Blood, sisterhood, and sanity: Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen #spooktober

If you’re looking for a haunting, atmospheric read to carry you through the end of #spooktober, Johanna van Veen’s Blood on Her Tongue offers the perfect blend of gothic unease and creeping dread. Set in the Netherlands in 1887, this novel follows Lucy, whose twin sister Sarah has fallen into a disturbing illness that blurs the line between madness and possession. As Sarah’s behavior becomes more erratic—and more violent—Lucy must decide how far she’ll go to protect her sister, even as something monstrous seems to take hold of her.

The story unfolds in shadow and candlelight, in grand halls filled with whispers and secrets. Van Veen’s prose feels appropriately decadent and claustrophobic, wrapping the reader in the same feverish confusion that grips Lucy. The decaying corpse unearthed on Sarah’s husband’s estate provides more than a physical mystery—it becomes a mirror for the moral rot beneath the surface of polite society, particularly the suffocating gender expectations that hem Lucy and Sarah in.

Sarah’s husband epitomizes this rot. He once admired Sarah’s intelligence, but in marriage he demands obedience, not brilliance. His friend Arthur isn’t much better, imagining Lucy as an ideal “doctor’s wife” rather than a woman with her own desires and fears. Both men assume their control is benevolence, their arrogance a form of love. It’s a familiar dynamic in gothic literature—men desperate to contain what they cannot understand—and van Veen wields it with precision.

At its heart, though, Blood on Her Tongue is about sisterhood: the kind of love that endures through fear, horror, and transformation. When the world tells you that you’re less than human, what happens when your sister becomes something truly inhuman? The novel dares to ask whether devotion can survive monstrosity—and whether freedom, for women like Lucy and Sarah, can only be found in darkness.

Blood on Her Tongue is a gorgeously written, unsettling exploration of love, madness, and what it means to be consumed by both.

What gothic horror are you sinking your teeth into this month? Share your #spooktober reads in the comments!

Related Content

• Q&A: Johanna van Veen, author of Blood on Her Tongue (Nerd Daily)
• My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen (Kat Loves Books)
• Exclusive interview: My Darling Dreadful Thing author Johanna van Veen (Paul Semel)
• Twin sisters face the sinister in Johanna van Veen’s horror novel Blood on Her Tongue (Exclusive) (People)

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Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

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