Such a wonderful, ominous tale in such a short passage. Alix E Harrow has a way of writing that makes you wonder if anyone had been written before - simply remarkable prose and storytelling from start to finish. One of my favourite short stories to date.

Harrow only gives us glimpses of these characters, May, John, the butcherbird, and all of these characters feel familiar. This town feels familiar. This love is made to feel familiar. Throughout the story I found myself confused at some points but excited for a second re-read to engage myself with the story once again. I absolutely adored it!

In a Nutshell: A dystopian-fantasy short story about love, trust, fate, hope and courage. Imaginative plot, well-sketched characters, lyrical prose, unexpected twists, apt ending that left me wanting more. After a long while, I read a story without any distractions or pauses. Much recommended!

Plot Preview:
In a post-apocalyptic world, a small outland town named Iron Hollow, set along the Red River in the Appalachian mountains, finds itself facing many challenges, but none like the demons rising from its own people. When the leader summon a legendary knight for help in hunting the latest monster, seventeen-year-old Shrike is not happy. The knight is just as determined to do his job and kill the demon as Shrike is to get rid of the knight. Why? Read and find out.
The story comes to us in Shrike’s first-person perspective.

PSA: The Goodreads blurb reveals way too much. (I am glad I didn’t go through it before I read this story. I grabbed this book as soon as I saw the author’s name without checking anything else.)

I read plenty of short stories, and I have rarely found a writer who can carve worlds and characters as intricately and successfully within a constrained word count as Harrow can. If you have yet not experienced the magic of Alix E. Harrow’s writing, this story would make a good starting point to sample her beautiful prose. Of course, it would help if you like dystopian fantasy-horror.

Woohoos:
🌲 The imaginative concept.
🌲 The setting and the atmosphere. The author puts the wildness and remoteness of the location to great use.
🌲 The descriptive prose – vivid and lyrical! A treat for the soul.
🌲 The names of the Iron Hollow residents – every first name pays an ode to nature.
🌲 The mind-boggling vocabulary! Harrow is the only author for whom I necessarily need to use my dictionary multiple times. I love it!
🌲 Shrike Secretary, our young narrator. A good complex lead for the story, she acts her age, which obviously means that she takes some silly decisions at times. But this behaviour adds to the unpredictability of the narrative.
🌲 The Knight and his avian companion. Loved the personality of the character and also his backstory.
🌲 The strange mix of historical and futuristic, real and fantastical, apocalyptic and present-day. Not many authors would be able to pull off this strange world convincingly, all the more impressive when you remember that this story is just 36 pages long.
🌲 The comment on the difference between the haves and the have-nots, the attitudes of the privileged towards those who don’t think/look like them, and the resistance to change. Some references reminded me of a certain currently-ruling government who seems to be adopting a similar attitude towards outsiders.
🌲 Didn’t expect to find twisty surprises in a short tale, but I did.
🌲 The teeny bookish Easter eggs in one scene – I got a pleasant thrill when I recognised all the references.

Hmmms:
🍁 The pacing is slightly on the slower side, even for such a short tale. I was captivated enough by the rest so the slowburn didn’t bother me. Might not make all readers happy, though.
🍁 Shrike often muses about the past in her narration. These stream-of-consciousness style interludes do depth to her POV, but they also feel a bit too intricate for short fiction.
🍁 The theme of how far you would go for love. Certainly some grey areas in this, especially considering the identities of the people in the relationship.
🍁 The ending – amazing but also a tad too hurried.

All in all, I am mighty impressed with this work. Despite certain minor things that could have turned this into a 5-star read, I still loved the eccentricity of the storyline, the characters, and the world. It’s the brainchild of a truly creative and talented writer, and I’d have gladly read a novella or even a novel set in this world.
Definitely recommended to those readers of dystopian fantasy who like short fiction.
4.25 stars.
My thanks to Amazon Original Stories for providing the DRC of “The Knight and the Butcherbird” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
The digital version of this book is currently available on Amazon Prime.

I'll read anything Alix writes. What would you do for love? What secrets will you hide?
Sewn with mistrust, love and sacrifices. Short, sweet and interesting.

Alix E. Harrow has done it again! I've enjoyed everything I've read by this author, and will continue to pick up anything she publishes. In this story, she creates an entire world and characters I continue to think about in less than 40 pages. I would love to see this expanded into a full novel!

The Knight and the Butcherbird is a beautiful, heartfelt story of love, grief, and the extent people will go to while dealing with the two. I loved this novella! The world-building is perfect, the characters and their development throughout this short read were great, and the fantasy and horror elements (as well as reality) are equally balanced.. This is just a wonderful, emotionally-charged read. 5 stars all the way!
Thank you NetGalley, Amazon, and Alix E. Harrow for this beautiful read!

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.

This was incredible. Every story I read of Alix E. Harrow's is even better than the last. I won't say too much about this one because it's short and I don't want to spoil anything, but amazing world building, so many twists I didn't see coming in just a few pages, and wow, this dragged my heart through the mud and then gently cleaned it up and bandaged it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc! Opinions are my own.

I’ve love Alexis’s previous work and i loved this novella as much! The dark and creepy setting, the characters and their determination for doing whatever it takes for love and solved the mystery, are all so real’

The Knight and the Butcherbird is a fairly tale about love, kinda, priests, and stories. Shrike Secretary holds her people's stories, but her own are the most powerful. When the Knight Sir John of Cincinnati comes to slay a demon, she could be his greatest ally or his worst enemy. This is a quick read that wraps up nicely the way good stories do. It isn't anything surprising, but it is complete, and I especially appreciate that in a shorter form these days.
Thanks to NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for this ARC!

My only complaint is that it was too short! While the ending was satisfying, I felt like I was just getting into this action packed short read when it was already over.

The Knight and The Butcherbird is a short form dystopian fantasy- didn’t know I needed that in my life until I read it! Iron Hollow, home of our narrator, is plagued by shape shifting demons. A knight is sent from a nearby enclave to slay the newest demon, and the narrator has been studying from where the demons originated. Turns out the knight and secretary have a shared weakness …

Thank you to Amazon Original Stories and NetGalley for the free ebook.

this was a fun quick read! gut punching too, excellent for only 40ish pages. cant wait to see what else this author has stored in her mind!

My chest hurts. Harrow is so good at breaking your heart with short stories. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. I think one thing that keeps drawing me back to Harrow is that it feels like each sentence, each word even, is so deliberate in its construction as to cause serious heartbreak.

I don’t think I have the language for it yet but her meditation/fixation on knights and what it means to be a knight, how she explores what type of devotion that entails is amazing and so incredibly thoughtful.

I highly recommend this.

As is my usual reaction to finishing an Alix E. Harrow book, I just want to scream because her writing is just. so. good.

The way she paints a picture of a world that is so clearly not our own, and yet - and yet! - casually drops subtle hints and cultural references that gradually lead you to the whens and wheres of it. (”the Applegate texts”… THE APPLEGATE TEXTS! iykyk, and I was CACKLING when I read that line.)

It is absolutely masterful, as her writing never fails to be, and so layered, such that even though it’s a short story, it feels like you’ve been completely immersed in this post-apocalyptic world.

Very pretty novella. I loved the themes and concepts. The setting felt rough but perfect. A blend of future with a blend of apocalypse rugged.

Definitely one to read and re-read in order to think of the bigger implications of what is being said.

As always I love Harrow's prose and voice. Would highly recommend.

"The Knight and the Butcherbird" by Alix E. Harrow - Out Now! 4-Stars

This future-set short story is an excellent little quick read, to remember why Alix Harrow is so good at character and world building in between releases of her longer works of fiction (here's hoping we get another one soon as I loved January, Witches, AND Starling House).

I loved ... the main characters dedication to her calling and her love, as well as her commitment to doing what she thought was best, not what was just or right. She was flawed and openly and knowingly so, which was a nice element in a short story where character building words are limited.

I liked... the future world culture and how they reflected on the past, mentioning current cartoons and Christianity as all part and parcel of an civilization long-gone and only remembered by the tales told.

I could have done without...the Knight. I just didn't like him, and his love story foil was a bit meh for me. But I liked the Butcherbird, so that was enough for one story.

Thank you to the author, and to Amazon Original Stories for the opportunity to read and review this short story. Thoughts and opinions are my own and intended for use by my friends and followers when choosing their next book. #alixharrow @theknightandthebutcherbird #shortstory #fiction #netgalley #netgalleyreview

Thanks to both Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC copy of this short story. This has not affected my review at all, which are my own thoughts.

I have yet to read anything of novel-length from Alix E. Harrow, but her short fiction? I'll pump that into my veins any time, because both her other work "The six deaths of the saint" and now this one are A-Ma-Zing.

In The Knight and the Butcherbird, we are presented with Iron Hollow, a rural community nestled deep in the mountains and beset by demons, one of which turns out to be the wife of our protagonist, Shrike. Eventually, a knight of legend appears to get rid of the problem by order of his superiors, and Shrike can't just let that happen.

What I most like about both Harrow's short-stories is that, no matter how gritty, no matter how much the characters suffer, and surrounded by an spectacular world each time, in the end, they're stories about love. What would the characters doe for their loved ones, how it affects their thinking and their decisions and how, ultimately, love is powerful enough to shape the world through people's actions for their loved ones. Because Shrike can't let go of May, her wife, ans she doesn't care that may is now a demon, because it is still May, and she may recognize Shrike still, for a while at least, There's hope, there's love, there's desperation, and Shrike won't let the knight of legend just take all of that from her in one go.

And, as usual, these themes are shrouded in amazing worldbuilding, places that Harrow creates with a few strokes, giving us the necessary details here and there to visualize it without saturating the page.

Shrike and the knight have a push-pull dynamic that kept me glue to the pages. I would read something longer featuring these characters any day, really, and I'll be thinking about them for a while, as they're so well crafted that they stick with you for long. The supporting cast is also worth mentioning because they add to that world they inhabit, giving us clues of how our world developed into this dystopia without Harrow having to dump a 20 page document onto us with the details, which I'm always grateful for no matter the length of the story😂

So, this is probably one of the best short-fictions I've read in a while and I completely recommend it. If you've read The Six Deaths of the Saint, this one scratches a different need, but it leaves you as equally devastated as TSDOTS, believe me.

Thank you NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Much like everything Alix E Harrow writes, I loved this short story to pieces. The premise of “town storyteller struggles to protect local demon from knight sent to kill it” is so delicious and I’m impressed with how much Harrow was able to fit into such a short space. The world felt real and lived in and frankly harrowing, but the atmosphere was top notch and the emotional core of the story (loving and protecting your wife even to your own detriment) shines through so, so well. Harrow’s short fiction is always a treat to read and I’m glad to have gotten this one early.

My first Alix E Harrow - I can't believe I've slept on such a talented voice for so long!

A story about love and loss - and clinging to the other person when they've changed so far beyond recognition, sometimes to your detriment.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC. All opinions my own!

5 stars!

I am astounded by how much a 36 page book made me feel. I was highlighting every single line because it was so beautiful. I think it is best to go into this book completely blind and just let yourself be along for the ride. I will definitely be reading more from Alix E. Harrow.

Thank you to Netgalley and Amazon for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

An enjoyable, short read. The worldbuilding and character development the author was able to convey through this short story was impressive.