Last week we started our look at four novellas published in Tor’s LGBTQ-themed collection In Our Own Worlds, beginning with the Asian-set gender-fluid story about siblings, “The Black Tides of Heaven.” This week it’s Margaret Killjoy’s American punk horror-thriller “The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion,” featuring narrator Danielle Cain. She opens with the astute observation that
Sometimes you just have to get a knife in your hands and make it clear which way the stabby end is pointing. (1)
Danielle is not by nature violent, but she’s a seasoned traveler, someone who’s been on the road most of her life. More than a traveler, she’s the traveler, the archetype of a traveler, and she’s come to Freedom, Iowa, for answers about the mysterious suicide of her best friend/mentor Clay. In the opening scene, she has to pull her knife in order to convince the man who’s given her a ride that he needs to drop her off, not where he thinks she’ll be safe, but where she wants to be dropped.
Ten years of putting up with shit like that from drivers. It was getting old. Hell, at twenty-eight, I was getting old. Ten years ago I’d talk to drivers about anything and love them for it. I loved the nice ones for their kindness, I loved the crazies for their stories, and sure, I hated the racist pieces of shit, but if nothing else I got to feel like I had the pulse of this racist, piece-of-shit country. But a decade is an awfully long time, and whatever shine I’d found on the shit that is hitchhiking had long since faded. Still, it got me where I wanted to go.
She’s going to Freedom.
Freedom, Iowa, is a town that has been abandoned, abandoned by industry, by commerce, and ultimately, by its residents. A true ghost town, a place where misfits, anarchists, social outcasts and idealists have come together to make a genuine, working, utopian community. Outside, in the world, the nice ones, the crazies, and the racist pieces-of-shit endure in the desolation of a near-future America that feels like a lyric from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Inside, all the escapees from America’s “freedom” find anarchist freedom—not, as Ursula Le Guin posited it, a bomb-in-the-car-trunk kind of anarchy, but a we-don’t-need-yer-feckin’-institutions kind, a community of cooperative free expression, a place to live out their own personal ideals. Sound a lot like utopia.
It’s also the last place Clay lived before he killed himself and, being the only person Clay considered family and in possession of his mysterious suicide note, Danielle thinks the squatter community will yield answers about his death.
It takes the threat of violence to free her from the outside world and put her on the road to Freedom. That road, however, is not without its own menace. Almost immediately Danielle meets a red deer. A bright red deer eating a rabbit. We’re talking evisceration-level eating a rabbit. And the deer isn’t just red—it’s blood red.
What a welcome.
Writing for the Verge, Andrew Liptak notes that
Killjoy’s world pushes magic to the edges of society, seen and used only by tiny communities living as far to the edge of mainstream society as possible. Stories about hidden pockets of magic in forgotten American towns feel a bit more convincing.
What makes these books so much fun to read is their setting in the middle of the American heartland: towns hollowed out by the Great Recession and lost opportunities, their former residents fleeing for major population areas. Killjoy’s characters are hitchhikers, anarchists, and squatters, looking for a place to settle and live with the freedom that they desire. In these dead spaces, they bring new life.
To her surprise, Danielle finds not only welcome, but family. Clay’s old friends take her in:
There’s a kind of hospitality found amongst squatters and punks that I’ll never stop appreciating. When there’s not enough to go around, that’s when people share. As far as I can tell, it’s part of why us poor get taken advantage of so much.
Social critique could overwhelm the narrative, but it doesn’t. Magic realism could overwhelm the mystery, but it doesn’t. It all works.
One of the reasons it works so well is because of the narrator’s voice: Danielle is observant, quick, possessed of both acerbic wit and a soft heart, and her observations are pretty deadpan. Her companions Vulture, Thursday, Doomsday, and Brynn, Danielle’s potential love interest, are all full-bodied characters—punks, artists, anarchists, lovers and dreamers. Even the antagonists are understandable, and Danielle is wise enough to know that every villain thinks he’s actually a hero (I’m using the pronouns deliberately throughout this diary, by the way. It’s a hint.)
The first person she meets is
a gangly, handsome fellow...His septum was pierced. One side of his head was shaved; the rest of his hair was thick black curls. His short dress was clean, faded black, stitched up in a few places with dental floss. He was heavily tattooed, mostly blackwork…
“I’m Vulture,” he said. “What pronouns do you prefer?”
Like I said, utopia.
I’d be a liar if I said, though, that I really liked the book. I appreciated it, and there are aspects of the story that are spectacular. The nature of the magic, for instance, is a reminder that magic in fantasy is dangerous, an amoral power, a tool that can easily redound on its wielder. In a story that focuses on refugees from society and presents society as a crushing authoritarian force, there’s also an profound observation that, even in utopia, there’s always an asshole who thinks he should be in charge. Add weapons, and it’s what makes one person’s utopia another person’s hell. Of course.
So what remains worth investing faith in? Family, perhaps. Danielle comes to Freedom because Clay, her family, killed himself. Something that happened in Freedom led him to suicide. She makes a new family while solving a mystery, setting to rights a great evil, and escaping the vengeance of an outside world intent on crushing the little squatter community as if it in all its idealism poses an existential threat to humanity.
As unpleasant as it was to have the massed power of the state waiting to take us into custody, waiting for comrades to betray us was worse. The woods were inviting. I could make my way over the hill, and by daylight I might be out of range of police blockades and Uliksi’s wrath alike. Travelers, they say, watch out for themselves. The situation was hopeless. No reason for us all to go down.
Brynn found my hand with hers, and her strength made its way into me.
Collective safety, sometimes, trumps personal safety. Friends who aren’t willing to fight alongside one another aren’t friends.
Real families are forged in adversity, and Danielle’s new family has one hell of a baptism of fire. Uliksi, by the way, is the demon blood-red deer, a vengeful protective guardian of the community, one that happens to make zombie critters like bunnies, foxes, birds, etc., by feeding on them. Why Uliksi is in Freedom, and why it turns on its inhabitants, is part of the mystery, a mystery solved by anarchist ethics:
The revolution is about taking power away from the oppressors, not becoming them ourselves.
It strikes me that “The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion” will pair well with Le Guin’s spectacular “The Day Before the Revolution,” which is also anarchist, although it predates punk.
Like JY Yang’s “The Black Tides of Heaven,” this is the first of a series, currently titled the “Danielle Cain Series.” Yang’s series focuses on the tides of history and the causes of cataclysm. Killjoy’s series will focus on Danielle’s crew and their demon-hunting adventures, the second of which is already out, also from Tor, “The Barrow Will Send What It May.”
Both “The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion” and “The Black Tides of Heaven” are the kinds of books that self-righteous evangelical types will petition to have banned from libraries because “they perpetuate the homosexual agenda” by—gasp—depicting LGBTQ people as people, people who just want to live their lives with authenticity and dignity. The sexuality and gender subtexts are pretty much that—subtexts. That’s gonna change, because the next two books are love stories, heart-thumping and romantic love stories.
In the meantime, it’s good to remember the punk anarchist motto, voiced by Doomsday:
“One day you’ll die. One day you’ll be in prison...Today, though, today you’re alive. Today you’re free.”
Note
1) All unattributed references are to the electronic edition of “The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.” If you want page numbers, you’ll have to get the print version. I don’t have it.