My Darling Dreadful Thing, by Johanna van Veen

[rachelmanija]

This spooky ghost story has a central pairing that I feel like I may have requested as an original work: Widow/Female Fake Psychic/Ghost of a Female Bog Body.

My Darling Dreadful Thing is set in the Netherlands in the 1950s, which is a selling point all by itself as I love unusual settings. Roos is a young woman whose abusive fake psychic mother forces her to participate in her fake seances. But though Roos does not communicate with the spirits sought by the desperate, grieving customers, she actually does have a spirit companion, a bog body whom Roos has bound to her and named Ruth.

Roos is delighted when Agnes, a biracial (Indonesian/Dutch) widow, takes her as a companion and spirits her away to her neglected Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere. The mansion is otherwise occupied only by Agnes's sister-in-law, Willamine, who is dying of tuberculosis, and has a marvellously bizarre Gothic history. Roos falls hard in love with Agnes, with whom she has a surprising amount in common.

But this whole story is being told in retrospect, as a series of interviews Roos is having with a psychiatrist who is trying to determine whether she's mentally fit to stand trial for murder. Something very bad happened at the mansion...



I saw some commentary suggesting that there are no ghosts and Roos is just delusional, but the only support for that is that the characters who can perceive ghosts stop being able to perceive them when they take unspecified pills for mental illness. When they take the pills, they still believe that the ghosts exist, but that they can no longer perceive them. This suggests to me that the pills just block their ability to perceive ghosts, rather than remove the delusion that there are ghosts.

Also, if there are no ghosts, then either all three of the main characters had the same delusion (the only support for it is that the psychiatrist who thinks it's all a delusion suggests it), or else almost nothing in the book actually happened within the reality of the book (even less interesting). So I vote for the ghosts being real.

Roos is certainly unreliable in some ways (naive, sheltered, probably autistic, in denial about some things) but I find it a much more interesting story if the ghosts are real. Also, if the ghosts are real it's a tragic and spooky but also deeply romantic story of love and jealousy that transcends death, while if they're not, it's about a delusional murderer. I know which I like better. And, come on! What's better than incredibly ancient ghosts?



Very enjoyable, very gothic, very atmospheric. I'm excited to read van Veen's other two books. I looked her up to see if she's actually from the Netherlands (yes) and learned that she's one of a set of non-identical triplet sisters! I don't think I've ever read a book by a triplet before.