As many writers of fiction have said, you sometimes have to go where the story tells you to go.
In the following email interview about her new novel Blood On Her Tongue (paperback, Kindle), author Johanna van Veen not only discusses what inspired and influenced this Gothic horror story, but also how it didn’t start out as a vampire tale.
Photo Credit: Wijnand Geuze / LINK Fotografie
To start, what is Blood On Her Tongue about, and when and where does it take place?
Blood On Her Tongue is set in the Netherlands in the 1880s, and focusses on identical twins Lucy and Sarah. Sarah is married to Michael, a wealthy landowner. She is scientifically-minded, so when peat cutters find a bog body on his land, she is quick to investigate.
Soon after, she becomes deadly ill with what her doctor believes is a fever of the brain, and so Lucy is brought in to help nurse her sister and to hide the fact that she is, at least temporarily, insane: she rants nonsensically about the bog body, and seems to develop a thirst for human blood.
Yet the longer Lucy stays with Sarah, and sees the changes this disease causes, the more Lucy begins to doubt the doctor’s diagnosis, and the more she wonders whether Sarah is right to be so suspicious of the bog body.
Where did you get the idea for Blood On Her Tongue?
Blood On Her Tongue didn’t start out as a vampire story at all, but a piece of historical fiction delving into the complicated relationship between two estranged twin sisters. That complicated relationship is still very much at the heart of the story, but a lot of other things have changed. The original time period was the 1950s, for example, and the story was a murder mystery: it began after Sarah’s death, which was ruled an accident. Though Lucy in this version hadn’t spoken to her sister in years, she immediately believes it can’t have been an accident, but that Michael must have murdered her instead, and goes to investigate.
A very different story indeed. The first draft was really quite dreadful, and I struggled for years to figure out how to improve it. Finally, I realized that the story just didn’t work if Sarah was already dead before it properly began, at least, not unless she came back to life somehow…
As you said, Sarah becomes a vampire. There are a lot of different ways vampirism can be portrayed: as a medical condition, as a supernatural condition, as a psychosis… Which way did you go?
For Blood On Her Tongue, it’s up for debate: you can either interpret it as a medical condition or a psychological one. I don’t want to explain too much about how it works because that would be a spoiler, but I wanted my vampires to be different from most vampires in order for Blood On Her Tongue to stand out; vampires are extremely beloved, and I believe that 2025 may once again become the year of the vampire, so she has some fierce competition.
It sounds like Blood On Her Tongue is a Gothic horror story…
I think describing it as a Gothic horror story is 100% correct. It is filled to the brim with Gothic tropes: madhouses and madness, moors, brooding Byronic men who threaten our heroines, forbidden desire, an estate that is basically its own character, secrets upon secrets, lush and descriptive language, etc. The horror is manifold: body horror, creature horror (because vampires), gore, the horror of a patriarchal society. I think you could even argue that Blood On Her Tongue is a kind of possession horror, too.
Blood On Her Tongue is your second novel after My Darling Dreadful Thing. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Tongue but not on Dreadful?
My Darling Dreadful Thing was an ode to the Gothic. Specifically, The Haunting Of Hill House and We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Guillermo Del Torro’s [movie] Crimson Peak, and, very overtly, The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James.
Blood On Her Tongue is also an ode to the Gothic, but draws inspiration from different works, most notably Dracula by Bram Stoker as well as Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. A notable difference for Blood On Her Tongue, though, is that I really wanted to lean into the horror aspect, hence the body horror and the gore.
What about non-literary influences? Was Blood On Her Tongue influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games? You mentioned the movie Crimson Peak.
Dead Ringers, the 2023 television series. I had already written the first draft before seeing the series, but the way this series portrays a deeply toxic, codependent relationship between twins did leave an impression on me, and I am sure influenced me when I set about rewriting.
I was also influenced by the trope of the mercy kill. I think it makes sense to kill someone if they’ve been bitten by, say, a zombie, because then you turn into a mindless creature who will harm your loved ones. In that scenario, it’s the ethical thing to do. But what about vampires? You become something else, something that must kill to survive, but if you can still think and feel, is it then ethical for humans to want to kill you? It’s a difficult philosophical conundrum that I wanted to explore.
And what about your dog, Teuntje? What influence did she have on Blood On Her Tongue? Because in the interview we did about My Darling Dreadful Thing you said she wasn’t a big influence on that story, but that “she [was] on my next project,” which I assume is Tongue.
There is a dog in Blood On Her Tongue. Unlike Teuntje, who is a cross between a Gordon setter and a cocker spaniel, the dog in Tongue is a whippet. But both are hunting dogs, so the scene in which Michael is very cross with his dog for going after a rabbit and refusing to be caught is something I have personally experienced.
I wanted to include a dog not only because I personally love them and people have always held dogs, but also because it’s a fun trope within horror: the dog instinctively knowing something is wrong with a person and growling at them, but no one taking them seriously because it’s just a dog being silly. Since Blood On Her Tongue deals with women not being taken seriously because they are women, I think it’s a fun little parallel.
Now, some horror novels are stand-alone stories, and some are part of a larger sagas. What is Blood On Her Tongue?
For now, it is a stand-alone novel, but I can see myself writing something else in this universe at some point. Lucy and Sarah’s story isn’t over, and I think it would be fun to explore what happens to them after Blood On Her Tongue ends, though there is beauty in an open ending, too. A sequel would likely force me to answer once and for all whether the vampires are real or not. Though I think this is less of an issue than it is for My Darling Dreadful Thing (there, everything revolves around the question whether the ghosts are real or not, and so a sequel / prequel / companion piece would, I fear, irrevocably spoil the book), it’s definitely something I must contemplate a bit more before committing.
Of course, I could write a companion piece rather than a direct sequel, focusing on another instance of vampirism, potentially in a completely different country and time period. I think that could be interesting. Maybe a medieval version focusing on the changeling myth? There’s plenty of potential, that’s for sure, and I would love to explore time periods that we don’t see much of in horror. Everything from the nineteenth century until now has been pretty well explored, and there are some early-modern horror books, but everything before that hasn’t been used much, which is a shame.
Earlier I asked if Blood On Her Tongue was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Tongue could work as a movie, a TV show, or a game?
I think this novel would work really well as a movie, and for the why, we only have to look at the success of 2024’s Nosferatu. What a dark gothic treat that movie was. So many of the things it does well would work superbly for Blood On Her Tongue: the cinematography, the score, the issues of hysteria / madness and women’s rights, the prosthetics and makeup that make Count Orlock look like a walking corpse… Honestly, this movie feels like it was made especially for me.
And if someone wanted to make a movie based on Blood On Her Tongue, who would you want them to cast as Lucy, Sarah, and the other main characters?
I don’t have anyone I’d really love, but I think it would be nice to see actual twins being casted. Rachel Weisz did, of course, do a phenomenal job playing twins in Dead Ringers, so I guess you really don’t need two separate actresses nowadays, but I do think twins might bring something extra to this role.
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about Blood On Her Tongue?
A bit of expectation management: although it’s queer, the queer storyline is definitely more of a subplot. I don’t want people to go in thinking they’re getting a queer romance like My Darling Dreadful Thing; this one focusses more on the relationship between the sisters.
Some reviewers have pointed out that the book isn’t quite historically accurate in how it depicts mental asylums. That is correct, and this was done intentionally; I am using the trope of the asylum as it has been used in Gothic fiction for a long time, namely as a place of unimaginable horror and a tool to suppress women. Reality is, of course, infinitely more nuanced than that. I should perhaps have mentioned this in an author’s note at the start of the book, though, because I can completely understand that people assume that, because this is historical horror, the historical details are all correct, and it would bug me too to then read something I know to have been a lot more complicated in real life.
Lastly, the dog lives!
Finally, if someone enjoys Blood On Her Tongue, what Gothic novel or novella of someone else’s would you suggest they check out?
Dracula by Bram Stoker and Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu for sure, because those were direct influences.
I’ve also noticed that readers who enjoyed Blood On Her Tongue tend to enjoy A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson, and for another sapphic vampiric novel, you can’t go wrong with Alexis Henderson’s House Of Hunger.
