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tetrootz's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Suicide attempt, and Violence
Moderate: Panic attacks/disorders, Toxic relationship, Gun violence, Vomit, War, Toxic friendship, Suicide, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Murder, Misogyny, Injury/Injury detail, Hate crime, Grief, Gore, Gaslighting, Emotional abuse, Death, Cursing, Bullying, Body horror, Animal death, and Alcohol
Minor: Rape
owenblacker's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
First in a Tor.com collection of 4 queer-authored novellas published for Pride 2018, The Lamb will Slaughter the Lion is a punk fantasy. Alex Brown summarises the tone well in their Tor.com piece Anti-Doorstoppers: 10 Great SFF Novellas and Novelettes: “The story is part rural fantasy, part dark fantasy, and part horror. Think Supernatural but darker and queerer.”
Travelling to the anarchist utopian squatter-community of Freedom, Iowa, to find out why her old friend ran away from his found-family and the home that made him settle down from the road in order to kill himself in a motel room, squatter/nomad Danielle discovers an “eternal spirit” in the form of a blood-red, three-antlered deer is… “protecting”… the community.
With an author who is herself a transfeminine nomad, a queer protagonist and prominent trans secondary characters and characters of colour in the found-family, the story is effortlessly diverse and the setting itself is really interesting: the ancom utopia sounds lovely — but broken, inevitably, otherwise the community wouldn’t have needed to summon their protector, and with it the cost. But this isn’t just a what-happened-next; as KJ Charles puts it:
This is on one level a tense horror novel, where forces of the State and society and male violence are as much a sinister and pervasive threat as the heart-eating magic deer. But, as that suggests, it’s also a meditation on things like society, what anarchism means, how societies enforce rules and what it means to do so and who takes enforcement roles on themselves. How do we keep ourselves decent without a prospect of punishment for those who transgress? Who makes those calls?
And, as Killjoy put it in the book, “the revolution is about taking power away from the oppressors, not becoming them ourselves”.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Death, Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Police brutality, Violence, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Suicide and Rape
CN: mention of suicide, mention of rape, animal death, death of a loved one, abuse, violence, gore, state violence
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