When my editor reached out to me to say I would be the right person to conduct an interview for a book about a mother and daughter who live in the woods and eat people, it was a no brainer to accept. I’ve never been more flattered in my life.
That book is The Lamb (Harper, 2025), a contemporary queer folk tale by filmmaker and debut author Lucy Rose. The novel follows Eden, a young girl struggling to reconcile her ordinary life outside her home with her private, domestic life ruled over by her cannibalistic mother, only named Mama. Together, Mama and Eden feed on people they call strays, lost and wayward souls whose disappearances won’t attract attention or alarm. When Mama takes a liking to a particularly enigmatic stray, bringing her into their home, it threatens the bedrock of their strange household.
Since its release, The Lamb has garnered critical praise from a range of prominent writers and media outlets. Kirkus Reviews described the novel as having “rich, almost unguent prose [which] carries the story through its gruesome developments . . . [digging] deep into the viscera of the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters, lovers, and one’s own physical and emotional hungers” and BookPage said it “blurs the lines between hunger and gluttony, human and animal, love and revulsion. It’s hypnotic, grotesque and beautiful all at once.” Perhaps most notably, The Lamb recently secured a coveted place on the Sunday Times Bestsellers List.
I had the opportunity and pleasure to speak with Rose over Zoom to discuss her novel, folktales, the domesticity of horror, childhood, abuse, the interplay between fiction and filmmaking, and, of course, cannibalism. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
***
The Rumpus: I want to say right off the bat that you have one of the best first lines of a novel that I’ve read in years, perhaps. “When I was six years old I found three fingers in the bathroom drain.” How long did you agonize over it?
Lucy Rose: Thank you so much. Do you know what, weirdly, this has built up a strange sort of pressure for my second novel in terms of making it have a good first line, and I have agonized so much for the first line of my second book. But this line just sort of fell out of me because of how I wrote the book. It actually started out as a series of flash fictions. I realized that I was writing all these flash fictions about the same mother and daughter, and then that they were all one narrative, rather than disconnected. And all my favorite horror movies have opening stingers. I wanted that to be present in the book, that feeling of an opening stinger.
Rumpus: The novel has themes of consumption and gore, and its fair share of body horror. There’s a deep viscerality there. But I had the very interesting experience in reading the book in feeling less horrified by the gore as the story continued. Was this something you intended to go into the text? I’m very curious about your process here.
Rose: That makes me so happy because one of my hidden secrets is that I’m a bit of a Tumblr nerd. And if you go back really far into that for me, you will see so many memes and GIFs from the show Hannibal. One of the things I loved specifically about that show was the way that the main character is a cannibal, and it made me so hungry when he was cooking the human meat. The cinematography has the style of a cooking show—for example, they show him chopping up and salting lungs, as if it was food that was going to be served in a fancy bistro. It genuinely made me feel hungry. That’s the one thing that I wanted, for the food and the gore to kind of become normal, in a sense. It kind of relates to that thing of real life where you put a frog in boiling water, and it doesn’t realize that it’s being boiled alive. Then you have that moment of realization of: “Oh my God, I’m being boiled alive.”
Rumpus: There’s an everydayness of these horrifying experiences, the juxtaposition of the domesticity of the characters’ lives informing some of the more extreme, monstrous moments later on. To a certain degree, that seems to be inherent to your work.
Rose: So, I have my own approach to horror, but to be honest it’s not something that I’ve thought about or done too consciously. But on reflection, I like to have a two-pronged approach to the antagonists and antagonism in the story. There’s a very conscious real threat, that being the cannibalism, and then I have this undertone that I want to be emotional and relatable. The cannibalism is very elevated, that’s not something that could happen to someone any day. I try to find a way to make the elevated and the emotional become one unit of terror, if that makes sense. I think the key to that in this novel is as a character. She is quite obviously awful, a truly terrible person. But adding those everyday nuances to her to make her feel like she’s someone you would meet, someone that you could quite easily fall under the spell of. From there, the domesticity is because it’s her space. And because it’s her place, she’s in control.
Rumpus: While this is very much an adult novel, the main character is a child and sees through a child’s lens. How did you approach striking that balance?
Rose: It’s so interesting because I was going through my desk a couple of weeks ago and something happened related to this. Just to paint a picture of what my desk looks like, it’s piled high with scraps of paper, junk mail. It’s just a chaos den of all sorts of bits and pieces that I pick up throughout my day and just leave there. I was cleaning up because the pile itself is becoming such a monster. I was throwing thing after thing out into a bin. And my partner stopped me when I was holding these scrap pieces of paper. And they told me it was the first thing I’d ever written for The Lamb. It said “Girl, 13, is scared she’s gonna be eaten by her mum.” That flash fiction ended up in Chapter 11, which is where we first see the Eden character out of the frosty window.
There was never a question that it was from the perspective of this young girl, because it offered such a specific way to explore this horror. And I think if it was from the perspective of any other character, the horror would have felt so different. Through the eyes of a child, you can kind of really manipulate what’s real and what’s not because of a child’s sense of space, their sense of reality. I know when I was small, I was such a gullible child. I believed everything that everybody told me—if someone told me a scary story, that was it. I believed that story and I was terrified forever. And even just in terms of sense of scope, kids are so amazing and brilliant because the world is just so huge to them.
To children, a door isn’t just a door. It’s like this massive, enormous thing, almost a vortex. So, I love the way that kids view the world and they’re just wonderful, wholesome little creatures. Margot has been involved in terrible things, and yet she’s still incredibly redeemable. It’s hard to write adult characters like that because adult characters are so conscious of their sense of right and wrong, whereas a child’s sense of right and wrong is not fully developed. It’s always changing until their frontal lobe develops.
I just find them interesting to write because they have such a different way of viewing the world and have such strong emotions. When they feel things, they feel them so big and so full. There’s something so fun about writing characters that just unapologetically feel the way that they feel. It’s cathartic as a writer to be able to just put that all down on the page without any inhibitions at all.
Rumpus: There are a lot of very unspoken, scary things about being a child that we as adults don’t necessarily remember or choose not to remember. That’s one of the things I was reflecting on as I read this.
Rose: Yeah, children are just like that. I have someone in my life who is really young, but she’s actually gone through quite a lot. There’s a lot of wisdom there. Children pick up on so much and they’re so honest. They do not lie about anything, they just say it. And I remember that’s exactly how I was as well. Then those behaviors are sandpapered out of them by culture, by society, and I think a lot of our experiences as children are sandpapered down in a similar way.
Rumpus: That ties into something that is a big part of the novel. While I don’t want to give away too much, there are supernatural elements where it’s uncertain if they’re real or imagined. That’s such a staple of genre fiction right now and I’m curious if you have an official stance or if you want to leave it ambiguous.
Rose: There’s no question that those things are real, because that’s her reality. Again, I just love that thing in children that they’re just like—they just want to believe what people are telling them. And I think that that’s something that’s so beautiful—I wish I still had it as an adult—that yearning to just believe in beautiful things that are happening around us. And I think the novel is obviously very folktale-coded. I grew up in a part of the world that is extremely rural and isolated. There weren’t very many people around, so my way of experiencing the world was to experience it through the lens of nature and the oral storytelling that I was given through people around me.
For instance, the woman who lived next to us was a farmer’s wife, and she used to tell us these really scary stories about the woodland. That became my way of understanding how the world works and the science of the world and the morals of the world. Those are things that definitely stay with you and they made their way into the book.
Rumpus: In the book, there’s a folktale about a rabbit woman. There’s the version that the Eden character tells the protagonist about, then we hear a much different version of the story later. It was clear to me as soon as that passage came up that your work was deeply informed by folktales.
Rose: Folktales are so good as a basis for horror because all the oldest spooky stories were all given orally, so I wanted that element of oral storytelling in the book. I think the heritage of horror is in all those really short cautionary tales that are passed down between people. These stories can be a sort of cultural armor for people. When we’re in difficult times or you know, when we’re experiencing big shifts in culture, those ways of communicating with people become almost like safety blankets. They’re ways of keeping yourself safe and I really, really, really wanted that in The Lamb.
Rumpus: What are some of the themes that you came back to over and over again when writing The Lamb?
Rose: One of my first readers gave me the manuscript back, and they highlighted every single time I’d used the sentiment of the main character wanting to be remembered. It must have been a hundred, maybe two hundred times. I thought, “Wow, this character really wants to be remembered. She doesn’t want to be forgotten.” Ultimately, at the heart of the story there’s a lot about women’s bodies. There’s this constant theme of birth, and about whether or not it’s right to have a child. And when you look to it, the heart of the story is really about child abuse. One of the sentiments felt so often among survivors is this desperation of not wanting to be forgotten—stories about not wanting to be forgotten and just wanting to be seen.
Rumpus: I made a note of the theme of abuse and women’s bodies as I was reading this. Feel free not to answer, but I’d be very interested if you wanted to expand on that.
Rose: God, how do I phrase this? Abuse toward women is often perpetrated by other women, but it’s done as an extension of patriarchy. It’s a complicated issue. It doesn’t mean that those women aren’t necessarily fully evil. It just means that there are complicated forces at work in our society that shape the way we behave. There’s something interesting about the way that women can become a tool of patriarchy to erode the welfare of other women. And that is so central to the book, I think. There’s no perfect victim, and there’s no perfect villain.
There’s a scene where the main character gets her first period that was very important for me to include. There’s such a strange taboo around menstruation. I remember having my first period, and it was quite a traumatizing experience because of the pain. I thought my appendix had burst and I was asking to be taken to the hospital—that would have been really embarrassing, it’s just a period. But human bodies are not perfect machines. When you have an ache or a pain, you seek out a healer to help you. But it’s just one of those things that you’re expected to be very quiet about. There’s a very Victorian repressed attitude around periods that I find fascinating.
And there’s something invasive about periods as well. It’s something that’s happening inside your body without your consent. That theme of invasion was important for me to include in the narrative.
Rumpus: You’re not just a novelist, you’re also a filmmaker. How do those two forms intersect for you?
Rose: I think I’m a very visual person, and I love making films so much. I don’t know how much you know about making films in the UK, but it’s really hard. I get a certain joy from making films because it’s such a team effort and I find that really beautiful. When you succeed, you succeed together. When you fail, you fail together.
Writing, even though it takes a whole village to publish a book, with so many people contributing to this final product, there’s less of a team spirit. Writing a book has pushed me to be more confident in myself, and it’s pushed me to advocate for myself more. It’s pushed me to think of myself as a singular artist rather than a part of a piece of a machine. I’m really happy that I’ve been able to have that experience. Making films—especially since COVID—is difficult, and I can’t wait to get back to it. But this novel has given me a certain understanding of myself because I got to be so solitary with it. Something that I’m curious about is how much my voice is going to have changed as I go back into film after this book.
I just love all different mediums, and I’m not somebody who says if you commit yourself, you should commit yourself to one thing. I think it’s better to be jack of all trades, master of none, rather than jack of all trades, master of one. Maybe that’s the ADHD. I collect things like a magpie. I need to try everything. There’s just a certain joy, isn’t there, in trying different ways of doing things?
***
Author photograph by J Reed
