“Sometimes, you just have to get a knife in your hands and make it clear which way the stabby end is pointing.”
So begins Margaret Killjoy’s novella The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, the first of a pair of books that introduces a fantastic world of magic in America’s decrepit heartland, featuring a band of genderqueer, anarchist demon hunters. The two books are short, sharp, get straight to the point, and present a fantastic world that can be consumed in a single sitting.
Some spoilers ahead for the two books.
In The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, Danielle Cain is hitchhiking to the abandoned town of Freedom, Iowa, the last place her friend Clay lived before he killed himself in a hotel room. She’s trying to piece together his story and why he ended his life, and discovers that the town has been transformed into an anarchist commune, one that’s home to a particularly nasty demon in the form of a red, three-antlered deer named Uliksi.
