H.D. Carlton Is Back, Baby [And She Brought ‘My Dreadful Darling’ To Ruin Your Life]

The queen has returned to the throne, and she’s holding a knife to your throat with a smile.

My Dreadful Darling, the first book in Carlton’s new Hollow Graves duet, dropped April 21st, and the dark romance internet has been in a full, unhinged spiral ever since. Rightfully so. This is the book. The dark romance people are going to be yelling about for the next year while the rest of us pretend we haven’t already read it twice.

Here’s the setup, and try to keep your jaw off the floor: Reverie Adams is the daughter of The Locksmith, an infamous serial killer. Dreadful Sharpe (yes, Dread, yes, that is his name, yes, we love it) is the son of one of The Locksmith’s victims. He also testified against him as an eight-year-old child, got called a liar for a decade, and is now a very hot, very unhinged Olympic swimmer with a singular mission in life: make Reverie pay for the sins of the father.

So he goes to her college. On purpose. Because he is that level of obsessed. And then he proceeds to bully her so creatively, so relentlessly, and with such diabolical flair, that readers have been comparing notes online like we’re debriefing after a natural disaster.

This is a bully romance done right. Not the “he’s mean to her once and she cries and then they kiss” variety. We’re talking psychological warfare. We’re talking handcuffed to a flagpole in a snowstorm. We’re talking a man who cannot stop thinking about a woman he is actively trying to destroy, which, if you’ve ever read a dark romance in your life, you know is the precise recipe for a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers that is going to absolutely wreck you.

And wreck you it does.

Reverie is not a passive participant in her own suffering, which is frankly the bare minimum we should be demanding from our feMCs and yet so rarely get. She fights back. She is sharp and complicated and carrying her own mountain of trauma that has nothing to do with Dread, and everything to do with a childhood spent living with a monster who wore a father’s face. The parallel between her and Dread is where Carlton really earns her keep: two people destroyed by the same man, in entirely different ways. These aren’t just two hot people who hate-kiss their feelings away. They’re two people who are broken in ways that, somehow, fit together.

The spice, from what readers are reporting, is apparently Carlton’s most incendiary work to date. The locker room scene in particular has caused what I can only describe as a minor public health crisis in the BookTok comments. Good for her. Good for everyone.

There’s also a genuine mystery thriller element threading through the whole thing: a copycat killer, escalating danger, and the very unsettling question of whether Reverie’s father is actually as locked away as everyone thinks. Carlton keeps the tension high and the plot moving, which means this 600-page book reportedly reads like it’s half that length.

Dread is already being measured against Zade, Carlton’s previous hero from the Cat and Mouse duet and widely considered her magnum opus. If the reader reactions are anything to go by, the competition is embarrassingly close. People are genuinely distressed about how quickly they fell for a man who, it bears repeating, handcuffed a girl to a flagpole in a blizzard.

This is book one of two, and it ends on a cliffhanger. Book two is on its way. There are currently over 23,000 people on Goodreads who want to read this, 7,000 actively reading it, and a rating sitting at 4.52 stars after almost 2,800 ratings.

You already know what to do.

My Dreadful Darling by H.D. Carlton is available now in ebook and print; paperback availability outside the US Amazon store is still being sorted out. The author has asked readers to keep their fingers crossed that it resolves soon. Frankly, we’re crossing everything we have.

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