The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

I do enjoy a book that gets right to the point. This is a very barebones novella that doesn't really have a wasted scene and gets into the meat of the story that it wants to tell right away. I just wish the story was a little more interesting.

Danielle (and she's quick to correct people whenever they call her something otherwise) is kind of a professional vagrant who's trying to figure out why a close friend committed suicide after leaving an anarchist commune that they thought was the best thing since sliced bread. Danielle manages to find the place, just as a supernatural event splits the town into two factions at each others' throats. She kind of incidentally gets wrapped up with one side, but then starts to wonder if she made a mistake.

This is my second time reading Margaret Killjoy; I didn't even register that it was the same author as Country of Ghosts until I was a third of the way through and thought, "this scene really reminds me of a similar scene in... oh, that's why." Again we get to see what an anarchist society looks like, albeit on a much smaller and believable scale this time. And it's not perfect, but I think that's the point and the characters in-fiction even say so. It's another exercise in "at least it's not capitalism," but wasn't exactly appetizing to me personally.

There's nothing necessarily bad about this book, it just kinda felt on-rails and predictable to me, as if the author just wanted to write about some cool punk lifestyle characters first and came up with a plot second. Which is fine (and I'm certainly not cool enough to hang out with anyone described in this book), but I felt like the "we summoned a demon and now we don't know what to do because we didn't think it would actually work" storyline was kind of wasted here.

First in a [b:Tor.com collection of 4 queer-authored novellas published for Pride 2018|39724296|In Our Own Worlds Four LGBTQ+ Tor.com Novellas|Margaret Killjoy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522942282l/39724296.SY75.jpg|61405231], 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 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?