A Campfire Story: A Guest Post by Lucy Rose

Sometimes hunger is stronger than fear. In this Gothic coming-of-age tale, Margot and her mother encounter a peculiar visitor who forces them to reexamine their family dynamic. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Lucy Rose on writing The Lamb.

The only thing I was certain of when I started writing The Lamb was that I wanted to write something that felt like a campfire story.

The oral tradition of storytelling is the root inspiration for every story I tell. I’ve always loved stories of the everyman. The quiet taxi driver, that man who seems to live at the same bar every night, the ghost stories we told each other as children around a campfire or the whispers passed between girls in the school toilets. These are the stories that make my heart race, and ultimately, are the reason why all writers do what we do: to emulate that feeling of “listen close, sit close by, let me tell you a story.”

Regionality, in that respect, also played a really vital role in my storytelling because the places we come from, whether that’s a close knit block of flats in inner city London or the rural stretches of the Pacific North West, these places and their micro cultures will inform the tone and voice. Cumbria, as a space, is so fascinating to me. I spent much of my childhood in a rural hamlet outside Carlisle. There was no public transport (except for the school buses) so it felt very trapping. And as I grew up and learned more about its incredibly bloodthirsty, folkloric, rich history, I fell even more in love. Being at the border, it has a history of being in near-constant political conflict. It is a place that once had its own language and sovereignty, but then was fought over and invaded not just by the Anglos and Celts, but also by the Romans and the Norse. Even now, thousands of years later, the impact of those events is still felt in Cumbria’s mesh of culture, language and dialect (which has inflections of Norwegian).

In writing The Lamb, I wanted to draw on that deeply human act of growing our culture through oral storytelling and fairy tales. I wanted the book tofeel 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.

Because The Lamb is based around a child protagonist, I was very conscious about giving Margot safe spaces in the novel. The story 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, and 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 look to when I’m most lost. 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.