“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”)a is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.
Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.
REVIEW
The cat’s out of the bag already, so I can say upfront that Cate Baumer’s The Butcher’s Lot is one of our semi-finalists. I didn’t initially assign myself the novella, despite being a fan of Baumer’s entry last year, but wanted to make sure I read and scored all our frontrunners.
The Butcher’s Lot is a quiet Gothic fantasy that’s heavily focused on the interior world of its protagonist. A dark, Sapphic vampire story that’s romantic without being Romance, and that plays with a lot of familiar horror set pieces within a historically-tinged setting, it’s in keeping with what’s emerged as an informal literary movement involving queer, feminist reappropriations of the vampire. Fans of Ava Reid, Jennifer R. Donohue, and J. Patricia Anderson’s Your Blood and Bones should appreciate this one most, but I’d recommend it to any reader who enjoys contemporary reworkings of nineteenth-century Gothic figures (and especially monsters). Baumer impresses with her ability to write in a number of subgenres, and whether or not you’ve enjoyed her previous work, if Butcher‘s themes, story, and characters intrigue you I’d recommend picking it up.
A fell mark blemishes the reputation of Butcher’s protagonist, Marguerite. An outcast in her small fishing community due to a mysterious past the reader is oblivious to, Marguerite spends her days fishing in the remotest corners of her hometown, having lost her faith in the Church she once followed and the people she once called family. While I won’t spoil potential readers as to the nature of Marguerite’s “crime,” it’s unlikely to surprise, and makes her even more sympathetic as she struggles against the loneliness forced upon her. As Butcher opens, however, Marguerite is assigned a helper to aid in her dangerous but mundane work. Vampire generals once waged war on the human population, and one such vampire now pays penance by travelling from community to community, working for the humans she once slaughtered. Each time the vampire–known as The Butcher–enters a town, the people there are given the choice to execute her for her crimes or accept her labour. With most communities shorthanded, it’s almost expected that she’ll be recruited to work. When The Butcher is assigned to help Marguerite, Marguerite finds herself compelled by the bold Otherness of the vampire, desperate for an existence in which she isn’t damned for the crimes of another. As the pair labour together, Marguerite’s longing for both The Butcher and what The Butcher can grant her, deepens.
“Cozy surroundings didn’t soften the violence of her nature; instead, it set it in sharp relief, like light behind a scene in stained glass”
The setting has a gloomy, medieval feel, and is laden with a sense of the folkloric or mythological. It’s atmosphere, in this case, that dominates over plot, with Marguerite’s (very justified!) broodiness seeping from her to paint the surrounding landscape in shades of misty grey. The whole work has a sleepy feel that seems to mirror the trance-like state in which Marguerite spends her days. This is a work that, to quote The Kids (TM), depends on vibes as its major appeal, though happily those vibes are supported by Baumer’s characteristically striking prose.
“My body knows. It keeps the record of the crimes against it. Knots growing over the axe-cut of a tree doesn’t mean there isn’t a wound, deep down.”
The ethical and moral map of The Butcher’s Lot is complex. The villagers are victims of The Butcher, with each community she travels to the home of someone she murdered. Yet sympathy for anyone outside Marguerite is hard to come by when the villagers themselves demonstrate none of the grief for their long-lost loved ones that might otherwise turn the reader toward their side. Instead, there’s a note of exploitative greed about their treatment of the vampire–a sense that they consider her an unfortunate necessity for their continued well-being, and one that they’d rather leave unacknowledged. Marguerite herself becomes the tool they need to keep their distance from the danger of the creature, marred as she is already by what they read as impurity. Baumer’s treatment of Marguerite’s circumstances and the events that led to them is handled with genuine care, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there was an intentional connection being drawn by Baumer between Marguerite’s name and a series of similarly named characters from adaptations of the Faust legend. Whether intentional or not, it was a happy parallel that for me further enriched the themes at play in the novella. Although sympathetic, however, Marguerite is just as messy as the villagers and The Butcher. The world has given up on her and so Marguerite has given up on the world, her would-be alliance with The Butcher an alliance with a being we know to have once killed people.
The Butcher’s Lot is a darkly beautiful book that will appeal to readers who like to linger in those shadowed corners of a story and spend time with characters who don’t fit neatly into good/evil categories. While there were a few minor elements here and there that didn’t quite land for me–the ending felt slightly abrupt, for example–Baumer’s talents are on display here in a distinct yet complementary way to her work in As Born to Rule the Storm. Feminist Gothic works are having a resurgence right now, and I can happily recommend Butcher to those readers who’re riding that wave.
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