TL;DR: Queer Victorian doll horror with big feelings and bigger red flags. The Gift of You is a lush, fucked-up Christmas tale about loving the person who will absolutely ruin you. Competent, atmospheric, occasionally devastating, but not quite feral enough to hit masterpiece mode. Great if you like your romance with splinters.

Chloe York comes out of the art and oddities world, which tracks hard here. She is an abstract painter and insect taxidermist who runs a small oddities business, and you can feel that museum-of-beautiful-weird-shit vibe in every page. The book fits neatly into that aesthetic: curated strangeness, careful composition, and a fascination with objects that blur the line between pretty and cursed.

Cecile, dutiful daughter and newly engaged good girl, sneaks out in a snowstorm to spend Christmas Eve with her childhood friend Miriam Everleigh, a rich orphan who lives alone in a big manor and collects dolls like red flags. Miriam gifts Cecile a doll made in her exact likeness, and the doll turns out to be magically linked to Cecile’s body and sensations. As the blizzard closes in, Cecile is forced to choose between a safe, boring future with her fiancé and a terrifyingly intense love with Miriam that may cost her flesh, freedom, and humanity.

The big swing here is how York turns the classic “creepy doll” setup into an intimate queer possession story. The early scene where Miriam demonstrates the doll’s sympathetic magic by kissing and touching it is genuinely hot and deeply alarming at the same time, which is a tricky needle to thread. There is a beautiful, fucked tension between Cecile’s horror at what Miriam is doing and the very real desire she has been burying for years. When Miriam escalates from erotic to violent use of the doll, the book flips from “oh shit this is kinky” to “oh shit this is abuse” in a way that lands like a gut punch rather than a cheap twist. The moment Cecile’s porcelain double starts breaking, and her own body answers with clean fractures instead of gore, is a gnarly little piece of body horror that feels both fairytale and clinical.

York’s prose is classical and ornate without being purple. She leans into a Victorian gothic register that feels natural for the setting: lots of sensory detail, candlelight, fabrics, smells of pine and citrus and smoke. The whole thing is told in Cecile’s first person, which gives us a tight focus on her guilt, longing, and repressed anger. The pacing is smart: the first half is slow, cozy, and a little horny; the back half hits the gas once the magic becomes openly violent. Dialogue is clean and often sharp, especially when Miriam starts dropping the polite society mask and speaking with real venom. Occasionally the book repeats beats of Cecile’s internal conflict a little too often, like it does not quite trust us to understand that she is torn between safety and desire, but it never drags enough to be a slog. On a sentence level, it is solid and readable, with enough stylistic flair to feel special but not so much that it trips over itself.

The book is doing a lot with queerness, control, and what “safety” even means. Cecile lives under a cruel, ill mother and a rigid social structure, so of course the person who offers her escape is also the one who literally turns her into an object. Miriam’s love is real, but it is also possessive as hell, and the sympathetic doll magic becomes a metaphor for how abusive relationships overwrite your sense of your own body. There is also a strong undercurrent about class and entitlement: Miriam’s money and magic let her build a private universe where her desires are law, and everyone else becomes decor. The ending feels like swallowing something sweet that has a shard of glass in it. You walk away wondering whether this was a fucked-up happy ending, a beautiful horror story about the price of queer love, or both at once.

Within the current wave of indie queer horror, The Gift of You sits comfortably in the “gothic dollhouse” corner of the room. It feels like a cousin to stories that mix sapphic longing with domestic entrapment, more in conversation with classic haunted-manor fiction than with splatterpunk. As part of Undertaker Books’ Graveside Reads line, it works well as a compact, seasonal read: a Christmas ghost story where the ghost is desire and the house is full of screaming dolls. On a 2025 shelf, it is the kind of book you recommend when someone says, “I want something cozy, spooky, and a little fucked, but not a 500-page epic.”

A good, confidently executed gothic novella with strong vibes and a few killer set pieces that lands solidly, even if it never quite goes as wild or as emotionally deranged as the premise teases.

The Gift of You by Chloe York,
published December 2, 2025 by Undertaker Books.