Blood on Her Tongue Summary: A Gothic Tale of Sisterly Love & Horror
TL;DR: The Short Version
In late September 1887, a young woman named Lucy Goedhart boards a train bound for Zwartwater, a damp and sagging estate in the Dutch province of Drenthe.
Frantic, unpunctuated letters from her twin sister Sarah and an urgent telegram from Sarah’s husband have summoned her there.
Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen follows Lucy into a household where a mysterious illness has taken hold of her sister.
The novel blends historical gothic horror with body horror, set against peat bogs, heathland, and Victorian medical practice.
- Premise: A twin sister’s strange illness turns out to be something far older than disease.
- Setting: Rural Drenthe, Netherlands, autumn 1887, on a decaying estate built over marshland.
- Core conflict: Lucy must decide how far she will go to keep her sister’s body alive.
- Key themes: Twin codependency, identity, grief, queer desire, and women’s lack of control over their own bodies.
- Tone: Rain-drenched, claustrophobic, and visceral, moving from slow-burn mystery to open horror.
The book is a gothic horror novel in three parts, with 26 numbered chapters and two newspaper clippings framing the narrative.
Blood on Her Tongue Summary: What Happens in the Story
Spoiler warning: The following section describes the plot in full, including the ending.
Lucy arrives at Zwartwater in a rainstorm and finds Doctor Arthur Hoefnagel waiting for her. He explains that Sarah suffers from a violent brain fever, and inside the dark sickroom Lucy sees her twin emaciated and burning with fever.
Sarah’s illness began after she helped excavate a bog body found on the estate. The corpse had been staked to the earth, buried face-down, and fitted with a stone between its jaws.
During one fever fit, Sarah bites Arthur’s wrist and laps at his blood. Arthur performs experimental blood transfusions using blood from Michael, himself, Lucy, and Katje, a poor relative living on Michael’s charity.
In a lucid moment, Sarah panics over a note she wrote comparing her condition to the bog woman. She screams that something is eating her brain and rams Lucy’s silver fountain pen into her own eye socket.
Believing Sarah dead, the household prepares a wake. While Lucy sits alone with the coffin, she hears scratching from inside the wood, and Sarah sits up in her shroud demanding food.
Afterward, Sarah cuts off her hair, shows no reaction to pain, smells of rot, and refuses normal food. In the local archive, Lucy and her employer Mrs. van Dijk find a 1559 court record describing a woman murdered in a bog by a husband who believed her a changeling.
Lucy walks in on Sarah drinking Katje’s menstrual blood. She drives a sewing pin through Sarah’s hand, and the wound leaks thick black blood without causing pain.
The entity admits it is an ancient parasite that once lived inside the bog woman, Marianne. It entered Sarah through the cut on her hand, consumed her mind, and absorbed her memories, becoming a blend of both.
It warns that Sarah’s body is decomposing fast and will die without fresh human meat and blood. Lucy and Katje cut their own arms to feed it, until Katje leaves it alone with Mrs. van Dijk.
After the starving entity bites off three of Mrs. van Dijk’s fingers, Michael and Arthur sedate Lucy with chloroform and plan to commit Sarah to an asylum.
Lucy wakes, overpowers the maid Magda with a chamber pot, and walks barefoot through frozen bogs to Arthur’s surgery. There, Michael tells her Sarah would be better off dead.
Remembering his past sexual exploitation of her, Lucy gouges out his eyes and stabs him in the throat with her fountain pen. When Arthur returns, he offers to frame Sarah and force Lucy to marry him.
Lucy cuts Arthur’s throat with a scalpel. Not-Sarah then drags herself into the room and feeds on Michael’s corpse to restore her body, forgiving Lucy for her past affair with him.
The two women frame Arthur and Katje as eloped runaways. Lucy, Not-Sarah, and Katje leave Zwartwater together for a new life in Europe, and a newspaper clipping later reports all three vanished without a trace.
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Characters in Blood on Her Tongue
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Lucy Goedhart | The narrator and protagonist, an unmarried woman working as a paid companion who travels to Zwartwater for her twin sister. |
| Sarah Schatteleyn | Lucy’s twin, an amateur natural scientist whose body is taken over by an ancient parasite after she cuts her hand on a bog body’s teeth. |
| Not-Sarah / Marianne / The Entity | A parasitic organism that inhabited the 16th-century bog woman Marianne and later absorbs Sarah’s memories and identity. |
| Lord Michael Schatteleyn | Sarah’s wealthy husband and the lord of Zwartwater, who conducts a secret sexual relationship with Lucy. |
| Doctor Arthur Hoefnagel | The local physician and childhood friend of the twins, who treats Sarah and repeatedly proposes marriage to Lucy. |
| Katje | An impoverished relative living at Zwartwater on Michael’s charity and Sarah’s secret romantic lover. |
| Mrs. van Dijk | An elderly widow who employs Lucy as a companion and accompanies her to the local archives. |
| Magda | Sarah’s discontented lady’s maid at Zwartwater. |
| Mr. Hooiman | The groundskeeper and peat cutter overseer who helps excavate the bog body and later finds a posy ring. |
| Doctor Abraham Rosenthaler | Arthur’s former classmate, a specialist in decomposition who assists with the bog body autopsy. |
| Pasja | Sarah’s Italian greyhound, who reacts with fear and hostility toward the bog body and Not-Sarah. |
| Lucille | Sarah and Michael’s young daughter, who died of scarlet fever a year before the story begins. |
| Aunt Adelheid | Lucy and Sarah’s late maternal aunt, who was institutionalized and died in a private asylum. |
Summary by Chapter
Spoiler warning: This section briefly outlines each chapter for readers who want to see what is inside.
The book contains an author’s note, three parts, 26 numbered chapters, and two newspaper clippings.
Author’s Note
Johanna van Veen introduces the novel as gothic horror set in late nineteenth-century Drenthe, Netherlands. She lists content warnings for illness, death, body horror, misogyny, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and toxic codependent relationships.
Part I, Chapter 1
On September 28, 1887, Lucy travels by train toward Zwartwater after receiving frantic letters from Sarah and a telegram from Michael. The letters describe the excavation of a staked bog corpse and Sarah’s cut hand.
Part I, Chapter 2
Lucy arrives in a rainstorm and is met by Arthur, who says Sarah has a violent brain fever. In the sickroom she meets Katje and sees Sarah’s emaciated, waxen body.
Part I, Chapter 3
Sarah bites Arthur’s wrist and drinks his blood until Katje douses her with cold water. Lucy binds Arthur’s wound and later learns from Katje that Sarah is terrified of the bog body.
Part I, Chapter 4
Michael returns home after chasing Sarah’s greyhound, Pasja. He tells Lucy that Sarah locked herself away with her papers after the autopsy and discusses her earlier breakdown following Lucille’s death.
Part I, Chapter 5
Lucy fetches writing paper from Sarah’s bedroom and notices a photograph of Lucille and a desk of scientific texts. She takes a treatise on ticks and notices Sarah’s increasingly illegible marginal notes comparing parasites to the bog woman.
Part I, Chapter 6
Sarah complains of hunger and thirst for meat and blood. The maid Magda reveals that Sarah slapped and bit her over a missing book, and Arthur performs an experimental blood transfusion using Michael’s blood.
Part I, Chapter 7
Further transfusions from Arthur, Lucy, and Katje briefly improve Sarah’s color. When Lucy mentions the bog woman note, Sarah screams that something is eating her brain and rams a fountain pen into her own eye.
Part I, Chapter 8
The household prepares a funeral, and Lucy and Katje wash Sarah’s body and veil her face. During the night wake, Lucy sits alone with the corpse and tucks a piece of Sarah’s sloughed skin under her tongue.
Part I, Chapter 9
Lucy guards Sarah’s body from visitors and Mrs. van Dijk arrives for the service. After breaking a mirror in Sarah’s bedroom, Lucy finds hidden diary pages describing a dream in which the bog woman seduced Sarah, then burns them.
Part I, Chapter 10
On the funeral day, the hearse horses arrive agitated, and Lucy hears scratching from inside the coffin. Arthur helps her unscrew the lid, and Sarah sits up in her shroud and announces she is starving.
Part II, Chapter 11
A newspaper article attributes Sarah’s near-burial to catalepsy. Lucy finds that Sarah has chopped off her own hair and watches a fly land on her remaining eye without her blinking, then sees Sarah drink tea mixed with her blood.
Part II, Chapter 12
Lucy and Katje walk the grounds and discuss Sarah’s past behavior after Lucille’s death, when she dug up the child’s body. Mr. Hooiman shows them a golden wedding ring unearthed in the same peat field as the bog body.
Part II, Chapter 13
Mrs. van Dijk cleans the ring and identifies it as a 17th-century posy ring inscribed “He shall rule over you.” Lucy resolves to search the archives, and Mrs. van Dijk gives her an ultimatum about her employment.
Part II, Chapter 14
Michael, Lucy, and Mrs. van Dijk travel through fog to the archive in Murmerwolde. Mrs. van Dijk finds a 1559 record of a farmer who murdered his wife M.W. with a blacksmith’s help, believing her a changeling.
Part II, Chapter 15
Lucy notes the similarities between the murdered wife’s symptoms and Sarah’s. Returning to Zwartwater, she walks in on Sarah drinking Katje’s menstrual blood and arms herself with a sewing pin.
Part II, Chapter 16
Lucy drives the pin into Sarah’s hand, but the entity feels nothing and does not notice until later. It pulls the pin out, leaking black, rot-scented blood, and asks Lucy what gave it away.
Part II, Chapter 17
The entity explains it is a long-lived parasite that hibernated inside Marianne’s body for centuries. It entered Sarah through the cut on her hand, absorbed her mind, and now needs fresh human meat to keep the host body alive.
Part III, Chapter 18
Not-Sarah begs Lucy for human flesh, and Katje admits she feeds it willingly, believing it a holy revenant. Arthur refuses another transfusion, so Lucy and Katje cut their own arms to feed it.
Part III, Chapter 19
Lucy resigns as Mrs. van Dijk’s companion, and Not-Sarah reveals that Aunt Adelheid was institutionalized partly over her relationship with Vera. Not-Sarah insults Lucy for hesitating over murder, and Lucy calls her a greedy parasite.
Part III, Chapter 20
A storm blocks the estate roads, and Lucy avoids both Michael and Not-Sarah for two days. Katje faints from repeated feedings and reveals she left Not-Sarah alone with Mrs. van Dijk.
Part III, Chapter 21
Lucy finds Not-Sarah on the bed’s headboard and Mrs. van Dijk bleeding in the corner with three fingers bitten off. Michael and Arthur lock Lucy and Not-Sarah in the Silver Room while Mrs. van Dijk is treated.
Part III, Chapter 22
Arthur and Michael announce Sarah will be sent away for a “rest cure,” and Not-Sarah screams that they mean an asylum. Arthur chloroforms Lucy, who wakes in her bed and escapes by knocking Magda out with a chamber pot.
Part III, Chapter 23
Lucy walks three hours barefoot through freezing heath to Murmerwolde. At Arthur’s surgery, Michael shows her a letter from Rosenthaler describing Cotard’s delusion, arguing that Sarah is incurably insane.
Part III, Chapter 24
Michael declares that Sarah would be better off dead and asserts his marital authority. Lucy gouges out his eyes with her thumbs and stabs him in the throat with her fountain pen.
Part III, Chapter 25
Arthur returns, assumes Michael abused Lucy, and offers to frame the absent Sarah for the murder. When he grips her neck and threatens to commit Sarah and marry her, Lucy slits his throat with a scalpel.
Part III, Chapter 26
Not-Sarah drags herself into the surgery and rejoices at the corpses, feeding on Michael to restore her form. Lucy confesses her affair with Michael, is forgiven, and the three women plan to frame Arthur and Katje as eloped runaways.
Epilogue: Newspaper Clipping
An article in De Nieuwe Murmerwolderse Courant dated 15 November 1887 reports that Michael, Sarah, and Lucy have vanished. Police note that Doctor Hoefnagel has also disappeared, while villagers speculate that he eloped with Katje.
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Who Is Blood on Her Tongue For?
This novel suits readers of gothic horror and historical fiction who prefer atmosphere and psychological tension over fast action.
The pacing is a slow-burn investigation through the first half before escalating into visceral body horror.
Readers interested in queer gothic romance, twin dynamics, and Victorian medical history will find those elements central.
Those sensitive to illness, gore, domestic abuse, and sexual abuse should note the author’s content warnings.
Books Like Blood on Her Tongue
My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen — The author’s debut, sharing a Dutch historical setting, queer gothic romance, obsession, and body horror.
Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill — A Victorian gothic novel about scientific obsession, family secrets, and male-dominated scientific hierarchies.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher — A reimagining of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” featuring parasitic infection, decay, and an isolated estate.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia — A woman travels to a damp, isolated estate to rescue a relative from a mind-altering illness tied to a parasitic organism.
The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling — A visceral Victorian gothic centered on a bloody marriage, medical experiments, and psychological deterioration.
Book Snapshot
- Genre & Subgenre: Gothic Horror / Historical Fiction / Queer Body Horror
- Core Narrative Tropes: Bog bodies, parasitic possession, the double, the gothic estate, secret affair, medical horror, unreliable narrator
- Tone & Atmosphere: Eerie, visceral, oppressive, rain-drenched, claustrophobic
- Primary Conflict: Lucy’s effort to keep her sister’s body alive while an ancient parasite inhabits it, ending in murder to prevent institutionalization
- Pacing Style: Slow-burn gothic investigation escalating into body horror and psychological thriller
- ISBN: 978-1464244926 (ISBN-10: 1464244928)
- Pages: 368
- Book Structure: Author’s note, three parts, 26 numbered chapters, two newspaper clippings, reading group guide, and author Q&A
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