truly real?

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the only good thing in Roos’ life, which is filled with sordid backroom séances organized by her mother. That is, until wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop attends one of these séances and asks Roos to come live with her at the crumbling estate she inherited upon the death of her husband. The manor is unsettling, but the attraction between Roos and Agnes is palpable. So how does someone end up dead?

Roos is caught red-handed, but she claims a spirit is the culprit. Doctor Montague, a psychologist tasked with finding out whether Roos can be considered mentally fit to stand trial, suspects she’s created an elaborate fantasy to protect her from what really happened. But Roos knows spirits are real; she's loved one of them. She'll have to prove her innocence and her sanity, or lose everything.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Satisfying sapphic romantic story of a woman who uses legit psychic powers in service of a horrible, harridanly charlatan. Or the story of an impressionable mentally ill young woman in thrall to a horrible, harridanly charlatan who grabs hold of sapphic love to effect her escape from abuse.

Either one fits. Both take us down the very dark, quite chilling paths that Author Johanna ushers the reader down. Roos, our PoV, has never experienced a normal life. It's the second culturally Dutch novel I've read this month that paints a very bleak picture of Dutch life after WWII, though I suppose that isn't exactly a shock is it. What does surprise me is the deeply homophopbic atmosphere Author Johanna portrays...I suppose the patriarchal horror of the world she's limned before our utterly appalled eyes is a big part of that, as the homophobia in question is directed at sapphic lovers.

If I'm to offer you one inducement to exceed all the others to get this book into y'all's hands, I'm going with: Dutch Author Johanna wrote this book in English, about lesbian survivors of a horrifying war in the Netherlands, because she's Dutch, because she's lesbian, and because she's clearly not quite right. How many people can accrete so many out-of-mainstream identities, write a story directly centered in them all, and get it published in the insular US market? And then, topping the high-calorie literary sundae with its obligatory gorgeously red cherry, create the undead/zombie character that twangs your readerly heartstrings with her fullness and pathos? Sweet, dead Ruth...my favorite zombie!

There are no others, just this one.

You can read, and there's a synopsis above this, so you know what's going on. I'm here to tell you if I think Author Johanna did the job of convincing me to invest in her world: Yes. Did she make me think long and hard about how the transactional world cheapens, while defining, human relationships: Better than the Southern Gothics. Roos is a classic Tennessee Williams character, a Blanche Dubois plus agency, with the psychic fragility and serious Love problems; Ruth puts me in mind of a gender-flipped Darl Bundren, articulate, doomed. Did her writing cause me to sit quiet for long moments, committing parts to memory: once, which is once more than most books I read. (It's a spoiler, so I daren't share; the Spoiler Stasi are ever vigilant and quick with their truncheons.)

The unique quality I literally never expect from horror, especially Gothic horror, novels is, here, the pervasive Dutchness of the story. It could not be reset in the US, or England, without losing the special something that kept luring me past my usual guardrails against con-artist faux psychics and fantastical stories of spirit lovers. These are usually the tropes I use as reminders that I have compararively few eyeblinks left and don't want to waste them. Author Johanna, in using postwar, post-Occupation Netherlandish settings, convinced me not to pre-judge these characters. Their long national trauma, their dark personal traumas, their battles faught against real cultural horrors, all formed a gestalt of world and people that convinced me to set my usual intolerance for these ideas aside and consider them as real...to the characters, thus opening the door to my belief as well.

That's a huge achievement for an author I'm unfamiliar with. I'm really pleased to say that I felt the ending was indeed a payoff commensurate with my investment of care and attention.

Brava, Johanna van Veen. Clearly your genesis as the odd-triplet-out was predictive of your sui generis selfhood. I'm eager for more from you.