My Dreadful Darling by H. D. Carlton
If you’ve spent more than forty-five minutes on BookTok in the last two years, you’ve seen the covers. The black. The roses. The girls with their hands over their mouths looking equal parts horrified and obsessed. That’s H.D. Carlton’s fandom, and they are not normal. (Complimentary.)
H.D. Carlton is a New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author who specializes in dark romance so pitch-black it comes with its own event horizon. Born and raised in a small Ohio town, her early love for words led her to publish poetry before a pivotal encounter with the TV series Farscape sparked her passion for science fiction. Poet to dark romance queen pipeline, honestly makes perfect sense.
Her breakout wasn’t a slow burn. The Cat and Mouse Duet (Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline) redefined dark romance with its gritty exploration of trauma, obsession, and resilience. The premise is exactly what it sounds like and somehow worse: woman moves into a gothic mansion, realizes she has a stalker, and the rest is morally bankrupt history. On Goodreads alone, Carlton has accumulated over 4.8 million shelved books and upwards of 2.2 million ratings. Those are not small numbers. That is a healthy cult.
Her works are not for everyone. That is the understatement of the century. Carlton’s content warnings read like a menu at a restaurant you’re not sure you should be eating at. But that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Her favorite characters are of the morally gray variety, and she believes everyone should check their sanity at the door before diving into her stories. She says this with the energy of someone who means it as a threat and a promise simultaneously.
Beyond the Cat and Mouse universe, Carlton has announced multiple upcoming projects, including a new duology centered on Sibby, a potential standalone focusing on Rio, and a four-book standalone series following the members of The Basilisk Brotherhood. The woman is not slowing down.
H.D. Carlton is back and she brought the whole haunted swimming pool with her. My Dreadful Darling is the first book in the Hollow Graves Duet, dropping April 2026, and it has everything you want from a Carlton joint: a dark academia college setting, a serial killer legacy, and two deeply unwell people on a collision course with each other’s worst nightmares.
Reverie Adams is trying to survive the weight of her father’s monstrous name while Dread Sharpe is laser-focused on making her pay for it, except, oops, the truth is way more complicated than either of them bargained for. It’s a vengeance plot wrapped in a ghost story wrapped in a romance, and Carlton writes it with her signature literary-yet-unhinged flair that feels less like prose and more like getting your hands around someone’s throat.