From Catherine, Annotated · sauerannotated.com/posts/lamb-to-the-slaughter-review/
Checked Out4 min read
In Lamb to the Slaughter, the Murder Weapon Comes With Peas
Roald Dahl's short story about a perfect housewife, a frozen leg of lamb, and the most satisfying dinner party in literature. My students loved it. I can see why.
Yes, that Roald Dahl. The man who gave us Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also wrote a story in which a pregnant housewife beats her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, cooks it, and serves it to the police officers investigating his murder.
The cops eat the murder weapon. That’s the story. It’s perfect.
My students, who recently rated Romeo and Juliet “mid,” loved this one. They loved the suspense. They loved the irony. Mostly, they loved yelling at the page during the dinner scene, which is exactly the right response.
A very nice evening
The story opens on Mary Maloney, waiting for her husband Patrick to come home from work. The lamps are lit. Her sewing is in her lap. His drink is ready. She is six months pregnant and blissfully happy, and she watches the clock the way you watch for someone you adore.
Dahl lays it on thick, and he’s doing it on purpose. Every cozy detail is a setup.
Patrick comes home. He’s quiet. He drinks faster than usual. And then he tells her something. We never find out exactly what, but it’s clear he’s leaving, and he’d like her not to make a fuss about it.
That gap is one of the smartest choices in the whole story. Dahl doesn’t tell us what Patrick said, so every reader fills it in with the worst thing they can imagine. Which is plenty.
Dinner, interrupted
Mary goes down to the freezer in a daze, pulls out a leg of lamb for supper, walks back upstairs, and hits him over the head with it.
He dies. She is, briefly, shocked. Then she gets organized.
She puts the lamb in the oven. She fixes her face and practices a smile in the mirror until it looks natural. She walks to the grocery store and makes cheerful small talk about what to serve Patrick for dinner. She comes home, “discovers” the body, and calls the police in tears.
Every one of those steps is building an alibi, and every one of them is terrifying, because she’s so good at it.
Dramatic irony is when you know something the characters don’t. Here, what you know is that dinner is evidence.
The best dinner party in literature
The officers who show up are Patrick’s colleagues. They’re kind to her. They search the house for the murder weapon, which they agree must be something big and heavy. They look everywhere.
Then Mary, the grieving widow, gently points out that the oven has been on all this time, and the men must be starving, and wouldn’t they please eat the lamb? As a favor to her? Patrick would have wanted them to.
So they do. And while they eat, they talk about the weapon. Where could it be? Probably close by, they figure. Probably somewhere obvious.
In the next room, Mary starts to giggle.
The most chilling sound in this story is not a scream. It’s a housewife giggling in the next room.
Why it works so well with teenagers
Every literary term you want them to learn is in this story, and none of them feel like vocabulary. They feel like the plot.
- Dramatic irony: you know what they’re eating. They don’t. Every bite is a joke at their expense.
- Situational irony: the investigators destroy the evidence by eating it. With peas.
- The theory: the officers keep saying the weapon must be right in front of them, and they’re right in a way they’ll never understand.
- The title: Mary looks like the meek little lamb. She is not the lamb.
- Suspense: the grocery store scene is just a woman buying potatoes, and it’s somehow the tensest thing in the story.
And then there’s the big question that keeps a room arguing long after the bell: is Mary a villain? She killed a man. But he blindsided her, and she thinks about her baby the whole time she’s covering it up. Students will defend her with their whole chest, and other students will be horrified that they’re defending her. That’s the good stuff.
The verdict
Five stars. No notes. Okay, I have notes, they’re all over the margins, but none of them are complaints.
It’s short enough to read in one class period, dark enough to feel a little forbidden, and funny enough that teenagers forget they’re doing literary analysis. Dahl wrote it in 1953, and it still lands harder than most things written last year.
Read it if: you teach irony, you like your suspense with a side of dark comedy, or you’ve ever wondered what’s really going on in a very calm house.
Skip it if: you planned to have lamb for dinner tonight.
Pair it with: Alfred Hitchcock’s TV adaptation, which he directed himself in 1958. Or Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for a fun contrast: Poe’s murderer cracks under pressure, and Mary doesn’t crack at all. Then, one question at dinner: is Mary a villain, or did she just get revenge?