Lamb to the Slaughter Summary / Study Guide

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Lamb to the Slaughter | Introduction

Initially rejected, along with four other stories, by The New Yorker, ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ eventually appeared in Collier’s in 1953, after Knopf published its first collection of Dahl’s short stories and established his American reputation. Dahl had been making headway as a professional writer with a spate of tales which, like ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’’ reflect aspects of human perversity, cruelty, and violence. ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ opens with Mary Maloney, the pregnant, doting wife of a policeman waiting for her husband to come home from work. When he does so, he makes an abrupt but unspecified statement to Mary, the upshot of which is that he intends to leave her. Her connubial complacency shattered by this revelation, Mary crushes her husband’s skull with a frozen leg of lamb and then arranges an alibi. The laconic suddenness of the events, as Dahl tells them, creates an experience of shock for the reader, an effect which no doubt accounts for the popularity of this frequently anthologized and reprinted story. Dahl, who is also the author of popular childrens’ fiction, appears here as an adult student of adult evil, as a cynically detached narrator, and as an advocate of a grisly form of black comedy. Yet ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ prefigures the grotesqueness in even his work for children: in both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ‘‘bad’’ children meet with bizarre and horrific but appropriate fates.

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