The Butcher’s Daughter

Mrs. Lovett, the cannibalistic, meat-pie-making accomplice of barbaric barber Sweeney Todd, gets her own melodramatic backstory in this dark retelling of the Victorian penny dreadful from Demchuk (Red X) and debut author Clark. In 1887, journalist Emily Gibson searches for the infamous Margery Lovett. She believes she’s found her in Margaret Evans, a self-described “prisoner” living among the sisters at St. Anne’s Priory, whose story plays out through a series of letters between the two women. Margaret recounts her childhood as the daughter of a butcher and her time as a maid in the household of a ghoulish London surgeon, where she is impregnated by her employer and forced to flee. Though punctuated with occasional creepy incidents, these early chapters feel like perfunctory episodes in Margaret’s gradual awakening to her power—which comes to roaring life when her child, purportedly stillborn, is snatched away from her. Adopting the Lovett persona and trade, a vengeful Margaret partners with psychotic Sweeney and the story goes full tilt ripping yarn, acquiring new energy and lurid gusto. Though the authors fiddle with the Sweeney legend as most horror and Broadway fans know it, they build to a startling final twist that readers will think worth the liberties taken. It’s a bloody good time. (May)