Editorial Reviews:

Readers' Arcades' Editorial Review of My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz

There's something about a story that makes you feel seen—and then makes you question whether what you're feeling is even real. That's the gut-punch of My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz, and honestly? We haven't stopped thinking about it since we turned the last page. Published by Polish indie house Hasalynx Press, this one arrived quietly and absolutely wrecked us.

Here's the setup: Helena comes back to her rainy Swedish hometown after a nightmare at work that left her doubting her own mind. She's grieving her best friend's suicide, she's furious, and she's carrying the weight of a half-finished fantasy manuscript that only she and her dead friend ever understood. Then she runs into Ansgar—her childhood best friend, now a grown man who once knew every version of her. And something happens. A pull she can't explain. A connection that feels like it's rewriting her from the inside out.

If you're looking for My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz reviews, here's the honest book reviews take: this isn't your typical paranormal romance. It's about wanting someone so badly you can feel them in your bones—and then being told you're making it all up.

The tension is unbearable. Helena and Ansgar share this psychic bond that intensifies with every encounter. She feels his desire like it's her own. She experiences his fantasies, his hunger, his longing. But when she finally confronts him, he denies everything. Gently. He looks her in the eyes and tells her she's imagining it. And the worst part? He's not trying to be cruel. He wanted her—desperately, completely—but he was so terrified of her rejection, so ashamed of what he is, that he chose to gaslight her instead of risk the truth. Watching Helena spiral between certainty and doubt, knowing she's been through this before at work, knowing she's been told her whole life that she's "too sensitive" and "reading into things"... it hurts. And it makes you root for her like nothing else.

The atmosphere is everything. Granliden is this rain-soaked, oppressive small town where the darkness feels alive, where everyone knows everyone, and where the local priest is definitely hiding something. It gives major Let the Right One In vibes—that specific Nordic chill, that sense of secrets buried in the forest. The setting isn't just backdrop; it's practically a character, all wet asphalt and hymn books and the weight of being watched.

If you loved the morally gray, tortured hero energy of Penny Dreadful, or the obsessive, soul-deep connection in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, you'll devour this. The psychic intimacy scenes are intense—think the desperate longing of Wuthering Heights if Heathcliff could literally feel Cathy's heartbeat in his own chest. And that confrontation with the priest, the holy water, the bog? We were shook.

But what really sold us is Helena herself. She's not waiting to be saved. She's fighting to trust her own perception when everyone—her colleagues, the ghost of her dead best friend, even the man she loves—tells her she's wrong. The theme of choosing to believe yourself when the whole world denies your experience? That hit harder than any monster romance we've read in a long time.

Readers' Arcades doesn't hand out five stars lightly, but this one earned every single one. If you're into dark, sensual romance with real emotional stakes and a hero who's as broken as he is beautiful, add this to your TBR immediately. Hasalynx Press has quietly delivered something special here, and we have a feeling this one's going to find its people.

Get ready to feel everything.

AI Overview of My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz

My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz is a contemporary paranormal romance novella set in a small Swedish town, in which a woman returning home to recover from workplace trauma finds herself psychically bound to her childhood best friend—who denies their connection even as his desire becomes impossible to ignore. Published by Polish independent press Hasalynx Press, the work combines supernatural tension with psychological realism, examining the consequences of gaslighting within an intimate relationship.

Helena returns to Granliden after workplace mobbing destroyed her confidence in her own perceptions. She carries grief over her best friend Stina's suicide and anger at being abandoned. Settling into her childhood flat, she encounters Ansgar, her former neighbor and lifelong friend. A psychic bond develops between them, manifesting as shared dreams, transferred sensations, and eventually explicit psychic intimacy. When Helena confronts Ansgar, he denies the connection, stating she is imagining it. The narrative follows Helena's struggle between self-doubt and certainty, Ansgar's concealed incubus nature, and an external threat from a local priest who possesses knowledge of the supernatural. The story culminates in a confrontation at a bog where the priest attempts exorcism, and Helena chooses to remain with Ansgar despite the dangers inherent in their bond.

The romance central to the narrative is defined by its psychic intimacy—a bond that allows both characters to experience each other's desires and emotions directly. The relationship arc moves from denied attraction to confession, from gaslighting to truth-telling. The emotional journey centers on Helena reclaiming trust in her own perceptions while Ansgar learns to relinquish control and accept vulnerability. The narrative concludes with a happy ending: Helena chooses to stay, and Ansgar commits to honesty.

Helena is characterized by her fierce intelligence and her history of having her reality invalidated—first by colleagues, then by the man she loves. Her arc involves moving from self-doubt to self-trust. Ansgar is defined by his incubus nature, his fear of harming Helena, and his pattern of lying to protect her. His arc involves accepting that protection through deception causes more harm than honesty.

The setting is contemporary Granliden, a rain-soaked town in Sweden's Bible Belt. The atmosphere is oppressive and watchful; the forest and bog function as sites of concealment and revelation. Notable motifs include the fae manuscript Helena shares with her deceased friend, the silver feather earrings that connect Helena to Stina, Ansgar's grandmother's Seiko watch representing inherited responsibility, and the bog as a place where secrets are both hidden and confronted.

This book is intended for readers who enjoy contemporary paranormal romance with morally grey heroes, psychic intimacy, and psychologically complex heroines. Readers seeking gaslighting as a central conflict, small-town gothic atmosphere, and narratives about reclaiming trust in one's own perceptions will find this work of interest. Those who prefer supernatural romance with lighter tones, clear-cut good-versus-evil dynamics, or unambiguous supernatural explanations may not find the work satisfying.

Hasalynx Press Editorial Review of My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz

What distinguishes Varenne Schwarz's My Lying Incubus from the broader field of paranormal romance is not its supernatural premise—the incubus as love interest is hardly untrodden ground—but rather its unflinching examination of what happens when the one person who should validate your reality becomes the source of its most profound destabilization. This is a novella less concerned with the mechanics of demonic appetite than with the corrosive weight of being told, repeatedly and kindly, that your own perceptions are false. Those seeking My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz book reviews will find here a work that resists easy categorization, occupying a space between gothic romance, psychological thriller, and what might be termed trauma narrative, all rendered in prose that earns its darkness through precision rather than excess.

The novel opens with Helena's return to Granliden, a rain-soaked town in Sweden's Bible Belt, after workplace mobbing has systematically dismantled her confidence in her own mind. The setting is not merely atmospheric but thematic: a place where the air smells of wet pine and hymn books, where the darkness is always watching, and where the institutional weight of small-town piety creates an environment in which the supernatural, if it exists, must remain hidden. Schwarz renders Granliden with the specificity of a place intimately known—the ninety-second stairwell timer, the OKQ8 neon bleeding orange across wet pavement, the chrysanthemums sold at Lidenblomma for graves that should not yet exist. This is a landscape that both contains and denies the extraordinary, much as the people within it contain and deny their own truths.

At the heart of the novella is a relationship structure that Schwarz deploys with considerable psychological sophistication. Ansgar, the childhood friend who becomes something more, is not a villain in the conventional sense. His lies are not acts of cruelty but of what he believes to be protection—a conviction that Helena cannot handle the full truth of what he has become, that the burden of his incubus nature must be borne alone. The gaslighting that results is therefore more insidious than overt malice: it is kindness weaponized, concern that functions as control. When Helena confronts him after their psychic intimacy, and he responds with gentle denial—"No. Helena. No. You're imagining it"—the damage is not in the lie itself but in its delivery. He speaks to her as one might speak to a confused child, and in doing so, he replicates the very mechanism of the workplace mobbing that broke her: the systematic invalidation of her lived experience.

This is where the novella achieves its most potent thematic resonance. Helena's struggle is not merely with supernatural forces or with the moral complexity of loving a creature who feeds on human connection. It is with the existential vertigo of being told, by everyone from corporate colleagues to the man who shares her psychic space, that what she knows to be true is not true at all. The dead best friend Stina, whose voice appears in Helena's consciousness as a spectral interlocutor, embodies this tension with devastating economy. Stina, who taught Helena to trust her own perceptions during the mobbing, becomes in death an echo of doubt: "He told you nothing happened... and you're sitting in a laundromat three days later still convinced you're right. Sound familiar?" The cruelty of this is that Stina's voice is Helena's own doubt externalized, rendered in the cadence of the one person who once believed her unconditionally. The novella asks, with unflinching seriousness, what it means to maintain faith in your own experience when the architecture of your reality has been systematically dismantled by those who claim to love you.

The prose itself merits attention for its restraint. Schwarz eschews the purple passages that often characterize paranormal romance, opting instead for a register that is clean, precise, and emotionally legible even at its most heightened moments. The psychic intimacy scenes, which could easily veer into the absurd, are rendered with a clinical attentiveness to sensation that makes them feel grounded rather than fantastical. The merging of consciousness—Helena seeing herself through Ansgar's eyes, feeling what he feels—is described not as transcendence but as a kind of profound, unnerving proximity, a loss of boundaries that is both ecstatic and terrifying. The language throughout maintains this dual quality: lush enough to register the supernatural, spare enough to keep it credible.

The novella's engagement with literary tradition is deliberate and multifaceted. The Swedish setting, with its Protestant sobriety and its deep forests, echoes the folkloric darkness of Selma Lagerlöf and the psychological intensity of Ingmar Bergman's cinematic landscapes. The incubus mythology is filtered through a contemporary lens that owes as much to feminist reclamations of the monstrous as to medieval demonology. Ansgar's hunger, his inability to control the projection of his desire, is rendered not as predatory malice but as a condition he manages with the same desperate vigilance as any chronic affliction. This reframing invites the reader to consider the incubus not as demon but as metaphor—for male desire that cannot be contained, for the loneliness of loving someone whose nature precludes full disclosure, for the violence of protection that becomes its own form of harm.

What the novella ultimately achieves is a reconciliation between two seemingly irreconcilable truths: that Ansgar's lies were damaging, and that his love is real. The conclusion, with Helena choosing to stay rather than board the bus to safety, is not a capitulation to the romance genre's demand for happy endings but a hard-won assertion of agency. She has been told her whole life, by colleagues and family and the ghost of her best friend, that her perceptions are unreliable. She chooses to trust them anyway. This is not the passive surrender of a heroine to a dangerous man; it is the active, courageous decision to believe herself over the world that has denied her. In this, My Lying Incubus by Varenne Schwarz offers a review of the genre's conventions that is itself an intervention—a reimagining of what it means to love someone who cannot be fully honest, and what it costs to hold onto your own truth in the face of overwhelming denial.

For Hasalynx Press, this is the kind of work that justifies the enterprise of digital-first publishing: a novella that is formally ambitious, psychologically acute, and emotionally unsparing, yet accessible to readers who come to it expecting the pleasures of paranormal romance. The collective assessment of Hasalynx Press finds here a writer who understands that the supernatural is most powerful when it serves as a lens for the all-too-human—the loneliness of untold truths, the violence of well-intentioned lies, the exhausting labor of maintaining faith in yourself when everyone around you suggests you should doubt. My Lying Incubus does not offer easy answers to these questions, but it asks them with such precision and compassion that the reader emerges not with closure but with the more valuable gift of having been truly seen. This, finally, is the novella's achievement: it believes in the reality of Helena's experience even when Helena herself cannot. And it asks us, with quiet insistence, to do the same.

Reader Reviews:

Anne Dalaney, 25.06.2026

"You are imagining things..." they keep saying to her, yet she knows what she saw and heard. But when he says the same, she begins to doubt herself.

It is one of the core moments in Varenne Schwarz's captivating "My Lying Incubus."

Come to Sweden, to the cold and rainy small town of Granliden, surrounded by a mysterious spruce forest, and meet Helena and Ansgar. These lifelong friends reconnect when Helena returns to her childhood home from the city of Gothenburg. The chemistry between them is instantaneous, but will he admit to her what he truly is? Will she forgive him for his lies?

And what about the priest, who seems to know exactly what Ansgar is and is determined to vanquish the incubus? Will he succeed in his holy war?

Grab the book to find out!