Cumbrian dwelling in the North East. Writer of folktales and fables.

Lucy Rose is a Sunday Times Bestselling author and award-winning filmmaker with an interest in gothic, girlhood, horror, and literary fiction. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been published in Dread Central, Mslexia, The Observer, The Nerd Daily and more.

Her award-winning short film, SHE LIVES ALONE, attended BAFTA and Oscar-qualifying festivals before being acquired by WatchALTER. Lucy’s latest short film, TASTE, is visiting festivals over 2023/24 and has attended BAFTA and BIFA-qualifying film festivals.

Lucy lives on the North East coast with her beautiful black cat, Figgy.

The Lamb is available now, you can order your copy HERE

Lucy Rose 13th March 2025 17:30

Lucy Rose’s debut novel The Lamb came out this January from W&N, and already is a Sunday Times bestseller and more importantly a Fantasy Hive favourite.  It’s a masterpiece of folk horror, exploring the dysfunctional relationship of a pair of mother and daughter cannibals living in the Cumbrian countryside. Lucy came to the Liverpool Waterstones as part of her tour promoting the novel, and was kind enough to speak to the Hive’s Jonathan Thornton while she was there.

Your debut novel The Lamb came out earlier this year. Can you tell us a bit about it?

Yeah, so The Lamb is a folk horror about a set of mother and daughter cannibals who live in the woods in rural Cumbria, and they pick off strays one by one and cook them into lovely pies and lovely stews. But all of that changes one day when a new stray shows up at the door, who kind of fits into the cannibalism dynamic a little bit too well. She slots right into that dynamic! But yeah, it was so much fun to write. 

They’re such strong characters, particularly Margot, who’s the voice of the novel. When you were writing it, did that voice come early on in the process, or was it something that had to be worked out as the writing progressed?

That’s a really good question. I think it was there from the start. I have autism and ADHD, so my attention to focus is, like, nil, it doesn’t exist. So I wrote loads of flash fictions, because that’s the only way that I could get myself to really engage and do it in short bursts.  Focused periods of ten minutes or five minutes, if that’s what it took. And in all of these flash fictions, the voice is kind of the one thing that was there from the start. But figuring out who she was and what that dynamic was, was a bit of a journey. And I didn’t realize that it was going to be a novel until about 15,000 words into these flash fictions, when I was like, Oh, my God, look, these are all connected and this is not just a bunch of silly experiments. This is an actual book that I could write! So I think that’s where Margot was born, in those flash fictions, and bringing her to life, and exploring her through those fragmented moments was really valuable. Because she is a child. But also the tone of the novel is like, it reminisces. So that fragmented nature of memory actually really serves the story in the end, I think. 

The central relationship with the mother is so key to the whole novel. Was that something that you wanted to explore from the outset?

So it was always the flash fictions that I was writing. They were always mother and daughter, but they weren’t always cannibals. It was really interesting to see as I was writing those flash fictions, which versions of them were cannibals. They were always up to no good, that was like solid. And their dynamic shifted a lot in those flash fictions. In some of those flash fictions, they actually had a really strong connection, and it was actually a healthier relationship, in spite of the terrible things they were doing. And settling on that line of where I wanted to put them, how aligned they were, was a really fun challenge. Because it was just such a experimental way of writing a book, so finding that was just really fun.

And then this other character, Eden, comes in and completely upsets the bounce between the two of them.

Yeah…

All of them are very dysfunctional, cause you have the mother/daughter relationship which is really unhealthy, but also the relationship between the mother and Eden is quite disturbing. 

Yeah, this is true. I really loved playing with those dynamics, though. I think the thing that I enjoyed the most was Mama and Eden thinking they were really aligned right up until the end, when they realized that they’re actually quite different. Even though they’re doing things in the same way, they actually want very different things out of life. To me, it’s really clear that Eden wants a family unit, whereas Mama wants her freedom. I find that really fascinating. Whereas Mama and Margot kind of have a flip where the flip experience of that is that they don’t have the right way of looking at the world together, but both of them have the same want, which is to be free and to be loved. But they just don’t have the right way of alignment of getting there. So that kind of flip was really, really fun way to play with the relationships, and for those relationships to kind of be the antithesis of each other was enjoyable for me.

And I won’t spoil the ending, but like, Jesus Christ, that ending! When you were writing it was there a sense of, am I allowed to go this far? Did you feel at some point, this is too dark? 

Do you know that is such a good question. Writing the ending was actually so hard to get right, because it’s such a careful balance. I actually think in my original draft it went further. And my editor was like, we need to pull this back, this is too much! I think what we wanted to do was make it end in the same way that it began, which is with that punch. And so the bit in the novel we worked the hardest on was  probably the end of the book to really get it right. But I felt really awful writing the book knowing that was where she was going! Obviously, no spoilers. But it was really interesting. As an author, there’s almost an inherent dramatic irony, if you know where it’s going, Because you know something the characters don’t, as the author, which is what’s going to happen to them! So I felt quite guilty writing that ending, but it just felt like it was the only way that it could go. And I also really wanted Margot to be courageous, and that was the way to give her courage, to really challenge her and make her step up to the plate. And she’s such a brave character. So she was happy to, well, not happy to, but she was she knew what she had to do! And I love that about her, and I think all of us need a little bit more courage, like Margot, to do scary things when we know they’re necessary.

She absolutely steps up and makes a moral stand that the other characters in the book are incapable of doing. Can we talk a bit about the setting? The novel has such a sense of place, which is part of the DNA of folk horror… 

So I grew up in Cumbria, but outside of the National Park. It’s basically a small village near Brampton and Carlisle. And it was so isolated, and I didn’t have a TV for a lot of my childhood. So my way of connecting with the world was those oral stories and oral storytelling tradition. And like, also just to be a little goblin as well, like playing in the mud, and there were eels and stuff. There were brook lamprey, and I’d let them literally latch onto my skin and wriggle. I’d go make dens in the woods and dams and stuff. And I just love that our automatic response to nature is to just have fun with it. And I feel like we’ve really lost some of that as like a culture, that really deep connection. But also history. The history of Cumbria is so violent and bloody. Cumbria used to be its own nation with its own language and its own history and its own cultural traditions and its own stories, and that was completely anglicized. And then the English and the Scottish constantly fought over it. And so that identity was lost. And then the Romans came over and Vikings as well. So that it’s like a sense of identity that’s so warped, and it’s just got such a history of awful warfare. But it’s really interesting how you can still feel that today, even thousands of years later, just in things like the dialect and the way the dialect is spoken. And it just felt like the perfect stage to set a story about this girl living in this house and not feeling like she belonged. That stage, that setting of such a confused identity, just felt like the right place. 

It’s interesting that you bring up the oral histories as well, because The Lamb does have a folk tale, fairy tale vibe to it. Was that something you intentionally wanted to tap into when you were writing?

I think in my first draft, probably not. It maybe was an accident, just due to the fact that those are my favourite stories ever. It’s the ones that we tell each other around a campfire or in a dark room after the party’s died down, and there’s inevitably that one person who says, do you believe in ghosts? And pulls out all these amazing, scary, terrifying stories. Those are my favourite stories of all time. They are inevitably better than any book or film I will read or watch, because they’re spoken from one person to another. And they’re the ones that elicit the most physical response from me as well. The hairs on my neck will stand erect, and I’ll start to get really nervous, and my skin will start to itch, and I love them. And I think that that love for those stories just inevitably sank into the setting. So that’s just kind of how that ended up there. 

And there’s a timelessness about the book as well. If you have people disappearing in the remote wilderness, you can’t have them using their phones. It adds to the sense that it’s all happening in this magical place sitting there outside of time.

So that’s exactly what I wanted it to feel like. Somewhere that felt like it existed out of time. And also, like the place I lived in Cumbria, there was no phone signal. Like it was, it really didn’t suck, It was great! But there was only one specific place in my house that had signal, and I had to stand on a window ledge in a really awkward position to get a single bar. But also, more so than that, it’s a trope of the genre. It’s a really fun trope of the horror genre that I actually really like about those situations. And I think it’s a really good rule of thumb that you should use coincidence to get your characters into trouble, but never to get them out of trouble. Life is unlucky like that all the time. That’s how we find ourselves in all sorts of terrible situations. There’s lots of reasons for that, but I love playing with those horror tropes. And I think anybody who loves horror movies or horror books also has a love those tropes as well, even though they pop up quite a lot. 

One of the funny things about horror, and I guess this links to the oral tradition as well, is that as a genre it tends to be quite self-aware of the tropes it’s playing with.

And I love that. I really do. I love horror tropes. They’re great. Even my opening, I wanted it to feel like an opening stinger, like an opening kill in Scream. I really wanted that feeling to be there, because those are the tropes that make me smile whenever I’m watching a horror movie. I’m like, this is familiar. This is like an in-joke that we’re all aware of. And even though obviously The Lamb is so tonally different to something like Scream, I think it’s something that, people like me, who are massive fans of horror, will appreciate the level of nuance and love that goes into writing a horror story, or reading a horror story.  

And did I hear recently that The Lamb has been optioned for film or TV? 

Not quite, we are working towards it. And really, really, really cool conversations are happening right now that I can’t say too much about. Annoyingly, I wish that I could. 

It’s very exciting! 

Yeah, it is. Things are happening, though, and movement is happening. And there’s a team of really excited, dedicated people pushing with me to get the book into the right hands, and I’m excited to talk about that more when I’m allowed to. 

The Lamb is your debut novel. It definitely doesn’t feel like one when you’re reading it, I was like, this is the work of someone who really knows their craft.

It is my debut novel, but I’ve written a lot of other books that didn’t go anywhere, which is always a valuable experience, even if it’s disappointing. 

It all goes into it, doesn’t it? 

It does. And any experience you can get storytelling, even if that’s telling somebody a bit of gossip. or crafting it in a way that’s compelling, is good experience. But also, I’ve got a background in film as well, which has been really helpful. And so I’ve made a range of short films. I think two of them are probably films that I like and am proud of! The two that I’m the most proud of are my two horror movie shorts that are the kind of films I’d love to carry on making if I ever get to make films again. But just writing in that different medium challenges you, any different way you can find tell stories is a way that will challenge your prose. And make you push your prose further, and change your view on how books are written. 

Are you planning on doing more work in in film or TV? 

I would like to, I would love to. The film game is really hard in the UK, because the British film industry is quite scared of genre. And what’s fascinating about that is that British horror is some of the best, like the original Woman In Black, like Hammer Horror movies, all iconic, iconic moments in our cultural history and our cultural canon as a country that I don’t think we celebrate enough. And I would love to be part of that and to continue making stuff. And I will keep trying. There is nothing that will stop me from giving it another go. 

And what are you working on at the moment?

So I’m still figuring it out. I’ve actually been writing it for ages, and it’s existed in so many different forms. I think this is maybe the third or fourth version of this story. And I have built it up and then pulled it down and started building again so many times, because I just really want it to be the right thing that comes after The Lamb. What I can tell you is that it’s like parasite horror. 

Excellent!

It’s a big slay. It’s still folklore and it’s still Northern and it’s coastal. 

Thank you so much for speaking with us, Lucy Rose!

The Lamb is available now, you can order your copy HERE

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