The Butcher

Praise

“Young crafts a mean little world of stark landscapes and sharp edges, and beneath each turn lies a wound. Psychologically claustrophobic, and a harrowing debut.”
Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

“Readers will be swept away by the fresh take on dystopia found in this intelligent, immersive horror novel drawing on both The Lottery and The Hunger Games. In a poverty-ridden mountain town ruled by unfeeling overlords and their monstrous code of punishment and retribution, Lady Mae will – one day – take on her mother’s role as the Butcher, delivering bloody eye-for-an-eye ‘justice’ to a resentful population. Her coming-of-age is brutal, and Laura Kat Young is unafraid to ask tough and necessary questions about corporal punishment, shared guilt, mob mentality, and who is served when the disadvantaged are pitted against each other.”
Ally Wilkes, author of All the White Spaces

“Immersive, original, and unflinching, The Butcher is a pitch-perfect dystopian Western. A satisfying, blood-spattered exploration of justice and vengeance.”
Rachel Harrison, author of Cackle and The Return

“Savage beauty, unrelenting violence, and unbreakable love crash together in this powerful and hypnotic novel of a dystopian West and the young woman who wields an intellect and sense of justice and revenge sharper and more deadly than her butcher’s knives. A bleak, brutal, and thoroughly original meditation on the horrors and triumphs of life.” 
Livia Llewellyn, author of Engines of Desire and Furnace

“The Butcher is being described as Shirley Jackson meets Never Let Me Go meets West World. Pretty wild combination, but it works!” – Book Riot

“A brutal coming-of-age story that’s true horror lies not in monsters or supernatural threats but in the depravity of humanity itself and what happens when a society gleefully pits the least among us against one another to survive.”
Paste Magazine


“This is possibly the best prose, the most readable book, that I have encountered this year; also the most powerful setting and the most troubled, perhaps damaged characters that I have read recently.”
British Fantasy Society Review