In this collection, readers enter a ghost-filled environment similar to Otranto's castle. Beautifully melodramatic and haunting in both word and art, with terror and heartache lurking around every corner and in every crevice, this collection disorients and surprises. Poems like "Paper Tombstones" exude Corpse Bride vibes. Other poems like "Tell Me Where You Are" detail a dismal yet passionate desire, one that plays like a long-forgotten goth rock album on vinyl. "This Mourning Together" spins defiantly yet romantically, like a poetic version of Alkaline Trio's album Good Mourning. At the book's core, however, lies "Forever," the collection's standout poem, which portrays an apocalypse as a wedding, one complete with gas mask canisters through which guests drink their pink champagne and watch as "the crow and the sparrow / dressed in their funeral attire / walked to the shore of the wreckage."

With Burtonesque artwork accompanying its verses, the poems are as simplistic as Dickinson's works but philosophical like the offerings of Baudelaire: "I want to bathe in ectoplasm / the residues of resurrection." A Gothic aesthetic paints every page, and lines like "I weep / while I laugh / I must be losing myself" play on common stereotypes and associations to reinforce the collection's dark themes and bolster its quiet, admirable creepiness. Alliteration—found in phrases like "mannequin morgue," "violent vermillion," and carefully phrased assertions like "you make the mausoleum so majestic"—makes the collection linguistically fun and playful. Minimalist in style, with a whispering voice uniquely its own, this collection is perfect for young adults and older readers willing to explore the cemeteries, coffins, and half-full glasses of ectoplasm that life and emotion have to offer.

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