The Lamb: Where Cannibalism Is Therapy

Culture has an insatiable appetite for cannibal narratives—from the pages of Bones and All or A Certain Hunger, to the transcendent lyrics of Ethel Cain’s Strangers—there’s certainly an extensive buffet of cannibalistic stories having a moment right now.

This January, Lucy Rose added The Lamb to the menu—and devastated my inner child.

Told through the eyes of pre-teen Margot, The Lamb is a folklore-inspired horror depicting the secluded life of mother-and-daughter cannibals who seduce ‘strays’ to bake into pies.

Rose lovingly weaves the intricacies of the female experience into her pages. Although laced with toe-curling images of roast-stranger-dinner, or fingers encased in buttery pastry—simultaneously—plaintive reflections on the rawness of girlhood, complexities of maternal relationships, tender sapphic love and female sexuality, are all sandwiched between bleaker moments of gothic-flavoured horror.

The unfiltered female experience is encapsulated through several magnetic characters, of which ‘Mama’ is la-creme-dela-creme. The beating heart of the novel, Mama is an explosion of everything we’ve been taught a woman shouldn’t be.

She stuffs her face, has no table manners, and sucks bones clean. Her home is unkempt and her hygiene lacking, but still the suitors roll in. And she enjoys them loudly. Her lust is untethered; She seduces without fear of consequence.

But most of all, she openly resents motherhood—and does a horrible job of parenting.

While Margot adores her Mama with every bone in her body—living to earn her affection even at the cost of friendship and normal childhood lore—we soon notice the cracks in Mama’s attempts to connect with her flesh and blood. As the unrequited love evolves it becomes clear that motherhood can never truly fill the hole in Mama’s belly.

 “I wanted to write about women constantly swallowing their anger.” Rose explains in a chatty, GRWM-style, YouTube video. “As somebody who has lived as a woman, there’s so much I’ve had to drop.”

Mama certainly tries to ‘drop’ her daughter.

“I never wanted to be a Mama.” She laments, in one gut-wrenching moment.

So while Margot spends her childhood tiptoeing around their isolated homestead, her mother sleeps with men on the kitchen table. And when Mama falls in love with a mysterious stranger, Eden, Margot is pushed to the way-side entirely.

On paper, Eden’s and Mama’s love should be paradise—free, wild women, living from the land, unapologetically Sapphic, unaffected by the male gaze, deeply connected—but to Margot, life devolves into Hell.

Mama’s struggle with motherhood, and living with the breathing embodiment of her previous loveless marriage, is something many women sympathise with. It's a story we’ve seen many versions of: the crippling effects of prematurely pigeon-holing people into heteronormative, cookie-cutter lives.

But Mama is not just a mother, she’s a woman, and a monsoon—erratic, compulsive, and addicted to self-destruction. Her cannibalism is not just a curse of insatiable hunger, hedonism and lust: It’s a desperation for love that only grows.

”I've always felt hunger,” Rose writes, “but I soon learned to associate “want” with “shame”.

The Lamb is my first five-star read of 2025. A feminist, queer, folklore-inspired novel featuring femgore? Impeccable. Lucy Rose is a master of imagery. The pacing is fantastic. I immediately fell in love with Margot.

But my main take-away, after crying over the last few pages, was how I felt, as a woman, reading it.

Rose’s words feel like a lullaby. Her female characters exist outside of the patriarchy, hetero-normativity, and beauty standards. They just are.

As women, we’re fed lies that our natural bodies are disgusting. We should pluck, wax, laser, and shave while men can walk the streets topless—hairy snail trail, uncovered nipples, and all. During our periods or in pregnancy we should be sexless, and don't think about mentioning birth control, or enjoying food, or how you don't give one about how you look today.

But in Margot’s home, the ugliness of love (and bodies) is shown just as intuitively as its pleasures. The female body becomes a shrine, to which food and sex are willing sacrifices. It’s unbelievably beautiful.

If you haven't already, I strongly urge you to pick up this novel.

Words by Eve Macdonald. Her Substack, Media Soup, can be found at the link