[Review, Dystopian] The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow (Amazon Original Stories, 2025)

Genre: Dystopian, Short Story

Demographic: Adult (General Audiences)

Length: 36 Pages, 1 hour 17 minutes

Content Advisory: This work contains mature themes including violence, cancer, body horror, death and murder, et al.

Representation: Sapphic main character, queernormative world

Links: Goodreads, Storygraph

Another masterful short story from the author of The Six Deaths of the Saint, Alix E. Harrow’s The Knight and the Butcher Bird is a cutthroat tale of love and loss relevant to our times.

I definitely will say that if you love the dynamic of a knight and his cursed lady, whom he will do anything for, from the classic 1985 fantasy film Ladyhawke, starring Rutger Hauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Matthew Broderick, this short story is definitely one for you. It is, however, a darker and more gritter version of that dynamic with vibes similar to the Hunger Games in its commentary on fascism and class in a dystopian society.

Both Shrike Secretary and Sir John of Cincinnati serve as dual protagonists in this work, though only Shrike narrates it. Shrike is the young and cutthroat secretary of the holler, or Iron Hollow. Secretaries in this dystopia are not the notetakers and personal assistants of the elite but instead the storytellers and wise men and women of their village, advising the elders on what is the best action based on the stories and histories they keep. John is a knight of the enclave sent out by the city-states of the dystopian America to slay demons - humans mutated into horrible and mindless beings - in the wasteland and protect the people. He is a solitary protector with only his hawk for a companion. Both are protecting secrets of their own and serve as parallels for one another.

It is only once both their secrets are revealed that we really get to see the parallels between the two, and in their parallels do they shine. Shrike and John are more alike than on the surface they would first appear, but clash on the matter of dealing with Shrike’s recently turned wife, May. John sees the demons as only that, demons, menaces to be eradicated from the world. While Shrike hopes to protect her wife, and maybe find the human underneath the deadly deer-like creature she has become. However, because this is a rather short story, I cannot reveal how they come together - in a way - at the end.

I will say that I loved the world-building in this work. The enclave is hinted at being a fascist fortress of the former upper classes, who left the lower classes to rot out in the wastelands after the apocalypse. John is described as being “old—crazy old, maybe even fifty” and “raised on multivitamins and clean meat”, while those out in the wastelands married and died young, Shrike herself only being “barely seventeen; grief ages you”. Their short lives are lived in parasitic servitude to The Enclave, which takes without giving back. The holler, itself being an iron mining town that sends resources back to the Enclaves two hundred miles away. I just wish that it were a longer work that could more deeply explore and comment on this relationship.

I know that Alix E. Harrow is resisting similar themes in her next novel, The Everlasting,1 to her short story The Six Deaths of the Saint, so I hope that she revisits this world and expands upon it in the future. Either way, I can’t wait for her next short short story as they always seem to hit.

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