Review: Short story: "The Knight and the Butcherbird" by Alix E. Harrow

The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow
Published March 2025 via Amazon Original Stories

Things haven't been the same since the apocalypse happened, hundreds of years ago. Shrike knows this, but the outlands—and stories from the before times—are all she knows. Life is hard, and it's harder still when people keep turning into monsters. And when a famed monster hunter comes to town to destroy the latest victim, Shrike will do anything she has to to stop him...

I had to start this story twice (I wasn't in the mood for something kind of fairytale-esque the first time, so I took note of the vibe and came back to it), but once I got into it the story kept surprising me. It reminds me a bit of Lauren Groff's Matrix, not because the plots or even the settings are so similar (they're not) but because of the way Shrike has been fighting for years to survive, because of the way she is so determined to make things work despite the status quo.

This was delightfully twisty—although I'm not sure I ever fully understood the context of Iron Hollow, where Shrike lives, I'm also not sure I really needed to; it was enough to know that life is hard for her, and that she has loved and lost, and that she is so determined not to lose everything. (There's also a beautiful moment, late in the book, where she reflects on what it means to love enough to kill—and on who is willing to take that step for whom. I would read a dissertation on that moment.) This is not my style for a novel these days (I'm not one much for alternate universe, or fantasy, or whatever this would be classified as), but for a short story it was just the right amount of weird and wild.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.