Rebecca had Manderley. Isabel has a Scottish manor and a husband who loves the devil.
In Your Heart a Devil | Vanessa Santos | Dead Ink Books | 8 October 2026 |
- Author Vanessa Santos
- Publisher Dead Ink Books
- Published 8 October 2026
- ISBN 9781917792226
- Subgenre Gothic horror, folk horror
- Reviewed by Natalie Wal
Years after leaving Portugal to find her father, Isabel is the widow of a Scottish laird whose spirit the villagers still keep away with bonfires. Now she tells the story his legend left out.
In Your Heart a Devil is the debut novel from Vanessa Santos, out now from Dead Ink Books, who also published her story collection Make a Home of Me. It follows Isabel, a woman who left Portugal to look for her father and ended up married to a Scottish laird. Now he is dead, the village lights bonfires against his spirit, and Isabel is ready to speak. This Scottish gothic horror novel draws on local folklore and squares up to one of the great Gothic novels. In this In Your Heart a Devil review, I look at how Santos claims that ground as her own
Vanessa Santos takes on Rebecca and holds her own. In Your Heart a Devil swaps a dead first wife for a husband’s obsession with the devil, roots its Gothic in Scottish folklore, and turns the quiet cruelty of being measured against an impossible ideal into real horror.
How In Your Heart a Devil Rewrites Rebecca
Few novels cast a longer shadow over the Gothic than Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Its influence is so pervasive that contemporary rewritings often struggle to establish an identity beyond homage. Vanessa Santos’ In Your Heart a Devil does something far more ambitious: it enters into conversation with du Maurier’s classic while fundamentally reworking the anxieties at its heart.
The parallels are immediately apparent. Like du Maurier’s heroine, Isabel finds herself isolated within a forbidding country estate, trapped in a marriage whose emotional dynamics are shaped by an absence that proves more powerful than any physical presence. The Scottish manor at the centre of the novel functions as a worthy descendant of Manderley, a house saturated with memory, secrets, and the weight of its owner’s obsessions. Santos exchanges the Cornish coast for the Scottish countryside, but retains that same sense of geographical and psychological isolation. The surrounding landscape feels remote, ancient, and slightly hostile; its folklore-infused atmosphere lending the novel a distinctive identity that prevents it from feeling derivative.
What makes In Your Heart a Devil particularly compelling, however, is the way Santos transforms Rebecca‘s central conflict. In du Maurier’s novel, the unnamed narrator finds herself competing with the memory of another woman, haunted by an idealised predecessor she can never become. But in Santos’ novel Isabel is not competing against another woman. Instead, she finds herself measured against her husband’s fixation on the occult and, ultimately, against the devil himself.
By replacing the Rebecca figure with a supernatural obsession, Santos exposes something that was always present within du Maurier’s novel: the impossibility of living up to a man’s idealised fantasy, as well as the uncorruptible devotion of Rebecca’s housekeeper Mrs Danvers. Here that male fantasy has become literally otherworldly, with Santos asking how can a woman ever hope to rival a demonic presence that exists principally within the realm of obsession and desire? Santos takes the emotional logic of Rebecca and pushes it towards horror, revealing the cruelty inherent in being compared to an impossible ideal.
Scottish Folklore and a Gothic of Its Own
Santos also makes excellent use of Scottish folklore, incorporating local legends and beliefs in ways that feel organic rather than decorative. The folkloric elements deepen the novel’s atmosphere while reinforcing its thematic concerns with obsession and myth-making. Just as importantly, they allow Santos to establish a Gothic tradition that belongs to her setting rather than relying solely on inherited imagery from English Gothic fiction.
Taking on Rebecca is a bold move, taking it on successfully is rare, and In Your Heart a Devil manages it well. Santos has crafted a novel that honours one of the genre’s defining texts while finding fresh territory of its own.
The Verdict: Is In Your Heart a Devil Worth Reading?
The verdict
A bold reworking of Rebecca that finds its own ground in Scottish folklore and turns an impossible ideal into something truly frightening.
Read it if: you love Rebecca, big lonely houses and Gothic fiction with folklore in its bones.
Skip it if: retellings of the classics leave you cold, or you want your horror loud and fast.
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About Ginger Nuts of Horror
Ginger Nuts of Horror is an independent horror review and culture site based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Edited by British Fantasy Award nominee Jim McLeod, it publishes horror book reviews, film reviews, author interviews, features and cover reveals. Ginger Nuts of Horror won Best Inclusive Film & Book Review Platform at the SME News UK Enterprise Awards 2026.
