The Lamb stirred from my love of oral folktales – in particular, the ones I’d heard growing up. I’ve always had an infatuation with the idea of stories and how we, as creatures, use stories as a tool of communication. And furthermore, how some stories are so powerful and hold so much meaning (even hundreds, if not thousands of years later), that they linger – the fairy tales come to mind. I like to think it’s humans from generations and generations back letting us know to keep safe: Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t walk in the woods alone. Don’t trust the wolf – even if he smiles to you.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted The Lamb to feel like that – like it was being passed from one mouth to another around a smouldering campfire someplace dark and cold, because those are the stories I remember most vividly from my childhood.
I always write my first drafts by hand, but this was particularly true for The Lamb. The first imaginings of it were written down on the back of recipes, postcards, and scrap pieces of paper because they were just little ideas I’d had here and there. Flash fictions I didn’t think would come to anything. But about 15, 000 in, I realised I was writing about the same hungry family. They were just these tiny stories about a mother and a daughter. I knew two things: that they hungered for human flesh, and that I couldn’t wait to see what they did next.
The Lamb is about love in all its different forms. Familial love, romantic love, self love and the love shared between both strangers and friends. Once I knew I was committing these characters to a whole novel, I decided to tell an unrequited love story between a mother and a daughter. I wanted to use these common narrative devices and tropes, which are used almost exclusively to explore, probe and examine romantic relationships, but use it instead to challenge some of the ideas we have about family bonds.
But I think the Lamb came around in the same way most great relationships do to: The lamb came because I wasn’t looking for it.
The Lamb by Lucy Rose is published by W&N on 30th January 2025
You can now pre-order The Lamb on dubraybooks.ie
