Kill My Darling

by Thanh Dinh, Cynthia Constantino (Editor), Tiago Araújo (Illustrator)

She didn't plan to love him. She didn't plan to bury him either.

On Valentine's Day, Angela disposes of her lover's body in a frozen Toronto lake. Bambi Raymond — rapper, icon, the kind of man the world forgives everything — is gone. And Angela, who gave him five years of her life, is finally free.

Except freedom looks a lot like a police investigation. And Bambi's twin brother just offered her a place to hide.

Kill My Darling is a psychological noir told in fractured timelines — part love story, part slow-motion unraveling, part confession from a woman who knew exactly what she was walking into and walked in anyway. It's about the men the world calls geniuses and the women who survive them. About obsession so deep it starts to look like identity. About what's left when the person who consumed you is finally, irrevocably gone.

Dark. Addictive. Impossible to look away from.

Perfect for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh, Gillian Flynn, and stories where love is the most dangerous crime of all.

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 31, 2026

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somewhere between philosophic prose, there is a story about love, life and death. This may be a hit for some people, but it fell short for me.

Thank you to NetGalley + publisher for the ARC!

[Dr. Naushin Moledina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t quite know what to think about this book. I finished it—but I don’t think it’s finished with me.

“Kill My Darling” by Thanh Dinh is a psychological portrait of a woman pushed beyond her limits—by love, by power, and by the myth of men who are allowed to destroy everything and still be celebrated as geniuses.

Angela meets Bambi at the height of his legend: a rising star with a god complex, a poet of destruction, adored by crowds and consumed by addiction. He is charismatic, brilliant, cruel, and terrifyingly tender. What unfolds is not a romance, but a collision—between desire and self-preservation, art and annihilation, between the woman Angela wants to be and the woman she is becoming. Drugs blur memory. Love mutates into obsession. Violence slips in quietly, intimate and inevitable. As their lives spiral into madness, Angela fractures—haunted by hallucinations, his voice, and the life growing inside her. After burying the body of her darling and running from the darkness, she encounters his twin brother, Pierre—another version of the same nightmare, perhaps even more fractured and dangerous.

This is not an easy read. Told entirely through Angela’s perspective, the novel interrogates celebrity culture, gendered violence, and the romanticization of male self-destruction, asking an unsettling question: what does it cost to love a monster when the world insists he is a god? It tests your patience—and your comfort.

Through Angela, I questioned reality, myth, and my own sense of sanity. The characters make choices that are difficult to witness, forcing you to confront your own inner shadows.

The character development is striking. The atmosphere is eerie, dark, and unhinged.

Blending literary noir, psychological thriller, and poetic confession, “Kill My Darling” will resonate with readers who gravitate toward dark, stylized fiction that refuses to look away—stories where love is both the crime and the motive.

[Keely Kovacevic · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐️ 1.75

DNF’d this book at 20%.

The writing was so overly done, so trying to be poetic and dark and brooding and atmospheric that it was just a hot mess.

Other than the writing, the book was just very meh. The characters were dislikable, but not so much that it was fun, just annoying. The storyline was interesting but too disjointed for me to really care.

This book needed a lot more editing. Maybe if 3 of the descriptive words in every sentence were removed, it would have improved the readability of the story 10 fold.

Thank you to NetGalley and Writerly Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. I’m sorry if I was too honest.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

What happens when Hell, Purgatory and Paradise are the same person? You get this manic, fever-dream of a novel. I am sitting here thinking of how to describe it, trying to figure out if I like it, and all I can think is "this book reads like a Rothko painting." If you know, you know.

Kill My Darling tackles the manipulative power of young love, the naivety that comes with falling for someone you think you can fix, and the long-term ramifications that come with staying in them too long (and killing them, ofc). The story oscillates between the past and present, however, the past chapters also hop between current and future thoughts, giving you a sense that the main character Angela in the present may not remember the timelines of the past. The actual murder is both primary and secondary to the story; it is less about the death itself (how), which you would get with a mystery, and more about the events that led to that point (why), which you get more in a thriller. I am not sure this book fits well in any one box, though.

The book synopsis references "sequins and bloodstains" and "glamour soaked tragedy" which give Gatsby vibes. These descriptions did not feel appropriate for my interpretation of the book. I mean… they met in a grungy club after Angela threw up on Bambi, the male lead, who thinks himself brilliant but is really just a confident narcissist who projects brilliance (although, I do believe Angela did think of him as brilliant). Every "tender" moment was underpinned with violence; there was nothing glamorous about this relationship or the environment. It is actually a very scary representation of how young women that are exposed to violence by men, may accept more subtle forms of violence in the future because it is comparatively better.

As someone who appreciates poetry, I really enjoyed Dinh’s lyrical writing style. It worked well for this more descriptive and emotional story telling. With that being said, I loathed every chapter with Bambi in it (which is a lot). There were a handful of chapters that highlighted Bambi and Angela’s first three days together, and the timing of the massive declarations during this time felt off contextually. These two were together for about five years, there is no need for the 72 hour insta-love, gothic-Hallmark meet-cute. I fully believe she fell in love with him, in the way that love was able to manifest, but I think it would have been more balanced if his nefarious side appeared at increasing intensity over time instead of literally right away on the same day she announces her perpetual, undying love for him.

Finally, there is a battering ram of analogies. Like, probably don’t need the divine comedy referenced ~5 times in the first 37 pages, trust in your writing and for your readers to pick up on this.

There is another Goodreads review by Demetri that goes in-depth on major themes that I encourage you to read if you are thinking of picking up this title.

For me: ⭐⭐/5 but a ⭐ ⭐ ⭐/5 was provided as I do think that a very esoteric group of individuals would love it though.

A free copy of Kill My Darling was provided through NetGalley and Writerly Book Press in exchange for an honest review. As always, I thank the author for their craft and the opportunity to review their book!

[Faye Moser · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an advance review copy for free from BookSirens, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This is a beautifully written book. The prose is poetic and aching, and the story is tragic in a way that sticks with you. I kept pausing just to admire certain lines and the heavy, dreamlike atmosphere the author creates.

I did spend a lot of time confused about what was literally happening, though, and that kept pulling me out of the experience more than I wanted. I wanted to sink into it emotionally instead of stopping to reorient myself so often. Not the best fit for me, but still something I can appreciate for its craft. I think readers who enjoy surreal, impressionistic thriller drama and mood-driven stories will probably love this.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kill My Darling is undeniably atmospheric and intentional in its tone. The author’s voice leans into lyrical, almost philosophical reflections on life, death, and what it means to keep going, which will resonate with readers who enjoy introspective and emotionally heavy narratives.

For me personally, the story felt extremely bleak, and while I could clearly see and appreciate the author’s intent, the overall tone made it difficult for me to fully connect. It ultimately wasn’t quite my cup of tea, though I think readers drawn to darker, contemplative prose will find a lot to admire here.

[Aida ☾ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never thought I would complain about a book being too lyrical and philosophical, but I finally found one.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book like “Kill My Darling” arrives already wearing its own warning label – not only the explicit preface that lays out the psychic weather ahead, but the prose itself, which moves with the glittery volatility of a streetlight reflected in a puddle: seductive, unstable, and always one step from going dark. Thanh Dinh’s literary noir is, at its core, a story about how people narrate themselves into a livable shape. That shape may be a lover’s body, a dead man’s name, a mother’s role, a saint’s patience, a criminal’s swagger, a doctor’s authority. It may also, more frighteningly, be a performance so persuasive that the performer forgets where the costume ends. The novel’s central trick – and its most serious question – is whether self-invention is a means of survival or merely another kind of violence.

Angela, its narrator, begins with a corpse and a certainty: she has disposed of her lover, Bambi Raymond, a famous rapper, and she will tell you how to die. But the book’s pleasures are rarely those of plot, in the conventional sense. The suspense here is psychological and theological: a thriller whose engine is not simply what happened, but who gets to decide what it means. Angela’s voice is the book’s signature – feverish, lyric, mordant, sometimes perversely funny, and always a little hallucinatory, as if she is speaking to us from inside a smoke-filled room where confession and performance are indistinguishable. She narrates like someone trying to control the shape of the story before the story controls her.

Dinh writes in a register that might be described as glamour-soaked grief. Toronto, Montreal, Chinatown bakeries, hospital corridors, highway exits, club interiors – these spaces aren’t merely settings but stages, lit in neon and moral fog. The book understands, in a distinctly contemporary way, how the modern city can feel like a machine designed to keep you anonymous until it suddenly demands proof of who you are. Angela’s world is full of institutions that claim to be neutral – hospitals, police stations, bureaucratic forms, “verification” protocols – and yet the book repeatedly shows how the body is never neutral inside them. A pregnant woman’s weakness becomes spectacle. A patient’s history becomes a shorthand. A person’s credibility is weighed by the people who have the power to write the notes.

If “Kill My Darling” were only a stylish noir about celebrity, obsession, and murder, it would still be an accomplished piece of atmosphere. But the novel’s ambition is stranger and more morally complicated. Its true drama begins when Bambi’s absence refuses to stay absent – not as a ghostly metaphor, but as an active presence that migrates. Angela’s relationship with Pierre, Bambi’s twin, is the book’s most unsettling invention: a triangle where one point is dead, one is living, and the third is a name that can be worn like a mask. Pierre is a psychiatrist, intelligent, brittle, and increasingly unmoored – a man whose professional language (diagnosis, constitution, dosage, protocol) becomes one more dialect of control. Angela, meanwhile, is a woman who both resists and craves control, who mocks sentimentality even as she longs for its shelter. Their bond is at once a romance, a conspiracy, and an argument with God – the kind of argument that doesn’t end in faith so much as exhaustion.

Dinh’s most incisive theme is substitution: the idea that in a world built to punish certain people more than others, you might survive by becoming someone else. The book returns to this motif with a ferocity that feels less like clever plotting and more like lived desperation. Pierre lives in his brother’s shadow and then, in a late and sinister twist, discovers that the shadow has been cast deliberately. Angela lives in the aftermath of her own choices, but also in the aftermath of systems that have taught her to expect judgment before help. Even love, in this novel, is a kind of substitution – not a pure exchange between two souls, but a barter between two damaged people trading what they have: attention, safety, the fantasy of being seen as “good.”

The Chinatown chapter is a miniature of what Dinh does best: a scene that is simultaneously physical and performative. Angela enters the bakery sweating, nauseated, hungry, counting down to an engineered fainting fit like a director timing a cue. The sensory detail is lavish – black tea, powdered sugar, egg tarts, the imagined squish of dough – and then the scene turns, as if the sugar has curdled. Angela’s hunger becomes both literal and metaphoric: hunger for food, for care, for the right to be unobserved. Her staged collapse is a small act of criminal theater, and yet it is also an indictment of how easily a woman’s distress becomes public property. Dinh keeps the reader in the double bind: we recoil at the manipulation even as we recognize the logic that produced it. In this world, you perform illness because the system rewards performance, not truth.

The hospital sequences, similarly, are among the novel’s sharpest pages. Dinh has a keen ear for the cruelty that can hide inside professionalism – the way pity can masquerade as empathy, the way “patient first” can become a slogan rather than a practice. Lucille, the doctor who flirts with Pierre while policing Angela’s moral worth, is drawn with the book’s most biting satirical touch. She is not a villain in the melodramatic sense; she is something more recognizable: a person who believes in her own decency, and therefore cannot see the harm she does. The older OB-GYN, by contrast, offers the rare relief of competence without contempt, a reminder that institutions do contain individuals capable of dignity. That tension – between the system and the person inside it – gives the book some of its most contemporary resonance. In an era of understaffed wards, fraying safety nets, and public arguments about what care should look like, Dinh’s hospital is not a backdrop but a moral arena.

And then there is Pierre’s unraveling, which Dinh handles with an unusual combination of theatricality and restraint. The book is careful, in a way that feels ethically deliberate, not to turn mental illness into a mere twist. Pierre’s instability is woven into his identity as a healer who has absorbed too much suffering and mistaken it for his responsibility. His monologues about guilt, faith, and the ghosts of patients – especially the story of the 17-year-old on suicide watch – are some of the novel’s most direct writing. They are also, at times, where Dinh’s ambition risks tipping into excess. The prose loves intensity; it loves the declarative sentence that arrives like a verdict. Often that intensity is earned – it feels like the only language Angela has left. But occasionally the book reaches for metaphysical grandeur when the scene would be more devastating if it trusted plainness.

Still, one of the novel’s strengths is its refusal to clean up its own mess. “Kill My Darling” is a book that understands that ugliness can be part of the truth. Angela is not written to be likable. She is written to be legible. Her cruelty is not excused, but neither is it fetishized. The book keeps asking: what happens when a person has been trained, by experience, to believe that tenderness is a trap? Angela’s narration is full of self-scorning jokes, sudden tenderness, and the kind of metaphoric thinking that feels like a survival strategy – if you can turn your life into art, perhaps it won’t destroy you completely.

In that sense, Dinh’s novel belongs to a lineage of women’s noir and psychological confession – books that are less interested in solving a crime than in anatomizing the desire that made the crime possible. There are echoes here of “Gone Girl” in the way the narrative weaponizes intimacy and performance, though Dinh is less interested in twist mechanics than in the spiritual hangover of obsession. There are shades of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” in the narrator’s acid humor and refusal of moral uplift, though Dinh’s stakes are more overtly violent and tender. The book’s atmosphere – neon, sex, club culture, hallucination – might make some readers think of “Drive” or “Uncut Gems” in its sense of forward-leaning dread, but Dinh’s sensibility is more literary, more hymnlike in its recurrence of motifs: God, forgiveness, punishment, the body as evidence, love as poison, love as shelter.

The novel is also very much a book of our era in its quiet preoccupations. It is interested in how reputations are manufactured and monetized; how celebrity creates a god-shaped void that people try to fill with attention; how women’s bodies become contested sites – medically, legally, morally. Its undercurrent of trafficking and exploitation is not treated as mere sensational garnish, but as a shadow economy that thrives on indifference. And its recurring skepticism about institutions – who gets believed, who gets helped, who gets labeled – feels attuned to a moment when public trust is thin and systems are visibly strained. Dinh never turns these concerns into slogans. They are embedded in Angela’s lived experience: the suspicious stares, the procedural delays, the casual cruelty of people who assume the worst because assuming the worst is easier than offering care.

If the first half of the book is a kind of noir fever dream – murder, disposal, seduction, hallucination – the latter chapters pivot into something stranger: domesticity as thriller. The scenes of Angela and Pierre in their condo, arguing about love and identity while preparing for parenthood, have a claustrophobic power. Dinh is astute about the ways “normal life” can be its own kind of performance, especially for people who have never been safe inside it. When Pierre proposes – not as a grand romantic gesture but as an insistence on the possibility of ordinary happiness – the moment lands with genuine complexity. We can feel Angela’s recoil. We can also feel the temptation: the relief of being offered a structure, a name for what they are, a promise that the story might end in something other than punishment.

The epilogue’s structure – its slow slide from postpartum terror into a police procedural into an almost mythic “miracle” – is where the book’s contrivance is most visible. Evidence arrives. Plans are made. A postal strike becomes a plot hinge. A dead man, once again, seems to be pulling strings. Some readers will find these mechanics too neat, too engineered. Yet it’s worth considering that “Kill My Darling” is not trying to be realistic in the manner of a courtroom drama. It is trying to be realistic in the manner of trauma: the way life can feel orchestrated by forces you do not control, the way coincidence can read like fate, the way the dead can seem to direct the living because the living cannot bear the randomness otherwise. In Angela’s world, the miracle is not that a plan works. The miracle is that anyone survives long enough to want a future.

The book’s final image – a naming that is also a benediction, a child positioned as an argument against the past – is where Dinh’s impulse toward mythmaking pays off. The name “Jeannet Pauline Raymond” is not just a plot detail; it is a thesis: a refusal to let the dead remain only dead, a refusal to let the living remain only guilty. Dinh’s ending insists, with a kind of bruised optimism, that the future is not obliged to repeat the past – though it will certainly inherit it. The book’s title, “Kill My Darling”, becomes a command not only about murder but about surrender: kill the old attachments that keep you trapped, kill the fantasies that make you return to the same pain, kill even the idea of a “darling” ending if it prevents you from living.

That is, ultimately, what the novel offers: not moral clarity, but moral electricity. Its best pages crackle with intelligence and danger. Its weaker moments – the occasional overstatement, the occasional flattening of a secondary character into a function, the plot’s dependence on precisely timed revelations – are the price of a book that refuses moderation. Dinh writes like someone who does not trust subtlety to survive the night. And yet, when the book is at its most controlled, it can be quietly devastating: an old doctor defending a patient’s individuality; a woman realizing love can feel like a burden; a man who has spent his life saving others discovering he might deserve saving too.

For all its baroque flourishes, “Kill My Darling” has a surprisingly classical core. It is a tragedy with an insurgent belief in ordinary happiness – the kind that arrives not as a reward for virtue but as a stubborn choice made by people who have very little virtue left to spend. If perfection is too clean a word for a book this messy, then perhaps the more honest praise is that it is alive. It is messy in the way living is messy, and in the way surviving is messier. It is not a book that asks to be liked. It is a book that asks to be believed – and, more unsettlingly, it asks what belief costs.

In the end, I found myself admiring the novel’s nerve as much as its craft. Dinh has written a noir that is also a love story, a psychological case file, a theological argument, and a satire of the performances we call adulthood. It is a book that understands how easily “care” can become control, how easily “love” can become addiction, how easily “identity” can become a weapon. It also understands something rarer: that even after the worst things, people still want the simplest ones – a warm body beside them, a child’s hand grasping a finger, a life that does not require constant explanation.

For its lyric intensity, its moral daring, and its refusal to offer easy absolution, I would place “Kill My Darling” at 83 out of 100 – a flawed, forceful, strangely tender novel that leaves a bruise where a blessing might have been, and makes you consider how often the two are the same.

[Jason Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Net Galley for the ARC

Reading Kill My Darling by Thanh Dinh felt like watching an elaborate fireworks display that never quite pauses to let your eyes adjust
The narrator is angry, drunk, maybe tripping, her senses alive processing and describing every single piece of sensory information and at the same time diving deep into emotional responses. She is an inferno barge, too hot and angry to approach but incredible to watch. It is spectacular writing but, much like a fireworks show, it needs to ease off, needs to reflect and take a breath. It doesn’t. Ever.
Thánh’s style in this book is full throttle. There are adjectives, metaphors and alcohol fuelled philosophies spilling off every page. I started to wonder if I had missed something or was this disorientation the author’s intended effect?
“In the faint light of the hushed dawn, I think I hear the cry of the unborn babe, palpitating in my eardrums, dancing to the rhythm of the life he dreams God would give him as the gospel promises”
I think I understand the sense of what she is writing even if it is difficult to understand the literal sense of the sentence through the definitions of the word it contains.
In another scene the lead character and narrator, Angela is out of her head drunk in a French style lounge bar. In between the classic chansons Francaises she keeps hearing a song in Finnish. The song has a deeper meaning to her;
“I shudder. There goes the same song, resurrected like a mummified version of the sanctified past and the glorified name I dare not call again in my fervent prayers.”
The song turns out to be her ring tone.
There is a poetry in some of Thanh’s writing that is exciting and keeps the reader engaged.
“the windows couldn’t temper the tempestuous howls of the beast outside.”
The downside for me is that the intense, concentrated style makes it hard to enter Angela’s (or Thanh’s) world. Moving forward through the narrative is always hard work. I questioned whether the book is even meant for me or my generation - would those in their teens or early twenties enjoy it more? It feels like Kill My Darling is speaking of an intensity of emotion that we only really have before we reach thirty. The book is not reflecting on that sensation, instead it is sending us a message from inside the furnace.
There is no glamour in this book. There is pain, there is confusion, there is Angela making the mistake so many of us have made when we are young and our sense of self esteem is not yet formed: we find ourselves in relationships that are unhealthy and dangerous. We know they are wrong but we have no reference point, we have no experience that allows us to define what we want our lives to look like.
There is a challenge with positioning that needs to be addressed. The publisher’s description of the book as “a noir fever dream dressed in sequins and bloodstains—a glittering descent into love, addiction, power, and the exquisite violence of wanting someone too much” gives off Mona Awad vibes. Kill My Darling starts with Angela going home with a man whom she had just thrown up over. No Bunnies (or sequins) here darling. This may sound flippant but get this pitch wrong and the author is in for a hatful of hurt
Thanh Dinh has written a book that, while not ultimately satisfying for me, is adventurous, energetic and completely in your face. Much like an unsatisfactory relationship, I was never sure how much more I could take, the difference is that with Kill My Darling I wasn’t sure how much I learnt from it either. There is much more to come from Thanh Dinh if she can add calm and reflection to her incredible intensity.
I admired its ambition more than I enjoyed the experience of reading it.
Dinh’s narrator, Angela, is all sensation and reaction. The prose is dense with metaphors, adjectives, and alcohol-fuelled philosophising, often prioritising intensity over narrative momentum. At times I found myself disoriented, unsure whether I’d missed something or whether that confusion was the point. There is striking poetry here—lines that crackle with energy and atmosphere—but the lack of modulation makes sustained reading hard work. I often felt the book needed space to breathe. It doesn’t ever take it.
That said, Kill My Darling is not trying to be glamorous. This is a novel steeped in pain, confusion, and the kind of self-destructive relationships many people stumble into before their sense of self has fully formed. Angela’s choices are frequently alarming, but recognisably human. The book captures an emotional intensity that may resonate more strongly with younger readers, or with those who value immediacy and sensation over reflection.
One issue is expectation-setting. The publisher’s description frames the novel as a “noir fever dream dressed in sequins and bloodstains,” but this is far messier and more abrasive than that suggests. Readers expecting something stylish or seductive may be wrong-footed.
Ultimately, this wasn’t a satisfying read for me, but it is an adventurous, confrontational debut. There is real talent here. With more restraint and reflection, Thanh Dinh could produce something remarkable—but this novel asks a lot of its reader, and won’t be for everyone.

[Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, this book does not want you to read it. It wants you to hallucinate it. Kill My Darling is not a novel so much as a fever breaking in real time, like someone just poured neon into your bloodstream and whispered “He’s dead, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone.” And then you, like Angela, keep walking toward the corpse anyway. Because love, guilt, grief? They don’t come with reverse gears.

We open after the murder. Not with a bang, but with a disposal. The world’s darling, Bambi Raymond, rapper, god, glamorized collapse in a fur coat, is dead under Angela’s trembling hands, and she’s narrating the burial like it’s a love poem and a confession at the same time. From there, the book spins through time like a broken record. 2020, 2025, Montreal, Toronto, a hospital hallway, a smoke-thick studio, a condo where someone may or may not be pretending to be their own ghost. It’s noir, yes. But noir soaked in molly and regret, wrapped in tinfoil, and screaming into a pillow.

Angela is an unreliable narrator in the same way a bomb is an unreliable birthday present. She’s funny, brutal, and spiraling so hard it feels like the prose is trying to claw its way off the page. Her relationship with Bambi is messy, terrifying, magnetic. Like watching someone pet a lion who’s already bitten them. He’s brilliant and broken in that specific way women are socialized to call genius. And Angela, in a thousand small ways, is trying to survive his orbit without losing her shape.

Except she does lose it. The timelines fracture. Identity becomes slippery. And then there’s Pierre. Ohhhh, Pierre. Bambi’s twin, but make it Catholic guilt with a medical degree. Their dynamic is... unsettling. Pierre wants to heal Angela. Or punish her. Or save her. Or become her. Or maybe become Bambi. I don’t know. There’s a lot of identity soup happening and not enough spoons. At one point, they’re raising a baby together while evading a federal investigation, and honestly? That’s not even top ten weirdest things that happen in this book.

And listen. This novel hates institutions. Hospitals, police, bureaucracy, academia, even goddamn postal workers catch a stray. Everyone is complicit. Everyone’s language is a leash. There’s a whole subplot where Angela fakes a fainting spell in a Chinatown bakery just to get access to a medical record. Because being sick is the only way the system will see her. And that’s the quiet part of the book.

The loud part? Is trauma with sequins on. Addiction, sexual manipulation, twin-swapping, weaponized empathy, systemic erasure, literal murder, and a fetus caught in the middle like a plot twist that got too real. And somehow... somehow it works. The prose dances dangerously close to melodrama, but always yanks itself back with some sharp little observation that leaves a papercut. It is exhausting in the way watching someone survive usually is.

But here’s the thing. The book wants to be mythic, and sometimes it pulls it off, but other times it just overreaches. The ending leans too hard on symbolic weight and plot convenience. A goddamn postal strike is the thing that tips the story into its final twist? Really? That’s less noir than it is sitcom cursed object energy. And while Angela’s voice is unforgettable, the characters around her start to blur. Pierre gets his full descent into chaos arc, but everyone else fades into furniture, especially once the narrative doubles down on trauma-as-style.

This book wants to be divine, but sometimes it just drowns in its own metaphor. Still gripping. Still vicious. But not quite as sharp as it thinks it is. Three stars. Feverish. Flawed. Ferociously itself.

Whodunity Award: For Making Me Suspect the Dead Guy Was Still Running the Plot from Beyond the Grave

Big chaotic thanks to Writerly Books and NetGalley for the ARC, which I accepted fully knowing it would emotionally destroy me and said “thank you” anyway like a little drama freak.

[Damla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kill My Darling is a literary noir that refuses moderation. It is intense, excessive, lyrical, and morally unsettled, and those qualities are not flaws to be corrected but part of the book’s deliberate design.

The novel opens with a body and works backward, not to solve a crime but to anatomize a relationship. What matters here is not how the murder happened, but why it became possible. Told through fractured timelines and a feverish first-person voice, the narrative pulls the reader into Angela’s consciousness, where memory, guilt, desire, and self-mythology blur. The result is claustrophobic and immersive. There is no safe distance. You are asked to sit inside the damage.

At the center of the book is a sharp critique of power and its disguises. Bambi’s fame, charisma, and self-destruction are repeatedly aestheticized by the world around him, while Angela’s endurance is read as love rather than survival. The novel is particularly incisive in showing how violence does not always announce itself loudly. It arrives through excuses, through devotion, through the insistence that genius must be tolerated at any cost. Love here is not redemptive. It is addictive, destabilizing, and dangerous.

Formally, the book embraces excess. The prose is lush, metaphor-heavy, and often overwhelming. The emotional intensity rarely lets up. For some readers, this will feel like too much. For me, it felt honest. The repetition, the fixation, the relentless inward spiraling mirror the psychology of obsession and trauma rather than smoothing it into something palatable. This is not a novel interested in restraint. It is interested in truth as lived, not as refined.

The second half of the book deepens its moral complexity by shifting the terrain from obsession to aftermath, from destruction to survival. Angela’s relationship with Pierre introduces questions of substitution, control, and care that are just as unsettling as what came before. Institutions that claim neutrality, hospitals, police, bureaucracy, are shown to be anything but neutral, especially toward women whose bodies and credibility are constantly under scrutiny. The novel is at its strongest when it exposes how care itself can become another language of power.

What I admire most about Kill My Darling is its refusal to clean itself up. The characters are not likable. They are legible. The book offers no easy absolution, no moral shortcuts, and no tidy redemption. Survival, when it appears, is compromised and sharp-edged. The ending does not undo the damage. It simply insists that life continues anyway.

This is not a book that tries to be universally loved. It is a book that takes risks, trusts its own intensity, and commits fully to its vision. For its lyric ambition, psychological depth, and moral daring, this is a five-star read for me. It lingered, unsettled, and demanded to be taken seriously.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Writerly Books Press for the ARC of Kill My Darling by Thanh Dinh for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own

⭐️3.75/5⭐️
This book is about a crazy love obsession. Love of life and the sweet release of rest. Freedom and the endless pursuit. Living, dying, being reborn. Choice. Separation. It's about searching for a different path in life. To kill your old self and chase after a new one. It's about suffering. So much suffering and to what end. It's about being thrust into a role you were and weren't wanting, trudging down it, surviving and persisting, even when you don't want to.

Bambi and Angela are star crossed lovers. The world rejectd them, they don't want that world anyway. They are running full force to live a life of their own. Driven by obsession, desire, passion they are both running from their past. To reinvent themselves amd just be.

Bambi had a bad upbringing. Angela did not. They meet one another one night and never part falling down a tragic existential rabbit hole.

Bambi is and enigma in his own right. Angela just want to seen, to be something else. Angela thinks he's god, but he's really a devil in disguise, but Angela devours his darkness. Following a misguided journey of the rejected just looking for salvation in whatever form they can grasp onto. They find freedom in self destruction.

Boy, Angela can cry. 85% of this book is this girl in tears.

Bambi was a monster, manipulative, narcissistic, and gas lighted Angela into his path to freedom, leaving her there to suffer the consequences. But she was not without freedom of choice, she chose to be. She chose to follow when she could have carved her own destiny. Angela's relationship with Bambi is the epitome of love is blind.


Did I like it, absolutely, but I was getting so bored reading Angela's waxing philosophical about literally everything. Oh, and her perpetual sobbing. But in the end, it was a beautiful story, so tragic and gritty and dark. A story about those who do not choose the "normal" path and the fight for survival.

[Maria reads SFF · Rating 3 out of 5]

My thanks to BookSirens for a free digital review copy of “Kill My Darling” by Thanh Dinh. All opinions are my own.
A Psychological Literary Noir about obsession, toxic relationships, addiction and mental struggles.
This is my first work by the author and I immediately got captivated by her unique poetic prose.
The trigger warnings listed at the beginning of the book should be taken seriously as this is a challenging reading experience that touches on extremely difficult topics.
The characters are flawed, raw and real, I found it difficult to look away from their fall, their struggle, their attraction to despair.
As with reality and life, things tend to repeat themselves and I do admit that a few times the repetition grated on me.
There was some profound philosophy, some thoughts that left space for interpretation, but even if I was forewarned that the book touched on religious discourse, I was not prepared for it to be so prominent.
I would recommend this novel to readers who seek to explore mental disorders, drug addiction, obsession, toxic relationships, the role of faith in the lives of people that feel punished by their lot in life.
As a reader I would love to read more from this author in the future. My hope is that religion (Christianity leaning) will not play such a leading role in her next work.

[Lilith's_Library_ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kill My Darling by Thanh Dinh is a dark, suspense-filled journey that lingers long after the last page. The story grips you with its tension from the very first chapter, drawing you into a world where danger is never far, secrets cut deep, and every character carries the weight of their past. Dinh’s writing is sharp, precise, and quietly menacing, creating an atmosphere thick with unease, anticipation, and a pulse of raw emotion.

The characters are flawed and compelling, their vulnerabilities and hidden motives making them feel achingly human. The tension between them crackles—sometimes violent, sometimes heartbreakingly fragile—and it keeps the stakes high and the pages turning. The plot moves with relentless momentum, blending suspense, intrigue, and subtle psychological depth in a way that keeps you on edge while still allowing moments of introspection and emotion to breathe.

While a few scenes could have been expanded for even greater impact, the strength of the characters and the intensity of the story more than make up for it. Kill My Darling is a dark, haunting read about trust, betrayal, and the fine line between love and obsession—a moody, atmospheric tale that pulls you in and doesn’t let go.

[sarah panic · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an absolute ride of a book. I knew this book was going to hit home in certain ways, but I did not think it was going to pull at my heart in quite the ways that it did. I really had to sit with this book at times. You would think that would be weird for a book that is described as part psychological thriller part noir confession. I have highlighted so many passages in the book and thought of the ways that Bambi is a character that so many of the of us can relate to. Either we are struggling with addiction and mental illness in some capacity or the ones that we love are struggling. This book illustrated for me the ins and outs of how it rips apart so many pieces of us when we love those that destroy us, yet we still endure that pain, we still love, but yet, we discover that there are monsters in so many of us. We are all fighting something. We just have to figure out where the light comes from.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We only miss the dead when we need their salvation and protection in a dire situation".

This book was so good and made me feel like i'm going insane, i finished this book on the 14th it is the 18th now and i still dont know if i'll be able to give a good review because i'm still hungover from it.
This book was very well written and about 90% of the time made me feel like i'm one of the characters and feel all the stress, sadness, madness that the character is feeling, which is great in a book. On some parts this book felt like it was too much emotionally but then i forced myself to keep going and it got better and the ending is worth going through the madness.
This story might as well be someone's diary because of how it was written and the information we gor from it, and adding the fact that the themes of this book (for example; substance abuse, mental health) should be talked about more especially when it'g going on more and more and mental health these days is talked about, but not enough.
This book might help some people with their problems but it also might make some people feel worse, but if you feel worse after reading this then you have to come back to this book later in life because it is very valuable even if it is very dark.

[Em · Rating 3 out of 5]

📚✨ Kill My Darling by Thanh Dinh
⭐️ 3/5 | 🌶️ 0/5

I received an advance review copy for free from BookSirens, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This book is gorgeous. The prose is poetic, aching, and soaked in grief and longing. The vibes are heavy. The atmosphere is dreamlike. The tragedy lingers. I found myself rereading lines just to feel them again.

BUT.
I was also… frequently confused. Not in a fun “what is reality?” way...more in a “wait, what is literally happening right now?” way. And every time I had to stop and reorient myself, it pulled me out of the emotional spiral I wanted to sink into. I wanted to drown in the feelings, not tread water trying to keep track of the plot.

Still, this book does something bold, and I respect the hell out of it.

I didn’t love it.
But I felt it.
And sometimes that’s the point.

📖 Reading Mood: staring into space after closing the book, emotionally bruised, questioning humanity, rereading highlighted quotes at 2 am

[Kayte Shearwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are looking for a dark read that is poetic and heartbreaking this may be for you. Somewhere in a fever dream of addiction, self obsession, devotion, mental illness, and trauma. This isn’t a sweet read expect to come out battered and still thinking this is what you wanted. You will go through ups and downs with our characters and still stare at the wolf in sheep’s skin with adoring. Be sure to read your trigger warnings as this is a heavy read. It won’t treat you kindly but it’s oh so good. Would definitely recommend.

[Sarah Rassool · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kill My Darling is a beautiful tragedy that has you engrossed in the despair of three different characters, their past, present, and how they intend to ultimately change their future—if there is one. The relationship between Bambi and Angela is so heartbreakingly toxic that you only hope that something can go her/their way. Dinh did a phenomenal job at depicting the hurt, growth, and bleeding scars of the characters that you almost find yourself the therapist in the story uncovering the truth and where the ending will take us.

[Kat M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed getting to read this book, it was a great blend of psychological thriller and noir and was able to tell the story that I was hoping for from the description. The characters were so well written and enjoyed going on this journey with the characters. I thought it was a strong concept and enjoyed getting into this plot and how the characters worked. Thanh Dinh wrote this so well and enjoyed getting to read this.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Anna Marija · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley, for providing me with a free copy in exchange for my honest review
the book took me by surprise in a good way the philosophical writing was just up my alley but the story lost momentum for me which otherwise would’ve been a higher rating.
Everyone will interpret the story differently, but these are messy characters, which makes their relationships more complex. It was just one of those stories where you didn’t really know which way the story was going to go. Especially, with Shakespearean references it kept me wondering how tragic the story would turn out to be.

[Karim Guillén · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was interested in the premise, but it only took me a few pages to know this book was not for me.
I tried to force myself to finish it as I was hoping there would be something that would change my mind, but no. I ended up dnfing it at 20%. The writing was one of the main things that pulled me off, when the author said on the foreword this wasn't about poetic prose, they meant it. The whole time it felt as if i were reading a wattpad mafia fanfic from 2010, with that being said i would probably enjoyed it back then, but unfortunately my taste has changed and I'm not the target of this book.

[Brenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

ARC recieved via NetGalley.

To be clear, this book is not meant for the average romance reader, nor is it a novel for those who enjoy literary-style fiction. Instead, it is a book that draws on numerous philosophers and religious references to create a narrative about love, death, and eventually, birth.

I cannot say that this book’s execution necessarily worked for me, but I greatly enjoyed the author’s prose. I’d be willing to try the author’s future works. 2.25 stars.

[MsJodiReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, dazzling, and deeply unsettling, Pretty. Witty. Bloody.

Thanh Dinh delivers a noir that’s as beautiful as it is brutal, perfect for fans of messy love, unreliable narrators, and poetic tragedy.

I enjoyed reading this!

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book about relationships that burns too bright to survive.

I had a hard time to connect to the book because I felt the plot was too scattered.

Thank you NetGalley and Writerly Book Press for the ARC.

[Ari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kill My Darling by Thanh Dinh has a beautifully lyrical writing style that often feels poetic and emotionally charged. However, as a story, the plot felt scattered at time, making it difficult for me to fully connect with it. I appreciated how the book explores the toxicity of love, but the frequent references to The Divine Comedy felt excessive and distracting rather than enriching. Overall, I think this book would have worked much better as a poetry or philosophical collection rather than a narrative-driven novel.

[Kelli Bilderback · Rating 4 out of 5]

great book.

[Rachel]

I couldn’t put this book down! I loved the writing and will definitely reading more from this author

[Melinda Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A emotional gripping story line that stays with you long after your done reading. Intriguing characters. Well written