My Darling Dreadful Thing

by Johanna van Veen

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.

it was wrong of me to say his name in this place of new beginnings. I should have known better. To speak of evil is to invite it in. Ruth stroked my hair. “Yes. Exactly so,” she said, and with those simple words, she made a promise and damned us both.

During my research, I also stumbled upon the following idea: that, on bright, sunny days, the bog water might have been clear enough for people to see the bodies thrown in, some of which were staked down to keep them in one place, and that people may have regularly visited these bodies because they were considered holy or otherwise imbued with power. All of this is utterly fascinating and, in my view, utterly Gothic: violence inflicted upon the young and the disabled and mentally ill, secrets we will never unravel, the possibility that these bodies would flicker in and out of view and thus come back again and again in the same way that a spirit might… Wonderfully fitting ingredients for a Gothic novel exploring obsession, desire, and madness!