More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To be Gothic means to refuse to be easily defined.
Left alone in the dark, this secret festers, until everything around it is infected with its rot and it has become impossible to ignore, forcing us to witness the most depraved sides of humanity.
If you strip down My Darling Dreadful Thing until nothing remains but its essence, you will not find a horrific secret at its very heart. You will find, instead, a love story.
“Nothing,” she told me, “appeals more to a man than a young girl who’s not been had yet, apart from a girl who’s not been had yet and gives the impression she’ll be had by him.” She made me think of myself as a piece of fruit and the act of sex like plucking a plum with a rough hand, bruising the flesh.
Ruth would slip out of me then, leaving me cold and bereft. When I’d come to, I’d do my best to look sleepy and shy, asking softly, “Did I fall asleep? I’m ever so sorry. I don’t know what came over me, but I felt so very tired all of a sudden. Shall we begin?”
Some things are so horrible that the only sane response is a bit of madness.
“Because the truth scares people. They’re always afraid of what they can’t explain, and my Ruth can’t be so easily explained.”
what is Ruth like?” P: “It depends. Sometimes she is barely visible, no more than a quicksilver haze. It’s like the shapes you see when your eye waters and you rub at it a little too hard. At other times, I can touch her, and she feels much the same as you and I do, only quite cold, as if she’s been outside in winter without a coat.”
“Sometimes, she looks almost alive, and at other times, she’s unmistakably dead. There’s something off about her features. I can’t explain. I think she’s been dead for so long that she doesn’t quite understand anymore what a human being should look like, although the longer she was with me, the better she got at it. Before that, I think she rested under the floorboards for a long time.”
for a long time, she was my only friend and companion. Then, when Mama realized she wasn’t an imaginary friend, she made me the medium of her séances. Ruth was my spirit control then.”
A spirit control is a powerful spirit who draws other spirits, like moths are drawn to a candle. They’re supposed to soothe and help those spirits so the medium can talk to them. The Victorians invented them.
Ruth was never any good at being a spirit control. Other spirits never came when she was with me.
Or perhaps other spirits do exist, but Ruth scared them away. She was fiercely protective of me. In fact, I don’t think she’d like me to talk to you. She might think you mean me harm.”
Spirits like her are not drawn to the happy and carefree; they want salt, be it blood or be it tears.
D: “Describe to me what it feels like to be possessed by Ruth.” P: “It’s like swallowing something sharp and slightly salty. I need to submit to her, because if I don’t, she won’t go down easily. She’ll bruise and scratch me, though not on purpose. Once I’ve swallowed her, she grows bigger and bigger inside me. It’s like a fever of the brain then, no longer cold but warm and rich as blood. Ruth moves me, speaks for me, and I know it is happening, and it’s still my body, but it isn’t me doing it.”
D: “Could you stop it if you wanted it? Exorcise Ruth, I mean? Or are you completely at her mercy as long as she’s inside you?” P: [laughs uncomfortably] “I just ask her to go and cough her up.”
D: “But what happens when you want Ruth to go but Ruth doesn’t want to go? Could you fight her then?” P: “It’s never like that. Ruth is my friend. She would never stay when I ask her to leave. She protects and loves me.”
“You must be careful with that, Roos. It’s a dangerous thing, to try and give someone everything. One day, you might find you’ve given away things you should’ve kept. Some parts of us must remain inviolate if we are to survive as a person.”
Might be worth watching her for more signs of homosexuality; after all, it’s a known disorder of the mind.
“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.”
P: “No. A— [Mrs. K—] didn’t die because of religion.” D: “Then why did she die?” P: “Because of love.”
“Happy. Such a funny little word, don’t you think? Perhaps not so hard a state to achieve, but nearly impossible to maintain, and different for everyone. I’m sure there are people out there who would be perfectly happy to never have to clean, but not me. Doing little has never agreed with me. It gives me too much time to dwell on things.”
I wanted to eat her up and drink her in. I was hungry for her touch and her words and her love. That’s very different from collecting shells or butterflies.”
“Thank God for small blessings.” “Not God: nature and its tendency to decay.”
they forced pills down my throat, huge, bitter pills that made me feel like I was dead. I didn’t feel anything anymore. And Ruth…” [sobs]
“She was gone. I couldn’t see her anymore because of the pills. Not that I want to, not after what happened, but it should be my choice, not anyone else’s.”
You’ll tell me that me not being able to perceive Ruth when I was under the influence of those pills is clear proof that she’s not real, when in reality, it doesn’t prove anything at all.”
It just means my brain is different from yours! If there was a pill that would make you unable to see colors, would you then think colors are just an illusion?
“How else does one show the strength and sincerity of one’s love if not through suffering and sacrifice?”
