Oh, how I love a filthy, twisted, emotionally damaging dark romance from H.D. Carlton.
I was ridiculously excited for this release, and it delivered exactly the kind of darkness I’ve come to expect from her books.
My Dreadful Darling carries that signature H.D. Carlton atmosphere from the very first page: obsessive, vicious, emotionally unhinged, and dripping with secrets that feel rotten to the core. There’s a constant sense that something terrible is lurking beneath the surface, waiting to drag everyone down with it.
We have Reverie, haunted by her father’s bloody legacy.
We have Dread, a man consumed by revenge.
And we have a love story that feels far more like drowning than falling.
The fact that Reverie may not even know the full truth about her own past only makes everything more dangerous.
This book had me completely hooked. The enemies-to-lovers tension? Absolutely delicious. I was obsessed. Dread is undeniably an asshole in the beginning, but honestly… if my mother had been murdered by a monster who never truly paid for his crimes, I’d probably be feral too. I spent a good chunk of this book waiting for him to become the “good guy,” but we’re talking about H.D. Carlton here, so that’s probably asking for too much.
Still, by the 20% mark he only has eyes for Reverie, and frankly, I’m counting that as character development.
A win is a win.
The chemistry between them is explosive, and while this isn’t a book packed wall-to-wall with spice, every intimate scene lands exactly where it should. The tension, the obsession, the possessiveness—it all works.
And their first time alone together?
Yeah.
You need to experience that for yourself.
My only real struggle was the pacing. This book is long. Very long. And for some reason, it took me forever to finish, which has never happened to me with an H.D. Carlton book before. The strange part is that I genuinely enjoyed it the entire time. I was invested, entertained, emotionally wrecked, and desperate to know what happened next.
But this story is heavy.
Not bad heavy.
Good heavy.
The kind of heavy that makes you put the book down for a moment and stare at a wall.
And can we talk about Lionel?
Every single thing about that man made my blood pressure rise. I wanted to personally escort him into the nearest volcano.
What surprised me most, though, was how different this felt from what I expected. When I pick up H.D. Carlton, I usually prepare myself for morally questionable obsession, emotional destruction, and enough red flags to cover an entire continent. What I wasn’t expecting was the thriller aspect and the serial killer elements woven throughout the story.
And honestly?
I loved it.
Despite taking me ages to finish, I had a great time with this book. It’s dark, intense, disturbing, addictive, and packed with enough secrets and tension to keep you turning pages. It may not have been my fastest H.D. Carlton read, but it was definitely one of her most ambitious, and I’m already curious to see where this story goes next.
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