'A debut small-town horror novel that is a chilling blend of Shirley Jackson meets Devil's Day by way of Westworld.
'When Lady Mae turns 18, she'll inherit her mother's ghastly job as the Butcher: dismembering Settlement Five's guilty criminals as payment for their petty crimes. But then their leaders, known as the Deputies, come to Lady Mae's house, and there in the living room murder her mother for refusing to butcher a child.
'Within twenty-four hours, now alone in the world, Lady Mae begins her gruesome job. But a chance meeting years later puts her face to face with the Deputy that murdered her mother. Now Lady Mae must choose: will she flee, and start another life in the desolate mountains, forever running? Or will she seek vengeance for her mother's death even if it kills her?'
We all like to think that if we were in some kind of awful regime we'd do something to stand up against it, some kind of defiant act that says 'no, I will not comply'; and dystopia fiction often puts defiant young heroes into roles where they end up becoming key figures in some kind of resistance movement, where their defiance becomes a spark for a larger rebellion. But, I think we all know that in reality that just isn't how it works. Looking around my country right now there are no resistances to our corrupt government, no one leading the charge against rampant capitalism, and transphobia, racism, and homophobia are all on the rise, unchallenged. The reality is, people don't really stand up against stuff, and if they do it's often small acts that do do much.
The Butcher feels very much like a story like that, where terrible things are allowed to happen, often with the excuse of 'that's how it's always been', and very little is said and done to stop it. It's not a story where our protagonist rises up and leads a movement that will change the world forever, there's no fight for freedom. But you get small acts of defiance, small moments where people say 'no', and sometimes they inspire others, but sometimes they do nothing. And because of that The Butcher is a realistically bleak story.
The story takes readers to Settlement Five, a small town in the mountains. Here, we meet Lady Mae, the daughter of the town Butcher, the person whose job it is to administer the physical punishments on those charged with criminal offences. The Butcher takes pieces from the townspeople, sometimes just a finder, sometimes a whole hand, depending on their crimes; and Lady Mae is set to take over for her mother one day.
However, when Lady Mae's mother lets a child go, rather than removing several fingers, she's attacked by the Deputies, the town's law enforcement, and killed in front of Lady Mae in her own home. Over the next few years Lady Mae takes over for her mother, and becomes the new Butcher. But when her childhood love returns to town her life begins to forever change as she realises that perhaps she doesn't want to keep hurting people, and that the system they all live under is wrong.
The Butcher is a story that takes readers to a very different world to our own; yet isn't concerned with building much of that world. We know that we're in Settlement Five, and that it's in the mountains, but that's about all. We don't know what year it is, what country it's set in, or how the world became this harsh, authoritarian place. There's no indication whether or not this is a dark future, or a completely separate fantasy world that has no connection to our own. And at first I was left wondering all of these questions, hoping that Young would provide some answers. But, that stuff wasn't really important, and inn the end, it doesn't matter.
What does matter are the people, both the characters like Lady Mae and Arbuckle around whom the story centres, and the people in the background. There are a lot of people in the book who don't get a time in the spotlight, who don't even get names, but every person in Settlement Five matters, as it's the way they live, the way they obey the laws of the Deputies, and the way they rebel against them, that shapes the story. We don't know the details of this world, but its inhabitants build it for us through their words and actions.
As such, this very quickly becomes a story where you care for the characters. You start to worry for them, you start to hope for them, and fear for them. Young shows us early on that this is not a kind world, that anything can happen to the characters, as not long into the book a young girl who breaks the law is sentenced to be burnt to death for her crimes. The laws of this land are harsh, and those in power aren't afraid to enact the cruellest of punishments. As such, you begin to understand why Lady Mae is constantly in a state of fear and paranoia; and you start to feel that yourself. There's an oppressive quality to the writing that gets under your skin as you read it.
But like I said before, this is a story about defiance, and Lady Mae, her lover, and her mother, all harbour the desire to rebel, to buck against the system. There are no big moments in this story, no grand gestures or big speeches. This isn't a story like that. Instead, it keeps its focus on the characters, on how they come to the tough decision to stand up and refuse to boy down, and how that effects them personally. And because of that it feels different to other stories about defiance in the face of oppression.
There are times where The Butcher is hard to read. It doesn't shy away from awful things, and goes to some very dark and disturbing places; but it never feels like it's completely without hope. It has a good message, and has a small seed of hope that I think we can all learn to try to have in real life. This isn't a light or fun read at all, but it is a damn good one, and one that speaks volumes.
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