BLOOD ON HER TONGUE, modestly successful Carmilla revamp

BLOOD ON HER TONGUE
JOHANNA van VEEN
Poisoned Pen Press
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: "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.

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

My Review: Messy take on Carmilla, only with twin sisters.

It's at its strongest in conveying the overpowering terror of losing one's mind, of feeling the moorings of consensus reality slipping out of one's grasp. The very introduction to the story's reality is a letter...hi, Bram!...that unquestionably gives us a taste of how that unmooring will play out in the rest of the tale. Lucy worries mightily about Sarah as she learns more about the damage done to Sarah's sense of reality. When she comes to look over the damage to repair what she can, the situation somehow gets worse for her.

Evidence aplenty greets her that Sarah is in the midst of supernatural crisis, vampiric deaths, and quite a lot of relationship toxicity. Sarah's world is full of people dying in creative ways. But the main issue I think most will have is how far Author van Veen (My Darling Dreadful Thing) is willing to push the body horror. No ordinary, sane person, ie Lucy/the reader, is going to see this kind of violence and not skedaddle. At top speed. Lucy is there for her twin so of course she will stay longer than you or I might, but there's an eye-gouging scene that...no matter if one witnesses the event or the aftermath...would cause a celeritous evacuation of self and digestive tract.

I wasn't convinced by the characters. To me, they felt insubstantial, tags placed on dialogue, because they reacted yet never interacted. Lucy, for example, has no reason to get entwined with Michael that I could see; it was a plot contrivance. It's not like this is shocking in the context of a horror novel, but I hoped for more, given my first experience with the author. That, more than any other factor, stalled my rating at four stars. I was really ready to go higher.

If you come to this read expecting body horror and a page-turning, propulsive gorefest, you will like the book. If you're wanting an updated Carmilla with its sapphic overtones and its more interpersonal horror slant, it won't be the most satisfying of reads.

On a personal resonance,the story's twins have the same names as my sapphist grandmas, Sara and Lucy...the very first QUILTBAG people I knew in this life.

So on balance a read aimed at others, not at me.