Our last podcast featured Shaun and guest host Kendra interviewing Dutch author Johanna van Veen about her new novel Blood on Her Tongue. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to that conversation yet about bog people and shifting cultural perspectives on death, madness, identity, and gender, then be sure to tune in along with reading this review and checking out van Veen’s rich, gothic treat.
Blood on Her Tongue ticks off most all of a reader’s expectations from the gothic literature genre: familial secrets, supernatural beings, madness, gender challenges, emotional intensity, isolation, curses, doubles, and above all that yearning for what isn’t good. With the pages of the book inked to appear like blood dripping out from within it, and the darkly decadent cover art, this title from Poisoned Pen Press simply screams Gothic.
In the Netherlands of the late 19th century, Lucy rushes to her twin sister Sarah’s side after word reaches her from her brother-in-law Michael that Sarah is close to death of some unknown ailment that seems to affect her body and mind. Only days prior, a healthy and lucid Sarah had sent letters to her twin about a discovery of a decayed but preserved body in a nearby bog. Sarah becomes fascinated by the body, found staked facedown into the Earth beneath and with a large stone jammed into its widely agape mouth, and its history.
Her husband and their family friend Arthur try to discourage her from her preoccupation and studies, but neither that nor a cut she gets while removing the stone from the body’s jaws convince her to stop. The men fear that Sarah’s subsequent withdrawal into seclusion and sudden illness are indicative of another mental collapse, similar to one Sarah faced years prior after the death of her only child, Lucille. Lucy arrives ready to do whatever she can to nurse her twin sister back to health and save her from being put back into any asylum.
Each part of Blood on Her Tongue kicks off with a quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula; together with shared character names from that novel and the inclusion of written ephemera like letters, readers may start off this book with expectations that Blood on Her Tongue is going to be about a very particular kind of monster, and that its plot is going to proceed a very specific way.
For a bit of time that’s at least how my expectations went. While I was enjoying the introduction to the characters and the stimulus of the bog person to immediately get the plot going from the start, I feared that all to come would be too standard, ticking off gothic check-boxes without anything new to say or any uniqueness to keep things interesting.
However, I soon began to realize van Veen was evoking those expectations to play with them and ratchet up reader uncertainty. This helped me empathize with the characters and their own uncertainty far more, because I quickly grasped that I didn’t know more than they did as much as I at first assumed.
In a way the entirety of the novel is a warning against making assumptions, of thinking that anything cultural is (or should be) static. All the themes I mentioned above that the podcast discussion also delves into (death, madness, identity, and gender) are all traditions and subversion of traditions that Blood on Her Tongue explores.
What van Veen does so exceptionally well in that exploration is firmly and realistically rooting it in late 19th century Dutch history and culture while also interrogating that honestly in ways that aren’t offensive to modern sensibilities or belittle the past for societal norms they lived under. Even with a character like Michael who is depicted as utterly toxic and reprehensible in every action and most speech, van Veen makes him authentic and understandable within the context (while decidedly still not forgivable or excusable.)
In the matter of identity, the novel explores the concept not just in terms of assumptions, but also in terms of the bounds between individuality and allegiance/conflict: marital, congenial, socio-economical, and sororal between the twins. Here expectations do hold true, with the strong bond shared between twins proving strongest.
I’d recommend Blood on Her Tongue to anyone who enjoys gothic literature. Its pacing and consistently strong start, middle, and conclusion make it an engrossing and swift read that provides both entertaining atmosphere and thematic complexities for reflection.
