Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

Such a unique book, a wonderful little allegory about power, corruption, anarchy, humanity and friendship. I love Margaret's music so I was very happy that I loved her writing too. Also, this could work wonders as a mini-series.

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donutlookaway's review

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dark mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix

3.25

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mikkitooloud's review

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I was first introduced to Margaret Killjoy on the "Behind the Bastards" podcast, but I hadn't read any of her books until now. This is fantastic! It's a really quick read, it took me maybe 3 hours. There's communism, body horror and shitty men! Ms. Killjoy excels in painting the scene with words; I really felt like I could see Freedom, Iowa.

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softbitten's review

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dark hopeful tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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owenblacker's review against another edition

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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”.

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