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The Lamb by Lucy Rose is a gut-punch of a novel, that leaves you gob-smacked, rattled and disturbed about the toxic nature of love, a harrowing examination of guilt, the possessive nature of love and the myths we inherit. The narrative that begins almost like a dark fairy tale about a mother-daughter duo soon spirals into a fragile tale of rural solitutde and grief.

Readers be warned that the book features cannibalism. There, I have said it. Margo and her mother live in a deserted forested land, away from the rest of the world. But they hide a terrible secret - the mother craves for "strays"; anybody who strays into the forest and is lost is a stray and little Margo is brought up to think that eating their "fingers" and the rest of their body is the natural order of things. Strays deserve to be eaten.

Yet as she grows up, she struggles to place people in this box of "Strays" or not. Take for example, the horrible boys who travel with her in the back of the school bus who keep bullying her, calling her a 'freak'. Or the Gamekeeper, the large man who keeps popping into their house and whom her mother seems to like a lot. Or her best friend at school, the innocent and beautiful Abbie with whom Margo secretly hopes she can spend the rest of her life with.

Margo's relationship with her mother is tender and intense at the same time. She idolizes her mother and wants to continue living under her shadow. But very soon, a stray enters their life, with whom Mother herself gets obsessed. That shatters the myths that Margo held, any romanticized version about the kind of future, she could ever have with her mother. It's a relationship that is unhinged at the best of times and edged with slow dread. She is being abused, and she never realises it. It is heartbreaking and emotionally disturbing to be living inside little Margo's head as she slowly unravels the truth behind her mother's love. The initial narrative and chapters were a bit slow, like a chapter in Margo's life as we slowly reveal the true nature of these two and their forest hideout. But post the halfway mark, we are hit with a cold, nauseous realisation that continues to grow, gnawing away at our insides about where the novel is heading to. In the end, I couldn't stop turning the pages fast enough.

The Lamb is not an easy read. But it's a necessary one. Unsettling, lyrical, and devastating in its restraint, Lucy Rose has crafted a modern pastoral horror that lingers like smoke.