Filthy Lambs

Edition excerpt from Filthy Lambs (2027): A blood-soaked capitalist nightmare in which a family that owns society learns its victims have teeth—and the rich have tender throats. In the basement of Grimaldi Manor, the family patriarch says a prayer and stabs himself in the throat. Blood falls. The demon watches. A woman tries to scream. Upstairs, three generations of the Grimaldi family and a snapping turtle fill the house with unfulfilled promise and joyful childhood shrieks. These are tremendous, terrible times for the lineage. The Grimaldis hold a contract with Their Lord Below and will soon earn another ten years of prodigious wealth and glory. The family’s matriarch tells her children that they are blessed. The family is not blessed. The family is haunted, not by ghosts, but by a contract forged in hell. They’re haunted by every warm and comfortable night they’ve spent in a house splattered by generations of blood. They are haunted by capitalism, as are we all. The Grimaldis have repeated this ritual for centuries. Eliza, a bartender from the nearby village, is meant to be the latest filthy lamb, forced to battle a demon in a fight she is not meant to survive. The Grimaldis see a working-class woman they can spend without consequence. They do not know Eliza is the secret lover of their daughter-in-law, Lucy. Lucy has seen what the family’s money does to everyone it touches, and together the women believe they have found a way to turn the ritual against the Grimaldis. When the ceremony slips out of the family’s control, Grimaldi Manor becomes a battleground between the dynasty and the women it turned into wealth. The resulting siege becomes a family succession crisis, and the patriarch responds by calling his lawyer. Before morning, a mother with razor-blade claws returns for the son stolen from her, a Model T runs over a demon, a grieving widow finds herself trapped in Hell’s waiting room, and an adopted industrialist gets high on live squid while dreaming of infernal disruption. By the end, even the walls are bleeding. At its center, Filthy Lambs is a queer love story about two women trying to build a future with money extracted from other women’s bodies. It is also a gothic horror story about capitalism’s great trick: turning the people it exploits into worshipers who believe themselves gods. As the house screams, Eliza and Lucy must decide what victory looks like when all the power within reach still belongs to Hell.