Rottenheart by Kat Dunn is a sapphic gothic reimagining of Hamlet set in the 1890s, following Odette after the death of her mother, Lydia. As Odette grieves, her aunt Claudine begins taking her mother’s place in the household, while her relationship with her childhood love Cecilia becomes increasingly strained, and Lydia proves considerably less gone than everyone believed. What unfolds is a story of grief, revenge, madness, complicated mother-daughter relationships, and the increasingly uncertain boundary between mourning someone and being haunted by their memory.
The question is: which can she bear? The loss of self or the loss of her mother?
Kat Dunn, Rottenheart
First, I think it’s worth clarifying that although Rottenheart contains a love story, I wouldn’t approach it expecting a romance. Hamlet is a tragedy. Shakespeare’s comedies are the plays that traditionally resolve themselves through a happily ever after (i.e. marriage), and Hamlet very much is not built to deliver any kind of HEA. So Odette and Cecilia’s relationship is supposed to be complicated, unhealthy at times, and deliberately difficult to understand as something we should simply root for. I struggled with their relationship occasionally, but I also think some of that discomfort is built into the material Dunn is adapting.
One of Dunn’s most interesting changes to Hamlet is giving Lydia a much fuller life, personality, and relationship with Odette. The ghost in Hamlet exists largely to give Hamlet his impossible task: remember me, avenge me. We know relatively little about King Hamlet as a person, but Dunn gives us something much messier in Lydia. Because the novel moves between different points in Odette’s life, we meet Lydia as the living mother Odette loved, resented, and rebelled against, while also seeing how Odette remembers her after death. Grief can soften, distort, or rewrite the dead, but Rottenheart adds another layer of tension by making Lydia’s ghost a seemingly sentient presence with desires, anger, and a personality of her own. Odette, therefore, has to contend with who her mother actually was, who grief and memory are turning her into, and a ghost that refuses to let death end their relationship.
How is it possible to love and to hate the same person so completely?
Kat Dunn, Rottenheart
That mother-daughter focus transforms Hamlet’s obligation to his father into something much more intimate and psychologically tangled in Rottenheart. Odette is trying to mourn her mother while also being pulled back into the expectations, resentments, and obligations that shaped their relationship when Lydia was alive. The gothic elements of this retelling further strengthen that ambiguity. The haunting makes Odette’s grief feel physical and inescapable, while the novel’s treatment of madness makes it harder to tell where mourning ends and something supernatural begins. That uncertainty gives the story the creeping sense of dread I love so much in gothic literature.
For all the elements of the retelling that worked for me, I never felt quite as immersed in the story or its relationships as I wanted to be. The nonlinear structure was a huge part of that because the story repeatedly jumps backward and forward, and I often found myself trying to reorient myself instead of getting pulled deeper into the narrative. I also never became as emotionally invested in Odette and Cecilia as I wanted to be. I certainly don’t expect a Hamlet retelling to turn Hamlet/Ophelia into an aspirational love story. But I wanted the connection between Odette and Cecilia to affect me more than it did, especially because their relationship is one of the places where this retelling has the opportunity to reshape the original.
If a woman is to be free, she must have her own means.
Kat Dunn, Rottenheart
And maybe this is where Rottenheart ultimately fell a little short for me. Dunn’s prose is lovely, the historical and literary influences are obvious, and there are some genuinely unsettling moments as grief tips into gothic horror. But with a gender-swapped, sapphic Hamlet, I kept waiting for the adaptation to become even more transformative. I wanted more feminine rage. More interrogation of revenge, inheritance in all its forms, and what changes when Hamlet’s burden is passed from father and son to mother and daughter. Dunn absolutely edges open those doors, but I wanted her to kick a few of them down.
Overall, I liked Rottenheart, particularly as a gothic exploration of grief and the complicated ways daughters remember, resent, love, and inherit their mothers. I just found myself more interested in the possibilities of the adaptation than completely satisfied by where it ultimately took them.
Thank you to NetGalley and Zando for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
