The Lamb: Interview with Lucy Rose
Lucy Rose’s debut novel The Lamb is a gripping, lyrical coming-of-age story set deep in the Cumbrian fells. It follows Margot as she struggles with her Mama’s desire to consume the lost people – the strays – that appear at their door. With the arrival of the magnetic stray Eden, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires and make a bid for freedom.
Read more about Lucy’s inspirations for the novel, from Cumbria’s bloody heritage, to the liminal spaces of childhood, to the necessity of courage, friendship and resilience in the face of horror.
Congratulations on your debut novel! It’s been so exciting to see the hype for it building all over social media and through your visits to bookshops. We’re all dying to know, where did the idea for the novel come from?
I started writing The Lamb accidentally. I was writing a lot of flash fictions and about 15,000 words into these stories, I realised I was writing about the same family. It’s one of the only stories I’ve ever written where the idea came fully formed. I still have the piece of paper I wrote the log line onto when I first had the idea and I treasure it always! That went on (almost word for word) to be my query pitch and even the pitch we used on submission. A little bit of that has even crept into some of the marketing materials. Having said that, I think that it’s probably a story and set of themes that have been ruminating for a very long time.
The Cumbrian landscape is a vividly rich and beautiful setting for the story but it is also the cause of such darkness by producing the Hemlock used to drug Mama’s victims. Why did you decide to set the story in Cumbria, and do you think it wouldn’t have worked as well in a different setting?
First and foremost, I grew up in very rural Cumbria and so it’s a landscape that I feel very drawn to. It’s one thing to hear the folktales and the oral stories surrounding a place, but as I grew up, I learned a lot about its heritage and its bloodshed. It has its own tortured past, dealing with settlers and colonisation (Romans, Norse, English and Scottish militaries), which is also a huge part of why the dialect is so distinct because so many have settled there. There was even a point it wasn’t claimed by either Scotland or England and thus became a dangerous, almost lawless space, where people could cross the border to commit their misdeeds. And I think that even though a lot of that history is long forgotten and buried, it’s still felt today in the atmosphere and in the culture of the space.
The Lamb is concerned with dark subjects from death and the body to hunger and animalism – yet Margot sees this darkness as quite beautiful. How difficult was it to strike the right balance of horror and beauty?
I was very conscious about giving Margot safe spaces in the novel. The Lamb tackles a lot of difficult subjects, but right at the centre, it’s a story about someone experiencing child abuse. The only thing that felt right to me was to give Margot the tools she needed to survive. She needed courage, she needed friendship, she needed resilience, so she’d not be eroded down, and last, she needed periphery worlds and characters to give her warmth, and to show her what kindness and love really look like. It was a delicate balance, but whenever I felt lost, I looked to all the final girls I love the most and thought about the qualities in them I like. And what I love about final girls is that all of them, despite the horrors, keep their warmth and kindness intact – even if they lose something else in order to survive.
The novel plays with time and memory in an interesting way. Margot and Mama’s house seems almost suspended in time with very little influence from the outside world, while their victims’ personal belongings carry such memory that they can almost talk. Tell us more about the significance of this timeless liminal space, and why you chose to tell the story in this way.
I think that’s what childhood feels like. It feels very liminal. And especially to a child who has a strange relationship with morbidity and death, like Margot. Some of my favourite stories are ghost stories, and I think many of those tales, even steeped in gothic iconography, are very liminal in their own ways too. But I also think that’s what it feels like to be a woman. We’re constantly taking one step forward and two steps back, and progress feels further and further away with every news cycle. My relationship with patriarchy and all the horrors it presents have influenced the liminal feeling in the novel for sure. I guess it feels like being trapped in a backrooms video – which are some of my favourite liminal spaces.
Lastly, how do you hope people react to The Lamb when it is finally out in the world? What would you like audiences to take away from the novel?
I hope that people come away feeling braver and kinder. The novel is a horror, and it dissects and studies some very difficult subject matter, but what I want more than anything in the world is for all the Margots to feel how powerful their courage is.
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The Lamb is published on 30 January 2025 with W&N, and we have two copies to give away!
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