“If Purgatory was anything like that nowhere upon the water, a time and place to be cleansed, he grasped now that it was also another test. It was God’s wont to try the mettle of his creations. Over and over again. Man’s trials need not end at death.”
Look, medieval horror is not a genre that always works for me, but something about Our Lady of Holy Slaughter completely drew me in, and I am happy to say that S.J. Shank genuinely surprised me in all the best ways. This is a grim, gory, and gruesome little nightmare of a novella about war, religious conflict, cultural clashes, swamp survival, and possibly some very mysterious folkloric entities working their influence, and it honestly had me drowning deeper in despair and discomfort with every turn of the page.
Now, I always love it when a setting feels like a character in itself, and that is absolutely the case here in Our Lady of Holy Slaughter. Through the eyes of our young recent Christian convert Gaidas, we are thrown straight into the haunting swamp waters and wetlands that he is traversing together with the Livonian Brothers of the Sword after they have just suffered a catastrophic defeat against the Pagans they were so certain they would crush. Everything is damp and dreadful, the bodies of their comrades are rotting everywhere, there is no food, barely any water, everyone is slowly falling apart, and then, because obviously these poor bastards have not suffered quite enough yet, a mysterious veiled woman appears beneath the moonlight in the image of Mother Mary who might be their salvation… or a pagan devil. Truly, this novella made me feel so damn miserable, and I mean that as the highest compliment possible.
I will admit that I wasn’t as emotionally connected to the characters, including Gaidas, as I would have liked, but I honestly didn’t mind that as much as I expected to because it felt like the themes and atmosphere were very much taking priority in Our Lady of Holy Slaughter. The way that Shank explores religious and cultural conflict, faith, fear, and existential dread was genuinely masterful to me, and that creeping sense of unease just had me in an absolute chokehold. Like, this isn’t the type of horror that is just throwing blood and gore at you for cheap thrills (even though there is certainly plenty of grim and gruesome material, don’t you worry), but instead it’s the type of horror that just creeps under your skin and festers in your brain, and I found that so much more effective.
There were maybe a few moments when things became a little too unmoored and fever-dreamy for me to the point that the sequencing of events didn’t always feel particularly smooth, but weirdly enough, I almost think that worked in the novella’s favour. See, we are spiralling with Gaidas as he loses sense of reality, so the fact that everything started to feel increasingly strange and disorienting only added to the immersion. There are visions of bog women, freaky snakes guiding him through the wilderness, strange apparitions, and all sorts of increasingly unsettling religious imagery, and I absolutely loved the way that Shank blended the body horror, psychological horror, religious horror, and folk horror (damn, that is a lot of horror) in such a scarily brilliant way.
I devoured Our Lady of Holy Slaughter in a single afternoon, and I absolutely adored how the ending felt so shocking yet inevitable at the same time. I mean, I might have liked it to go even weirder, darker, and emotionally devastating, but I think that might be more of a me-problem than a book problem because there is simply no denying that Shank absolutely nailed the nightmare vision he was going for. I absolutely respect the hell out of this bleak, weird, macabre and deeply uncomfortable little novella, and I would highly recommend Our Lady of Holy Slaughter to anyone who likes their medieval folk horror in the vein of Between Two Fires and Hellmouth.
Thank you to the author for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review, all opinions are my own. Our Lady of Holy Slaughter is scheduled for release on 22 September 2026.
