Lamb to the Slaughter Review

Roald Dahl’s creative mind has done it again with bringing Lamb to the Slaughter, another of his great stories, into the world. The story begins in a middle-class, domestic setting, where Mary Maloney is six months pregnant and waits for her husband Patrick to come home from work every day. The introduction of the story emphasises a house as spotless and well inhabited...‘‘The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn.’’ First, she seems like a typical housewife longing for her husband to return, but something is odd on this particular day; “There was a slow smiling air about her, and about everything she did…the eyes, with their new placid look, seemed larger, and darker than before.” It was almost as if she was expecting something unusual to happen. Her actions change from being a husband-pleasing wife, to a self-conscious woman that knew all of a sudden, exactly what to do, as if she had been prepared for months.

At the start of the story, Roald Dahl describes his main character as a gentle, harmless woman, but immediately after her husband reveals his burden, she becomes unstable and almost naturally hits him. She “…simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb…and brought it down as hard as she could…” The irony in the story is clearly dramatic because when Mary offers the police officers the leg of lamb for dinner, they think they are just eating a piece of meat that is definitely not the murder weapon. They have obviously done one of the worst errors possible to this crime scene.   “There was a great deal of hesitation among the four police officers, but they were clearly hungry, and in the end they were persuaded to go into the kitchen and help themselves.” They had lost the evidence they needed to find the killer.

After the murder my view of Mary changed. Roald Dahl manages to completely change his main character to now represent her a cold blooded murderer who aims at covering her tracks. Mary not only goes...