Giving new meaning to the term finger food, Lucy Rose’s THE LAMB is a delicious, delectable and demented story of cannibalism, carnality and coming of age.
A horror story, a love story, a fork tale with knives out, THE LAMB is all this and more, an accomplished and compulsive thriller that whets the appetite and keeps you asking for more.
Packed with wincingly convincing detail, THE LAMB calls us to share the irresistible and merciless secret of a mother and daughter anthropophagus as they prey on strays seeking succour in their country hideaway, sharing not only a terrible taboo but deep seated family issues.
Margot and Mama have lived in their woodland cottage since Margot can remember. When strangers present at their door, lost or broken down, Mama welcomes them in, offers drink and warmth, then flays and feasts on them, enclosed in a puff pastry coffin.
Then one day, a candidate for consumption knocks on their door, a woman called Eden, and Mama’s hunger for her inflames another kind of appetite. Not only does Eden kindle sexual desire in Mama, but reveals herself a kindred spirit in cannibal culinary craving.
After their first feast after becoming a family, Margot asks Eden about her own mother to which she answers “My ma died a long, long time ago. Moments after I was born. She was the first person I killed.”
Beguiling and beautiful, Eden becomes the serpent in the garden of the parent child paradise and Margot soon finds herself competing for Mama’s affections, a competition she is ill equipped for. It’s not an even playing field as Mama confesses, “You were supposed to be a promise of happiness, but you’ve eaten me alive.”
Written with an accomplished bite, THE LAMB never pulls its lunches delivering a compulsive thriller that satiates the appetite for surprise. Metaphor with the macabre, analogy with anathema, truth with taboo, plenty to chew on, although repellent to those who can’t handle the tooth.
THE LAMB could well have turned out a gross-out ghoul meets ghoul gazpacho of gore, but the author has made it into an unexpected bonne bouche, a skill which has made the subject matter palatable and compulsively readable.
THE LAMB by Lucy Rose is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson through Hachette.