*There are going to be more spoilers ahead than Uliksi had ribcages in
its collection, so don’t read on if you don’t want the book spoiled!*
There’s a lot to love about Margaret Killjoy’s The Lamb with Slaughter
the Lion. The novela has a great
setup, a neat world, solid pacing, and a protagonist I was delighted to follow
around.
I ordered the book on a recommendation because my wife and I are reading
science fiction and fantasy by non-male authors lately, and the Danielle Cain
books seemed right up our alley. It
arrived on a weekend, and I immediately started reading it out loud to my wife
while we sat on the back patio. The
first third of the book flew by and we were hooked.
The book has a real noir feel throughout.
The lead character is jaded and idealistic, cautious and trusting. Her personal quest to find out why her closest
friend Clay killed himself brings her at the books opening to Freedom, Iowa,
an abandoned town reclaimed by squatters and idealists. The time and world that the novela is set in
feels like a slightly more apocalyptic version of the here and now. Were it not for the police and the existence
of Walmart in the story, I would have told you that it must take place in a
post-apocalyptic world.
I like Killjoy’s take on urban fantasy by divorcing it from the urban
half of that name. It’s more properly
rural fantasy or small-town fantasy, thought neither of those names are
particularly catchy. The back of my
edition calls it “anarcho-punk fantasy,” which is a much cooler name and a
pretty good description since Freedom, Iowa is very anarcho-punk in its
construction. And I dig on that
construction. I love the casualness with
which the world is peopled with every gender, sexual identity, and sexual
orientation. It might be one of the
reasons the setting felt post-apocalyptic to me, because I could picture these
characters existing in Avery Alder’s Dream Askew or Vincent and Meguey
Baker’s Apocalypse World. This
world is not just unapologetically queer; it is celebratorily (is that a word?)
queer. Yeah, we need more of that in our
fiction (and even more so in our non-fiction!).
As for the story itself, Uliksi is a great take on the old golem tale of
a rabbi creating a guardian who then becomes a threat in and of itself. Everything about the Uliksi is cool, from its
three-horned, blood-red look, to its practice of eating hearts and sleeping on a
bed of removed ribcages, to its stone-cold staring game. It was a neat idea to have the Uliksi active
only in daylight hours as opposed the the classic trope of having the creature
that can only stalk at night. And giving
Uliksi an army of undead grazers and smaller animals was awesome.
It was only the in the final quarter of the book that it faltered for
me. First, what the hell is up with Clay
researching only to leave quoted poetry that clarifies nothing? He could have written, “we weaponized Uliksi,
and for that we became the very things we summoned Uliksi to eliminate.” Also, it is a pet peeve of mine (and I know I’m
not alone in this) for characters to recognize obscure lines of poetry, and
having Brynn casually recognize a misquoted Robert Frost line and a misquoted
William Blake line was eye-rollingly bad, especially since the recognition gave
neither the reader nor the characters any insight. Another question: why did it take Uliksi
years to figure out that it had been “weaponized” and only just now realized it
and killed Anchor? Rebecca and Clay were
clearly aware before Uliksi was; why?
Someone of injures another person in the privacy of their own home and
Uliksi just knows and is ready to punish.
Figuring out motives and actions is what Uliksi does. It’s mere convenience that Uliksi started
acting up the day Danielle arrived, and that feels hollow. Then, having Uliksi pick and choose his work
in the final scene is awfully convenient, settling on Eric as its final kill
before skipping town because of the thinned veil. It could have stayed and wreaked whatever
vengeance it wanted before leaving, which it seems like it would be required to
do given the nature of its summoning.
So I liked the pacing and the ideas in the ending, but it all just felt
pasted together.
When the gang decided to become “demon-hunters” at the end, I actually
laughed out loud because it was so unexpected. First, no one in the group has any real experience
with demons, so why would you feel called to do so. Second, Uliksi was the most decent creature,
having a set of rules and following them, as opposed to the humans who continue
to fuck everything up, so why hunt demons?
Seems like it would be better to hunt humans who were awful, or hunt
humans who used demons to do their bidding at the expense of the demons and
other people. Third, Danielle is the
only developed character in the five-person team. Everyone else is fun enough, but they are
only vaguely even characters. Vulture is
a night owl (heh!) who takes pictures for Instagram. Brynn tattoos. The Days are a badass unit. The team thing feels more like a gimmick to
sell the book and the series as a TV serial than it does a logical next step.
So those were my frustrations. They
were not frustrating enough to keep me from ordering the second book in the
series (which I admittedly did before getting to the final quarter of the
book), and they won’t stop me from reading the second book.
A smattering of final thoughts: The writing is solid and direct, which
fits the noir style nicely. Dani is a
better name than Danielle, so it’s disappointing that she insists on the latter. Tall-as-Fuck is a brilliant last name. It would have been nice to see anyone in
Freedom, Iowa doing a lick of work to keep this anarcho-communist-punk paradise
afloat.
