Reviews

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

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actualspinster's review

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4.0

this fucking ruled tbh !!!!

greevianguy's review against another edition

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1.0

Novellas can be a powerful tool when wielded by a competent crafter. The advantage of writing a novella is being able to delve into multiple aspects of one complex idea without having to reach for other sources of conflict. For storytellers more concerned with entertainment than deep thought, novellas are a challenge of self-discipline and creativity. They must tell a satisfying tale while heavily cutting anything that does not develop the narrative.
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion does none of these things well. The author, Margaret Killjoy (who uses they/them pronouns), attempts to give us the story of an enclave of punk anarchist squatters who summon a vengeful spirit into their midst. The squatters summon this ‘endless spirit,’ a red, three-pronged deer named Uliksi, to dispatch a man who has become a tyrant in the community—wielding too much social and material capital. After killing the man for his crimes, the spirit gradually begins hunting down and killing his summoners. The characters feel compelled to undo the summoning and restore peace to the community. Also the United States is in the midst of, or recovering from, some great conflict and many cities are laying around abandoned. Already this sounds like the kitchen sink of concepts, which is foreboding of the disappointment in payoff to come. But from an outside perspective, I had a lot of perhaps undue faith in the unknown author to take this conglomerate of ideas and ring out something complex and gripping. In fact, I was incredibly excited to begin reading it. It was urban fantasy, it sounded unconventional, and it had a queer main character and supporting cast. There’s not much good queer fantasy out there, and I was desperate to find something of value to add to my shelves. So where does the novella stray from its promising path?

Spoiler

Punk drifter Danielle Cain is heading to the squatter town of Freedom, Iowa looking for answers to her friend Clay’s sudden, unexplained suicide. She quickly bumps into some of the residents of the town, who happen to be punk like her, and they all make a heavy-handed show for the reader of just how counter-culture they are and how cool and ideal that is. When introducing herself to the first person she meets, Danielle notes that her last name “wasn’t my legal name, but it was my punk name.” Then shortly after she notes that her new friends are incredibly friendly and welcoming, like all punks and squatters of course. She notes that they are on the couch, “lounging atop one another in the same way that punks and puppies do.” The statements here and throughout the book smell of the type of shirts that you can buy in teenager-aimed stores like Hot Topic that loudly proclaim “PUNK” across the front in a glaring font to remind their high school peers that they are the real thing. That is, it seems incredibly performative for observers and less meaningful for the people actually practicing it. To be fair, I am unfamiliar with punk culture, so I have no standard to gauge this representation against. But with how often the book insists on reminding the reader that the characters are punk and that punk is the way to be, it would make me think that punks are on a level with overzealous vegans in their insistence on convincing others of the virtue of their lifestyle.
The ideology of the book in general is oversimplified and preachy, when it truly could have been made into so much more. Animal Farm, a much better executed novella that the book references, dealt with the issue of authority by showing that power corrupts when left unchecked. Every aspect of Animal Farm works to explore that one central idea. The Lamb says that all power is inherently evil, but it doesn’t do anything to explore the deeper meaning of that statement. It wastes a good deal of its time expunging on the glory of punk anarchist culture, introducing a zany cast of characters, and bringing up small issues that immediately get resolved. A gay relationship is introduced that immediately falls apart and gets brushed under the rug. A hint of distrust and ulterior motives exists between the main characters that simply gets ignored and goes away over time. Uliksi holds the main character and her love interest hostage in a tree, then he leaves a few hours later and they can go, no problem. Amazingly, there’s a mini-conflict brought up and then destroyed within the space of a page, when some characters seriously contemplate keeping the spirit, then immediately get shot down by the wisdom of the main character, “I’ve been through way too much shit for you to switch sides on me now.” They drop the subject and never bring it up again. None of this is building up to commentary on anything, or at least, not any commentary intended by the author.
The central conflict seems to be this: who has the right to regulate morals in an anarchist society? Apparently no one, since the characters who decided to stand up against the tyrant in their community are punished by the spirit for wielding power over another person. Killjoy seems to say, “Look, I’m showing that judging tyrants is in itself evil, because judgement is wielding power over another person, and wielding power over people is bad.”
Despite how nonsensical it is to say that judgement is an act of evil that must be punished, (wouldn’t the spirit have to kill itself? For that matter, wouldn’t the characters we’re supposed to like be just as bad as the ones they’re fighting?) the author simply drops the subject at that point. The book is spent mostly moving about, wasting pages in various little tangents. The dialogue between the characters delves randomly into exposition and is often bafflingly wooden, “’Clay was my best friend,’ I said. ‘About a month ago, he slit his own throat.’ ‘Fuck,’ Brynn said. ‘That’s hardcore.’” The rest of the time is spent exhibiting how total anarchism plays out without going into any hard-hitting details of their lifestyle. It all just works, and we’re expected to accept that.
It is admittedly nice to see a large cast of queer characters filling roles straight characters get to do, but they get so little development that they, like the story, are underwhelming. Because we only get their identities—gay, queer, trans—and don’t see their characters fleshed out much beyond that, the representation falls flat. It’s also never explained exactly what the situation with United States is at the time; the beginning implication is that the economy has collapsed and a large portion of the country has become unlivable due to environmental hazards. But then one of the characters has an Instagram that he updates compulsively, and another buys a water key off the internet. They are mentioned to be getting food from a food bank, and Danielle drives easily to another state for a funeral, which all requires infrastructure, trade, tech maintenance, and highly developed government. This is all hand-waved as well. One could argue that the entire book is hand-waved.
The resolution of the book is a cluster of missteps. The conflict culminates with Danielle explaining to her new friends and the audience in the most soap-box moment she has that the spirit “was hunting his summoners because his summoners were predators.” Her friend who committed suicide was one of the summoners, so he “he killed himself, because he knew Uliksi was right to be after him” (emphasis hers). I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around this logic, especially since this cure-all solution is presented by her in one paragraph, with only bare-bones support from the previous 100 pages to back it up. In another bizarre reveal, one character admits that she was abused by her husband, so she killed him in relatively cold blood and then killed a few police officers in her escape. Danielle’s only response to this? “Damn.” This implies again that the main characters can do whatever they want, because they are the main characters and consistency with the moral code is inconvenient. Also it ends up that the spirit was leaving anyway because it didn’t feel like being there anymore, so banishing it was a non-issue the whole time. And for the epilogue, the gang decides to go and have a fun time hunting down more spirits without ever questioning the deeper morals of what they’re doing.
The story is inept in the way it handles its moral quandary, writing, dialogue, and plot, but it does have a few bright spots. Killjoy skillfully implies that the main character is trans, though never coming out and saying it, which is a surprising amount of restraint from a book that can’t seem to deal with anything else thoughtfully. They also somewhat convincingly show a community that has integrated acceptance into its very nature. “What pronouns do you prefer?” is dropped on page 18 during Danielle’s first meeting with the townsfolk, and no big deal is made of it. Danielle, a bisexual, begins an explicitly romantic relationship with another girl, Brynn, but they abstain from sex at Brynn’s request. This is treated as perfectly acceptable. It is nice to see both bisexual and celibate (perhaps asexual?) representation played out so front-and-center. Killjoy does have a certain way with words, especially when it comes to the descriptions of the horrific visage of the bloody demon deer and its undead host. Out of everything that the novel does, the images of the supernatural it evokes are what lasts after the reader turns the last page.
Overall, I would not recommend this novella to those looking for a thoughtful or inspiring read. Those who care less about quality and more about pulp entertainment might gain more from it than I did, but I am afraid that they too would find it ultimately disappointing in the final hand-wave of its action. I do wish to see what Killjoy produces in the future, since they did, after all, show a good deal of creativity in conceiving this project, and talent in the short bits of prose describing the dreaded monster stag. The world always needs more queer fantasy, though preferably good queer fantasy. Perhaps as their writing matures so will their interest in thoughtfully developing their work, and creating something more substantial out of it.