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A review by ghostboyreads
The Lamb by Lucy Rose
4.0
"On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain. The tub yellowed near the plughole and there was a peachy hue up the curve of the bath. It was the same colour as my skin. Milky and a little buttery, like the outer edges of a bruise."
At once both beautiful and hideous, The Lamb is a harrowing, intense, and honestly, superbly disgusting reading experience. Here, alluring and gorgeous prose collide with a horrific subject matter, resulting in a wonderful and ruinous story. This novel has, what must be, one of the very best opening passages to exist. Right away, you're shown what you're getting into, you're exposed to something gruesome and sickening. Nothing is shied away from, the horrible, crushing and claustrophobic reality of this novel is apparent from the very first page. The Lamb is so, so very sad, a heavy sense of bleakness weighs this novel down, and, it's impossible to escape just how sorrowful of a story this is. It's a slow moving thing, a maddening look at desperation, desire and love, it's a beast of a novel.
Interspersed throughout all of the horror and the cannibalism, there lies the heart of this novel, a sapphic love story that becomes the undoing of everything. The Lamb does so many things extremely well, how it portrays love might be one of its greatest strengths. Here, love is messy and complicated, in fact, nothing is ever simple in The Lamb - even the language has subtle shifts with Margot going from loving descriptions of her mother to seeing her as something more monstrous and foul as the story progresses. This book is so vile, and so upsetting. On its surface, it's about hunger, but thankfully, doesn't have a central food motif, the hunger is simply a vessel for us to explore a void that can never be filled.
At once both beautiful and hideous, The Lamb is a harrowing, intense, and honestly, superbly disgusting reading experience. Here, alluring and gorgeous prose collide with a horrific subject matter, resulting in a wonderful and ruinous story. This novel has, what must be, one of the very best opening passages to exist. Right away, you're shown what you're getting into, you're exposed to something gruesome and sickening. Nothing is shied away from, the horrible, crushing and claustrophobic reality of this novel is apparent from the very first page. The Lamb is so, so very sad, a heavy sense of bleakness weighs this novel down, and, it's impossible to escape just how sorrowful of a story this is. It's a slow moving thing, a maddening look at desperation, desire and love, it's a beast of a novel.
Interspersed throughout all of the horror and the cannibalism, there lies the heart of this novel, a sapphic love story that becomes the undoing of everything. The Lamb does so many things extremely well, how it portrays love might be one of its greatest strengths. Here, love is messy and complicated, in fact, nothing is ever simple in The Lamb - even the language has subtle shifts with Margot going from loving descriptions of her mother to seeing her as something more monstrous and foul as the story progresses. This book is so vile, and so upsetting. On its surface, it's about hunger, but thankfully, doesn't have a central food motif, the hunger is simply a vessel for us to explore a void that can never be filled.
"I took my knife and fork and pulled the meat apart. It was tender. So tender. I'd thought Eden had given me a gamey piece, but I'd been wrong. She had given me something beautiful. When I put it on my tongue, it fell apart at the first bite. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted in my short life. I wondered if this was what Mama had felt when she'd dipped her fingers into the brain of her first stray."
Brutal, completely and utterly unhinged, authentic and honest, Lucy Rose's The Lamb is all of these things and so much more. Not only does it navigate so many difficult to consume topics in such a short space of time, it does so without ever weakening them. It's such a fascinating story, and though, most of the characters aside from Margot are largely difficult to like, they're so extremely interesting. As awful as it is to be stuck within this situation, you can't help but want to stay. The Lamb so vividly captures that specific feeling of isolation and what it's like to be trapped within your own circumstances. Much like its opening passage, the ending of this novel is amazing too, its perhaps the best passage in this entire story. This is simply a beautiful and haunting novel.
"The night I wore Mama's lipstick, I had a dream that I pulled out her teeth so she couldn't smile anymore. I didn't want to see those teeth. She was still as I held open her jaw and pulled them out one by one. 'I love you, Mama,' I said. 'You don't have to be hungry anymore.'"