New York Times bestselling author Alix E. Harrow weaves a dystopian fairy tale that follows the town storyteller as she struggles to protect a local demon from the knight hired to kill it.
In this gritty, haunting tale about doing whatever it takes for love, a small-town storyteller resolves to keep the local monster—and her own secrets—safe from a legendary knight.
Nestled deep in the steep hills, valleys, and surrounding woodlands lies Iron Hollow, a rural community beset by demons. Such horrors are common in the outlands, where most folks die young, if they don’t turn into monsters first. But what’s causing these transformations?
No one has the answer, not even the town’s oral historian, seventeen-year-old Shrike. And when a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest beast to haunt their woods, Shrike has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still human, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.
Determined to keep May safe, Shrike stalks the knight and his demon-hunting hawk through the recesses of the forest. But as they creep through toxic creeks and overgrown kudzu, Shrike realizes the knight has a secret of his own. And he’ll do anything to protect it.

My Review:

I picked this up for two reasons. The first reason – and the more important – is that I really loved The Starling House by this same author, also in audio. The second reason is that I’ve been experimenting with a Kindle Unlimited subscription and have really liked some of the Amazon Original Stories with audio that I’ve discovered, notably my holiday romp through the Under the Mistletoe Collection.

The Knight and the Butcherbird looked like exactly the kind of story I’ve been enjoying more lately, dark fantasy hovering over the edge of horror, in a nice, bite-sized audio version by an author I already like. It sounded like a win/win – and it absolutely was. All the more so because this is one of those stories that straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy in a way that chills, thrills, and makes the reader, or at least this reader, go both “Aha!” AND “Ahhhh” at the end.

It also turned out to remind me of a whole lot of different, differently weird and differently creepy stories while blending into a darkly satisfying whole.

This is very much a dystopia, the kind of dystopia you get when your story is set on an Earth that we’ve fucked around on and left the consequences for our descendants. At first, I thought it was a bit Mad Max but things aren’t quite that bad – or at least the violence isn’t quite that widespread.

Instead, it’s very much like the world of Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds duology, where pollution has ruined the ground, the air, the wildlife and the weather, but people are hanging on by the literal edge of their fingernails, like the grim death that’s inevitably coming for them sooner than it should.

But that’s the view in the ‘outlands’, which is very much where Iron Hollow survives in remote, rural Appalachia. Just as in Clouds, there are “Enclaves”, protected places where technology is still functional, where the elite live in abundance, health and prosperity and look down upon the dying primitives that send them raw materials to keep their technology functional so they can remain all of the above.

Those outlands, still rife with pollution and radiation and microplastics, produce more than just raw materials. They are also plagued by monsters. Monsters that the Enclave-folk call demons. Monsters that used to be their friends and their loved ones, transformed by an alchemy that no one understands and no one can cure.

The Enclaves send out knights to eliminate those monsters. Not out of altruism. Not out of the goodness of their hearts. Out of need and greed. The populations of the Enclaves have grown too large for their technology to maintain. The outlanders are dying off, each generation smaller than the next. Extinction is in sight. All the Enclaves need to do is wait to sweep into what will soon be empty lands.

But those lands are filled with monsters, and until the science of the Enclaves can find a way to stop humans from becoming monsters, the land they covet is not safe for them to take.

The knight that comes to Iron Hollow has come to kill the latest monster. The monster that, as far as Shrike, Iron Hollow’s scribe and archivist is concerned, is still her wife May. Whether May is a monster or not. Because, when all is said and done, aren’t all of us capable of becoming monsters if the need is great enough?

Escape Rating A: This was a story that chilled me to the bone – even though I laughed myself silly when the knight of this story, Sir John, said that he had been sent by the “King of Cincinnati”. (I don’t see my old hometown mentioned much in fiction, and I absolutely wasn’t expecting it here.)

This story starts out dark, and it gets darker as it goes, and not in the ways the reader initially expects.

First because it’s saturated with Shrike’s bottomless grief. She and her wife were childhood besties, young sweethearts, happy marrieds, and now Shrike is a widow. At seventeen, because people in the outlands don’t live past 40 if they even reach that milestone.

Most monsters are found early, because the metamorphosis manifests as an illness that changes people from, well, people, to red-eyed shapeshifters with hoofs and horns, or feathers and claws, or gills and fins, and eventually to all of the above in a neverending kaleidoscope of transformation.

Shrike, as the historian, archivist, chronicler and storyteller of the hollow, knows that the mutation isn’t truly a disease, and that there is no real cure. Her only real fear about the nature of her wife’s condition is her fear that the transformation has wiped out May’s recognition of her and her memory of their love.

The knight’s secret provides Shrike with the answer she has long hoped for, even as her storytelling provides him with an answer that he wishes he had never learned.

As I listened to the audiobook of The Knight and the Butcherbird, read marvelously by Aida Reluzco, even as I was absorbed in the story I was surprised, teased and occasionally outright puzzled by all the stories it reminded me of. And I want to share those before I close as on the one hand this story was exactly the right length for what it wanted to tell AND I wanted more like it at the same conflicted time.

The setup of the elite Enclaves vs the disease-ridden outlands is very similar to The Annual Migration of Clouds and We Speak Through the Mountains, definitely including the patronizing attitudes of the Enclave citizens towards the outlanders they exploit. The slow, hidden transformation of humans into monsters, as well as that creepy border-shifting sense that the story is on the sharp and pointy line between the darkest of fantasy and the fear-shiver of horror is similar to T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night as well as Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater. (Tracking down that the thing stuck in my head was Star Eater took quite a while because I didn’t even like it all that much but it there were parts of it that were creepy in exactly the same way that The Knight and the Butcherbird is creepy, although Star Eater has plenty of extra creepy bits that are all its own.) There are also hints of Idolfire in those dying dystopian outlands.

But the biggest surprises were just how much of The Last Unicorn and the movie Ladyhawke I found in The Knight and the Butcherbird. I wasn’t expecting both the state of the world and Sir John’s quest to hit so many of the same notes that The Last Unicorn did. And I absolutely did not come into this story thinking that Ladyhawke would fly away with the whole thing after all.

The Knight and the Butcherbird is not exactly a happy story, but it is a haunting one. It is also very, very satisfying, in an astonishingly rueful way. I’m glad I spent an hour with the knight, the butcherbird, and their beloved monsters.