Blood on Her Tongue (Deluxe Edition): A Novel

“An intriguing novel, as well as a horrifyingly revealing one, on many levels.”

In the 1887 Netherlands, Lucy Goedhart receives a letter from her twin sister. A stronger, much more forceful character than her sister, Sarah reads vociferously, studies science, and is keenly intellectual in a time when women were supposed to be meek and too delicate to think for themselves. Sarah’s letter tells Lucy about a body found in one of the bogs on her husband’s land, dug up by the farmers.

“By the end of the afternoon, they had uncovered all of it: A naked human body, lying face down. Wooden stakes had been driven through the knees, elbows, shoulders, and neck, which had set the men murmuring, some of them crossing themselves.”

Sarah is fascinated by the body—not only because it is staked to the earth, but there is a huge rock forced between its jaws. When Sarah attempts to remove the rock from the corpse’s mouth, she accidentally cuts her hand on its front teeth.

“I pulled my hand back with a cry. Little cuts gaped on my knuckles. Already blood as dark as the water from the bog flowed freely down my palm and wrist. It stained her teeth pink.”

Later, when childhood friend and family doctor Arthur Hoefnagel arrives to perform an autopsy on the body, Sarah attends and makes notes.

That should be the end of it but soon a letter arrives from Sarah’s husband Michael, stating that Sarah is severely ill. She has developed an obsession with the Bog Woman as she now calls her. She has strange dreams—when she can sleep—and begins sleepwalking. She finds herself wanting to know who the Bog Woman is and why she was buried in such a cruel way.

This fascination worries Lucy because there is a history of madness in the Goedhart family. Their favorite aunt, also a forward woman for her time, ended her days in an asylum. Sarah had also gone a little mad when her daughter Lucille died, refusing to release the child’s body for burial.

Lucy leaves her post as paid companion to Mrs. van Dijk and hurries to the Schatteleyn family home. Her purpose is two-fold—to nurse Sarah through her illness and prevent anyone from declaring her sister mad.

Lucy is too late. Soon after her arrival, Sarah attacks and bites Arthur as well as one of the maids and then dies after stabbing herself in the eye with a fountain pen.

At Sarah’s funeral, while Lucy sits beside her sister’s coffin, she hears a faint scratching from inside. Insisting Arthur open the casket, they find Sarah alive, and then the real horror begins . . .

The reader does not have to be extremely perceptive but simply familiar with Dracula, to immediately notice the similarities between the beginning of this novel and Bram Stoker’s tale. The names of two of the characters—Lucy and Arthur—as well as the occupations—doctor, nobleman, strong-willed woman and the more withdrawn one—and the epistolary opening chapters, with their letters, diary entries, and newspaper clippings, immediately draw comparisons.

The description of Michael, with his pale face and pair of fang-like teeth, also throws in a red herring as a twist.

Almost immediately, as soon as the stage is set, these similarities fade into the background as a very different story from the usual vampire-threat emerges. Lucy remembers their aunt’s madness, Sarah’s own hysteria over Lucille’s death, and learns her sister is having an affair with Katje, her husband’s poor relation cousin.

Lucy has to face some unpleasant truths and make some life-or-death choices.

“Her sister wasn’t her sister. Oh, it looked like her sister, talked like her and moved like her but though the imitation was convincing at first glance, perhaps at the second or third, as long as one kept looking, one saw through it. And whatever had taken up residence inside Sarah, it had lived inside the bog woman first.”

This novel may be classed as a gothic horror novel, but it is so much more. It’s a commentary of the treatment of women at that time, but more importantly, the study of a submissive personality and the ways she will protect the one who has always dominated her. Lucy admits she gives in to Sarah—she even gave up Michael because Sarah wanted him—and states at one point that she hoped to die first so she won’t face a future without her twin. The only defiance she has ever shown is her disastrous affaire with Michael, but even then, she yielded to Michael’s domination as she entered into it.

With her acceptance as Sarah’s “protector,” Lucy bows to her fate. One can imagine, in spite of her horror, she looks forward to a life with her twin as her forever companion.

An intriguing novel, as well as a horrifyingly revealing one, on many levels.