Read about Colleen Hoover’s “Verity” and its newest chapter included in the hardcover edition of the novel.
Colleen Hoover is the most popular romance author in the world right now. Her romance novels are bestsellers, but she is also well-known for her thriller, Verity, which was recently released in a hardcover version.
The novel, (spoilers ahead!) follows a struggling author, Lowen, who is approached and asked to finish the novels in a series. The author was known as Verity, who had recently been in a tragic car accident leaving her paralyzed and unable to write. Lowen accepts the deal and moves into Verity’s house, where she lives with the author and her husband, as well as their young son, in order to gain enough knowledge to finish her series.
Instead, Lowen finds Verity’s unpublished autobiography, detailing psychotic things she has done. This includes neglecting her baby girls by letting them cry all day long. She also describes how later, one of her daughters died of an allergic reaction, and Verity believed her other daughter was responsible. In reaction, she killed her. Lowen alerts Verity’s husband, who then murders Verity out of rage.
At the end of the novel, Lowen finds a letter in the floorboards of Verity’s old room, addressed to her husband. The letter said that the manuscript was an old writing trick to become a better author. Verity says that she was told to write her life’s story from the perspective of a villain, instead of a hero, meaning that everything in the autobiography was fake. The letter also says that Verity’s husband had found the manuscript months had and staged the car accident to make it look like Verity committed suicide, when in reality, it was her husband’s first attempt at killing Verity for what he thought she had done.
Now, the question that left us at the end of the novel was- what was real, the manuscript, or the letter? Fans sided more toward believing the manuscript was real, and that Verity only wrote the letter to cover up her actions. There are also bits and pieces of the novel that do not add up with the contents of the letter.
Verity first came out in December of 2018. On September 27th, 2022, the hardcover version of the novel was released, which includes a bonus chapter at the very end. In this new chapter, more things were revealed about Verity’s husband, Jeremy, who is now romantically involved with Lowen.
Lowen and Jeremy had another baby girl and moved away with his and Verity’s son after Verity’s murder, which was covered up as her passing in her sleep. Lowen describes how she is still obsessed with Verity, constantly thinking about her and her relationship with Jeremy, and worried that Jeremy was happier with Verity than he is with her. She also says that Jeremy’s son, Crew had been careless with the new baby. Lowen finds her three-month-old daughter outside laying in the front yard after Crew put her there because her crying was annoying him. He also tends to yell at the baby to be quiet.
In the chapter, Jeremy and Lowen take the kids to the beach where they run into one of Verity’s old friends. Terrified that she was suspicious, Jeremy tells Lowen to take the kids to the car to get ready to leave, and when Lowen turns around, Jeremy was drowning the woman. She doesn’t tell anyone but grows concerned about how easily and quickly he had done that twice now.
From what was revealed in this new chapter, fans are reconsidering what they think is a real letter or the manuscript. It is questionable whether Verity was the psychotic one who did all the things said in her manuscript. Or was the letter real, and Jeremy is the real psychopath? It is also a theory that their son, Crew, was the one who killed his sister, and Verity was covering that up for him. With Crew’s actions toward his infant sister, it is speculated that he is the one with psychotic tendencies, along with his father.
Although the chapter did not give us any clear answers, just more questions, it did tell us one thing- that every character is crazy in one way or another. Even Lowen’s obsession with Verity makes me question her sanity and even her credibility as a narrator. After much consideration, I think I lean toward Team Letter, but I’m also Team “We Need a Sequel, ASAP”.