A surreal domestic horror novel makes you wish it was a ghost haunting you instead

Sweet Lamb of Heaven — Lydia Millet

Jan 25, 2022

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Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet

What It’s About

Anna is a young mother to a six-year-old girl, and she’s just escaped from Ned, her sociopath, controlling, politician husband. But in order for his campaign to run smoothly (he is running for a party that believes in the nuclear family, after all), Ned needs Anna back and by his side.

Meanwhile, Anna and her daughter have found a new life in a small motel in Maine, literally all the way on the other side of the country. But instead of the happy, carefree life she imagined, she’s paranoid, worried Ned is following them, and now she hears voices. Anna isn’t sure if they’re real, but they seem to stop after Lena, her daughter, starts talking.

As the storylines converge, Anna finds herself questioning her own sanity and her ability to raise her daughter, even when it seems like everyone around them is against them. This is also a book that questions religion, morality, church, and what spirituality really means.

Memorable Quote

I thought about mortality, sure, and I felt the pull of soulful music, but I never met with elevated feeling sitting beside my parents and listening to their minister. For me it couldn’t be found in the cramped and unlovely building of their church, the boring sermons, the congregants next to us. . .
It was in cloud passage, in the galactic sweep; it was the stars beyond count, footage of herds of beasts thundering over grasslands or rivers, the rush of multitudes, large beauty: a utopian sunset, the black cloudbank of a looming storm.
Meaning can be attached to it or not . . . but either way the sacred has to live apart.

Who Will Like It

I’m not going to lie—this is a polarizing book that isn’t for everyone. If you’ve seen reviews of Lydia Millet’s books on Goodreads, you know her star average is less than what you’d usually see for an award-winning author. I think this is because she writes in a very specific way that a very specific audience enjoys.

If you like unresolved questions and endings, characters who are relatable in their flaws and misunderstandings, or surrealist novels that don’t quite follow a traditional narrative, her work is absolutely for you. This book in particular reminds me a lot of I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid, with the same slow and quiet horror, mind games, and uncertainty about what’s going on.

But I think labeling this book a “thriller,” as so many have, seems to give it the wrong expectation going in. It’s a quiet and strange novel that’s more a character study and about what people will do when faced with strange, impossible, but entirely plausible choices to make.

Next Up

This past weekend was my birthday, so naturally I treated myself to a bookstore trip. Some highlights:

Mindy McGinnis is one of my auto-buy authors, and I haven’t read The Initial Insult yet, which has a sequel coming out in March (The Last Laugh); been meaning to check out Last Night at the Telegraph Club for a while, and saw it was finally out in paperback; and Kill the Farm Boy, which had a staff recommendation card on it and is billed as a Monty Python/Princess Bride/Shrek mashup, which is everything I didn’t know I needed.

Let me know which book you’d start with out of this stack, and what you’re reading this week! Have you picked up any under-the-radar books lately?