What Comes After Female Rage: The Future of Horror with Lucy Rose

E interviews Lucy Rose.

Birdsong and windchimes spill from my speakers as our Zoom call connects, the redwood wilderness outside my cabin sending its own greeting. “You have the perfect little writing place,” Lucy Rose laughs, the fluttering chorus of forest leading us into conversation.

Lucy Rose is a Sunday Times bestselling author and award-winning filmmaker whose work moves deftly between horror, fairy tale, and literary fiction. Born in Leeds and raised in rural Cumbria, she grew up in landscapes steeped in shadow and myth—a childhood that now haunts her debut novel The Lamb. The book unfolds as a gothic coming-of-age fable and feminist horror story, blending folk-tale beauty with visceral terror. 

The Lamb follows young Margot, whose world begins and ends with her mother—known only as “Mama”—in their remote Cumbrian cottage. Here, strangers drift in like wayward ghosts, welcomed as “strays” before meeting a fate as brutal as it is ritualized: murdered and consumed. Into this closed orbit steps Eden, a beautiful newcomer who becomes both muse and rival, igniting in Margot a feverish mix of wonder and dread. Eden offers the shimmer of another life beyond the fells.

Critics have called The Lamb “a dark, gorgeous concoction” (The New York Times), “beautiful, terrifying… destined to become a classic” (The Washington Post), and “a feminist horror novel that resonates with contemporary political anxieties” (The Guardian). Its unsettling imagery and currents of longing, liberation, and rebellion mark Rose as one of contemporary fiction’s most arresting new voices. 

Raised on Ghost Stories and Girlhood Rhetoric

Rose’s own childhood was similarly forest-bound. “I grew up really rural, just outside the National Park,” she recalls, describing summers spent deep in the trees, fuelled by illicit ciders and contraband Ouija boards. “Our weapon of choice was always words,” she laughs.

After a decade in which “female rage” became a marketing hook, Rose is less interested in spectacle than in what happens next. “Women are entitled to anger,” she says, “but now we have to channel it—to do something useful with it.” That imperative, for her, includes broadening the very definition of who gets to stand around the narrative campfire. “I hope the next wave [of feminist horror] becomes more inclusive,” she emphasizes. “Right now I see ‘acceptable’ diversity in the eyes of capitalism; I want that net cast wider—especially so trans women feel seen, loved, and safe.”

Haunted by Cinema 

Acting classes, wedding-photography gigs, and weekends shooting micro-budget films on a “really cheap DSLR” taught Rose how image and dialogue build story. The collaborative grind of filmmaking—and the capitalist gatekeeping that came with it—left her craving a solitary art practice. Writing novels offered that intimacy. The Lamb began as a screenplay about a lonely girl in the Cumbrian fells, then morphed into the prose she had always wanted to read.

Cinema still haunts her process. She describes the audiobook adaptation, voiced in a gorgeous, authentic Cumbrian accent by actress Emma Rele, as “directing by proxy.” Her only direction to Rele? “Read it like you’re telling the story round a campfire.”

Screen-rights conversations for The Lamb are, she says, “quietly percolating,” but for now the script lives on in luminous prose.

Rituals, Coloured Paper, and the Five-Draft Gospel

Rose’s second book—“something ocean-soaked and still folk-tinged”—is on its fifth complete rewrite. Each draft begins fresh, handwritten from memory on loose, colour-coded pads. “Anything that survives from one draft to the next obviously matters,” she laughs, waving green, purple, yellow, and blue pages at the webcam. This generative process pushes her deeper into her fictional worlds: “Each draft gets me closer to what I really mean.”

Handwriting, she says, keeps her neurodivergent brain engaged. Her advice for fledgling writers is comfortingly analog: write by hand. “It feels intimate, tactile. Even the colour shift on the page jolts imagination awake.”

Life on—and off—the Internet

Despite landing on Forbes 30-Under-30, Rose describes social media as “a Venus fly-trap.” She posts “tiny slices of honesty”—sharing both the dizzy euphoria of awards and the blank-page dread of second-book syndrome—then logs off before the dopamine spike collapses. “I post the good news,” she says, “but also the days the good news knocks me flat.”

Speaking Stories

Dusk folds itself around my cabin window as we return to the subject of campfires. “I want my stories to feel as if they’re being passed from one mouth to another,” Rose says. “People haven’t always written things down or filmed them; speaking stories aloud is how we keep each other alive.”

In Lucy Rose’s hands, the future of horror is defiantly bright.