Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen is an inventive take on the vampire mythos with a femgore edge and reflections on sisterhood. It is one of my favorite reads of the year, and I am so honored to have been able to interview Johanna! We dove deep into queer horror, the concept of “the other,” and the “unlikeable woman” trope. I hope you enjoy our discussion, and that it inspires you to pick up the book if you haven’t!

Synopsis

“I’m in your blood, and you are in mine…”

The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy’s twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband’s grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister’s condition, but it’s clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.

Then, the worst happens. Sarah’s behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angry… and hungry. 

Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth, or risk losing her forever.

Interview

Sage Moon: Johanna, I have always been a big fan of gothic horror, but Blood on Her Tongue took the subgenre to an entirely new level!  I know that you are a triplet, and that provided some inspiration for your novel.  What were some of your other inspirations?

Johanna van Veen: Both Dracula and Carmilla are obvious sources of inspiration, but I was also inspired by the concept of the ‘mercy kill’. In horror, particularly in works with zombies, the ‘mercy kill’ is the idea that it is better for someone to die than to be transformed into ‘the other’. There are usually two reasons for this: 1) the infected will undergo such a change in character that they can no longer be considered the same person as before the infection, and 2) the infected will become an active danger to their loved ones. Indeed, zombies are usually mindless and thus without personality, and their hunger for brains means that they are dangerous to be around. 

In Dracula, too, we encounter the concept of the mercy kill: Mina begs her husband to kill her, should she transform into a vampire. But is that the right thing to do? Unlike the aforementioned zombies, vampires are certainly still intelligent. They are dangerous, of course, but they don’t bite people willy-nilly. Where, then, do you draw the line between a genuine mercy kill and killing ‘the other’ because they frighten you? In Blood on Her Tongue, I wanted to explore this concept in more detail. What makes a person a person? To what extent can you change and still be considered the same person? It is noteworthy that Mina’s husband Jonathan decides he would rather become a vampire alongside Mina than kill her. 

There are some other obvious sources of inspiration, but for the sake of spoilers I shan’t divulge them here!

SM: I always love when authors say that writing a book took them many years to write, rather than writing one quickly. I could tell how finetuned Blood on Her Tongue was based on how you let it evolve over multiple manuscripts.  Do you feel that some novels require authors to grow and incorporate new insights and experiences to be most impactful?

JVV: Absolutely! The simple truth is that writing is a skill. The more you intentionally practise it, the better you’ll get at it.  But that does mean that the first few projects you write probably aren’t that good, or at the very least not as good as you could make them once you have a few years of experience under your belt. That’s why a common bit of advice given to aspiring writers is to not start out with their passion project, but to write some other fun things instead. Blood on Her Tongue certainly required me to grow, both as an author and as a human. 

SM: The feminist themes you incorporated with Lucy and Sarah within the time period was groundbreaking. I love how both women were headstrong, and the men didn’t hold all of the power. Do you think that incorporating characters like Lucy and Sarah with feminist themes in historical settings is important?

I found this question difficult to answer because I didn’t set out to consciously incorporate feminist themes into my historical fiction. I think that, as soon as you choose to write in a certain historical setting, your work automatically touches upon those themes, especially if you choose women as your main characters. 

That being said, I do think it is important to incorporate characters like Lucy and Sarah in historical settings. They are both deeply flawed human beings, and some of the decisions they make are questionable at best. Male characters are allowed to be like that, but you don’t see a lot of female characters, probably because people often criticise them for being unlikeable or crazy (or both!). With the current rise in ‘female rage’ and ‘femgore’ books, we are seeing an increase in such female characters, which I applaud. Feminism is all about equality, so why shouldn’t I have complicated female characters? I support women’s rights, but I also support women’s wrongs. 

SM: Blood on Her Tongue included quite a bit of body horror involving eyes!  What made you choose to focus on eyes for a lot of the gore?

JVV: It’s something I personally find scary and upsetting. When I got COVID in 2021, I was very sick with all the usual symptoms (headaches, nausea, coughing, difficulty breathing, an utter lack of taste and smell), but I also had one less-common symptom: an extreme sensitivity to light. For weeks, I had to sit inside with the curtains drawn and wear my sunglasses, because if I didn’t, I would get this stabbing pain in my eyeballs. My right eye, especially, felt tender all the time. I’d never experienced that before, and I luckily haven’t experienced it since, but it was on my mind when writing.

SM: Do you think that incorporating queerness in historical horror versus contemporary horror brings something different to the horror genre?  If so, how?

JVV: It’s important to note that horror has always been queer, just as people have always been queer; in that sense, incorporating queerness in historical horror in and of itself is neither groundbreaking nor unrealistic. As for whether it brings something different to the horror genre when incorporated into historical horror compared to contemporary horror: I think it depends. It’s easy to make queerness part of the horror in historical horror because being queer was illegal for so long in so many places, but then again, it’s not as if queerness is now universally accepted. There’s a reason that plenty of contemporary horror is also queer; Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle is all about the horror of conversion therapy, for instance. All I can say is that I generally do think adding queerness brings something a little extra to a book, whether it is horror or not!

About Johanna van Veen

Johanna Van Veen grew up in the Netherlands with her twin sisters; they are triplets and although not identical, they share a strong bond. She earned both an MA in English Literature and Digital Media from Leiden University. Johanna is the author of My Darling Dreadful Thing (2024) and Blood on Her Tongue (2025), as well as the upcoming middle-grade novel The Witch of Hagstone Hill (2025), the first installment of The Triplets Grim trilogy. When not writing, she enjoys spending time with her wife, her sisters, and her dog, though not necessarily all at the same time.