If you fed Sarah Waters and Angela Carter into a meat grinder and baked them into a Jack Ketchum pie you still wouldn’t come close to the sensation of reading this. Just superb.

A fresh retelling of Sweeney Todd, starring Mrs. Lovett as our protagonist.

What is already a well known story has been used to create something new, while still retaining the core of the original. The story is told through diaries and letters, creating the effect of reading the newspaper while living in victorian times, and discovering the events of this story.

This was a fun read, I always wanted to know what happens next, and while I don't read much historical fiction, the author made the reader feel right at home. Go into this blind, while some things may not be a big surprise for those who know Sweeney Todd, this has more than enough to not feel like going through the same story again.

For fans of retellings, victorian times, and a crimson baked barbershop.

This gothic, blood-soaked feminist retelling of Sweeney Todd will have you celebrating women's wrongs.

The set up of this book as a series of letters between a journalist trying to find an aging Mrs. Lovett after the famous events of her pie shop and the barber shop above it, is really interesting. The authors are already assuming we know a little of the dark deeds that happened, but give Mrs. Lovett the time and space to tell the entire story from her perspective - including how she got her name.

I love feminist retellings and this was the right amount of dark and dreadful. This isn't a fast-paced story, which is fine because I liked seeing what terrible tragedy was going to happen to Lovett next and how she'd endure.

While Lovett was surrounded by terrible things happening to her, I never felt like she was a victim of her circumstances. She always had agency and like black mold, she thrived.

Pick this up if you want
🔪 Feminist retelling of Sweeney Todd
🔪 Sapphic Gothic Horror
🔪 Supporting women’s wrongs
🔪 Epistolary
🔪 Cannibalism
🔪 Meat pies

This book is best read while sitting in an empty kitchen, cleaning blood from your butcher’s knife.

Rating:1-1,5/5 stars
Thank you to NetGalley and Soho Press for the ARC.

This book opens with promise—an epistolary format and a moody, gothic tone that hints at something in the realm of Sweeney Todd. Unfortunately, what follows never quite lives up to that potential.

While the concept of telling the story through letters is appealing, the execution feels off. The so-called letters read more like stylized first-person narration interrupted by dates and signatures, rather than actual correspondence between characters. It lacks the organic, back-and-forth nature that makes epistolary storytelling immersive and emotionally impactful.

Tonally, the writing leans into the melodrama, but without the payoff. It reads like fanfiction—specifically fanfiction for fans of Sweeney Todd—but without a clear direction or much narrative momentum. Despite my interest in the premise, I found myself increasingly detached from the story and its characters. I simply couldn’t get into it.

I’m truly grateful to have received an advance copy, and I really wanted to enjoy this—but ultimately, it left me wondering what the purpose of the story was, and why it was told in this particular way.

🥧🔪🩸A pie for two pennies🩸🔪🥧

"For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because if mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed." Psalms 31:10

Dripping with gothic atmosphere, this was chilling, mysterious and thrilling tale told in an exchange of letters, the way the book is formatted with letters, reports, newspapers clippings, recipes and other inserts just aid to make this a true experience. Blending it all with the audiobook, curtesy of RB Media and NetGalley, this was an immensely immersive read. The way the narrators set the tone and following the pages was like walking the alleys along with Mrs. Lovett, in her tale on how she came to be, and what made her that way.

The evolution of a story of Mrs. Lovett, from victim to victimizer.

It's a lifelong story, where we follow her from youth and what drove her to make the choices she made. With a diverse cast of characters, compelling story, a mystery being investigated, and an enveloping atmosphere that absorbed me from beginning to end.

🩸I would say this is a book that you would love if you blend the book and audio because the cast of narrators push this to be over the top!

🩸I was able to purchase a copy early from Barnes and Noble, and I cannot tell you how beautiful the illustrations and formatting is.

🩸 Recommend if you loved Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito and The Black Hunger by Nicholas Pullen.

***some of the descriptions in this book are graphic, so be aware of that***

I would love to thank NetGalley, Hells Hundred for the e-book ARC, and RB Media for the audiobook ALC. I can't wait to see what this duo of authors come up with next!

I really enjoyed this and was so pleasantly surprised by it. I found Meg to be a fascinating protagonist and was thoroughly entranced by her various trials and tribulations. With some despicable characters and truly horrific moments throughout the narrative , I actually thought the part dealing with Mrs. Lovett was the least compelling and was sometimes taken out of the story a little by it's epistolary nature. Nevertheless, I had a great time with this and would highly recommend it.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Thank you Soho Press/Hell's Hundred for granting my wish for an ARC.

Who else watched the 2007 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and was left wanting? Who actually is Mrs Lovette? And what happened to Toby? So many questions lol. I think one would actually benefit from reading the original Victorian penny dreadful that started it all.

So I was happy to see Mrs Lovette get some love an attention, become the star of show for once.

This is a mostly epistolary novel, where the events are told through letter exchanged between an obscure nun and a lady journalist investigating the whereabouts of Mrs Lovette (in the movie/musical she is pushed into the oven by Mr. Todd, but here it seems that her imprisonment was common knowledge, yet the journalist, Miss Gibson, thinks otherwise).

The backdrop is Victorian London, a setting that I can never resist, where it depicted the fancy ballrooms and drawing rooms of the aristocracy or the grimy streets from Dickensian world. The horror and gore were appropriate to the story and not heavy handed. The twists and turns kept on coming!
My only criticism is that this story was meant to be told in the form of letters, and these letters started short and concise as letters are meant to be, then became more of a disjointed memoir, no one writes letters this long lol.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. And I can’t wait for the audiobook release so I can relive it again.

4.5 stars! Horror at its finest! Everyone knows Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But what was Mrs. Lovett's background? Well, this is her story and what a story it is!
The novel unfolds around letters penned back and forth between a journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the mysterious Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett relates a pretty horrendous tale of her life through her correspondence, and Miss Gibson may find out more than she bargained for. The ending is delicious!

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Hell's Hundred for this digital e-arc.*

Thank you Netgalley & Hell’s Hundred for an eARC♥️♥️♥️

This book is like a spooky letter from the past—dark, mysterious, but weirdly charming. It tells the story of Mrs. Lovett (yes, *that* pie-making villain from *Sweeney Todd*) through old letters she writes to a curious journalist.
At first, it feels like a classic Victorian horror tale—mad doctors, dirty London streets, and, of course, suspicious meat pies. But as you read, you start to see the human side of Mrs. Lovett. Was she truly evil, or just trying to survive in a cruel world? The way she tells her story makes you almost… *like* her, even as she confesses terrible things.
The back-and-forth letters give it a cozy, intimate feel, like uncovering secrets in an old diary. You’ll be hooked by the mystery, but also moved by the strange friendship that grows between Mrs. Lovett and the journalist.

📜 Historical fiction with a dark twist
🥧 Villains who aren’t *all* bad
✉️ Stories told through letters and secrets

⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 – A haunting, sad, and surprisingly sweet read. Maybe skip the pie while reading, though.)

*"A ghost story with heart—and just the right amount of horror."*

I liked the first half of this book but when I got the halfway point and it did a 180* in character change. This would have been fine if it made any sense to the character we know of Mrs. Lovett. It would have been nice to see some suggestions to this behavior earlier on in the story or an explanation as to why she was hiding it instead of the sudden change.

The Butcher’s Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett by Corinne Leigh Clark & David Demchuk ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

This book, an epistolary novel that brings Mrs. Lovett’s POV from Sweeney Todd, which Gregory Maguire blurbed about, is literally a literary dream for me. This book was everything I hoped for and so much more. I was so engrossed. I couldn’t read this one fast enough. The pace, while slower because I hung on every word, grew in intensity by the end. And the ending! I screamed. Goosebumps. Loved it. Round of applause.

What the authors were able to do through the letters was remarkable. The setting work felt authentic but not staged. I was transported to London and all its griminess with the narrow alleys, lurking people, and cluttered streets. The characters leapt off the page, and I couldn’t help but want to know them (even the really bad ones).

It was bloody and gross and stomach churning. Be warned it is graphic in its depictions. But I so so so enjoyed it. It would have been five perfect stars had there not been some things that left me with questions.

Fans of Sweeney Todd, Victorian-era reads that focus on the underbelly of society, and intense reads will enjoy this.

This story is told entirely through a collection of letters, diary entries and other documents which made it so interesting and so much more fun to read. It feels like the reader stumbled upon something forbidden, an archive of hidden lives and lost voices.

What stands out the most is how the book reclaims a well known story like Sweeney Todd, reclaims it and lets it speak on its own. This time focusing on Mrs. Lovett - Todd’s partner in crime.

This retelling feels grounded in time and place, plausible in its London scenario. The authors build a life shaped by desperation, limited options and a society stacked against her. There’s a quiet fury beneath it all.

And just when you think you’ve mapped the whole plot, it twists again. The ending lands hard, closing Mrs. Lovett and Gibson’s arcs in a very shocking manner.

At first, this book wasn’t gelling with me. It was slow to start and I wasn’t sure where it was going. But in the end, I think that was a good thing. When things began to pick up in the middle, they didn’t let up. Learning more about the origin of Mrs. Lovett was extremely interesting because you never know too much about her from the play, film, or other forms of media depicting Sweeney Todd. In a lot of ways, she’s more interesting of a character than Todd is and this novel helps bring that to life. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys the play/film.

The Butcher's Daughter did a wonderful job of spinning the tale of Mrs. Lovett into something exciting and new.

Told exclusively in recovered correspondence of a missing reporter, the format of this was refreshingly new. It did take a bit for me to get used to, but once I did, I flew through the story. I did find parts of this dragged on a bit for me, but there were also moments where I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what was going to unfold next.

The intricacies of the story were done extremely well - there were plot twist connection reveals that I did not see coming, and that was really cool to see, as the story of Sweeny Todd, demon barber of Fleet Street, is one of my favorites. This book took the story of Mrs. Lovett and turned her into an oddly relatable and likeable character, even with the atrocious crimes she ends up committing. At the end of it all, she was just a young woman who had been dealt an awful hand in life and did what she could with what she was given.

The twist at the very end (involving her son) felt a bit unnecessary and like it was tacked on as almost an afterthought, but every other plot twist had my jaw on the floor! I wasn't expecting plot twists at all, since I know the original story of Sweeney Todd so well.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, and would recommend it to any Sweeney Todd fan.

Thrilling, bloody, Victorian indulgence - reads like the best kind of Penny Dreadful!
I love an epistolary book and this one delivered so many twists and thrills. The untold back story of Sweeney Todd's Mrs Lovett is interspersed with a mystery surrounding a journalist on the hunt to find her.
If you love Sweeny Todd, love a dark Victorian tale and don't mind a little body horror, this book is for you.

(Rounded down from 3.5)

Compelling, sympathetic, and bloody, this portrait of what it takes a woman to survive in late 20th century London is gripping from the start. It is written in a retrospective epistolary mode, so the story is being recounted fifty years after it occurred through a series of letters. This, well, this I didn’t love. It didn’t feel like it added to the story, and it actually felt like it held me back from the experience.

Let’s start with what I enjoyed, though. This is not a re-telling of Sweeney Todd (or The String of Pearls,) it is telling a parallel story about an under-explored character from that story, and I think it does that well. We get a deeply moving portrait of a life marked by adversity and struggle, shot through with brief moments of victory only to have lasting happiness constantly be on the periphery, just out of reach. I really enjoyed our central character, and the journey she went through. She is still mostly a victim, of her birth, her circumstances, her sex, and a number of awful men that cross her path, but within that she does fight for agency and make choices, sacrifices, for clear and specific reasons. The world-building is rich and descriptive, not just the 19th century England of it all but also a number of different locations within that, all distinct and captivating. The story moves quickly and covers a lot of ground, and allows our main character to develop and grow. The writing also worked, the tone and style personal and emotional and helped create the atmosphere. The story is happy to force us to blur the line between aggressor and victim, and doesn’t want the reader to be content and unquestioning in their acceptance of such a false duality, and I appreciate that.

I enjoyed the novel quite a bit, I enjoyed the depth of story and the pacing, the shocks of gore and violence and the small moments of intimacy that struggled in its bloody grip. The epistolary format, though, held me back from really loving this story. I did enjoy the meta story being told, about the missing reporter to whom all these letters had been addressed, I think that was a nice touch. I don’t find the argument as to why our main character was allowed to begin this correspondence compelling, nor that as to why she was insistent on telling her whole story (but repeatedly telling this reporter that she couldn’t tell anyone) …. But I am willing to overlook that, if the epistolary framing brings something else to the story and experience, something lost otherwise. Unfortunately, for me, it didn’t. It did set up a nice ending, I will give it that. But having everything told in this retrospective epistolary format kept us at a significant distance from the main character and from her actions. Her feelings, her experiences, both terrible and titillating, are all seen through a filter, never mind the constant doubt about the narrator’s reliability. The story that was told is exciting and emotional and has all sorts of peaks and valleys and I would have loved to be able to experience that with our main character, not set at a remove, not in an almost clinical recollection. The occasional additional ephemera included—police reports, letters from the reporter’s father, letters from physician groups, and so on, these were a nice touch. They helped create tension in the story and did add to the overall ambiance. But I would gladly give them all up if I could have been in the room with our character when she sawed through her first leg, when she took that fateful carriage ride with her mother, when she crossed all sorts of lines, both knowingly and unknowingly. There is a level of immediacy and intimacy that I felt was lost in the decision to write in this format/mode, and what was gained didn’t quite make up for it.

That said, I did enjoy the novel. Even though I constantly felt like I was being held at arm’s length I was still drawn to read the next chapter, and the next, to dig deeper and see what secrets might be uncovered. The atmosphere and writing are well-crafted, and the story itself is inventive and fun, forcing the audience into an alliance, or complicity, with a party they know they should avoid. Although I didn’t feel the emotional experiences of the characters were as well-explored in this format as they might be in others I did find the main character genuine, complicated, and engaging, and most of the various ancillary characters also colored the world well and felt like more than mere window dressing. If you are most attracted to the immediacy and intimacy of a character’s story and aren’t particularly compelled by epistolary novels then, even though the story itself is a good one, this novel may not work for you. However, if you’re intrigued by or even simply don’t mind epistolary novels, and, for that matter, retrospective first-person novels, then I think this novel is a lot of fun and worth seeking out.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Soho Press, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

There are such horrors in this book, and they are told in such an enticing manner that I found myself almost unable to put it down until I reached the end. An epistolary novel set in Victorian London, with the backdrop of Mrs. Lovett, her pies, and Sweeney Todd? Yes, there's plenty of darkness to delve into, and this book delves deep, and there's a strange and thrilling beauty, terrifying though it is, in the telling of the tale. I love the way Demchuk and Clark draw us in with all the trappings of a gothic tale, skillfully entwined with mystery and suspense, as we're led through the dirty streets and bloody rooms of London, into the greater darkness beneath the surface. A thoroughly compelling, profoundly disturbing, and unforgettable book.

Unholy, queer, and bloody in all the right ways. This gothic fever dream doesn’t care if you’re ready—it drags you by the neck and whispers folklore straight into your bones. It’s theatrical, poetic, and a little feral. I was obsessed.

I had the highest hopes for THE BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER, and perhaps that was the problem—nothing could quite live up to my expectations. I normally love epistolary stories, but Mrs. Lovett's story didn't work for me in this format. I found it more confusing to follow the story and had to reread sections, which is never a good sign. While I didn't love this, I know it'll find its readership.

The Butcher’s Daughter by David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark was a surprisingly gripping read. Told through letters and documents, it offers a fresh perspective on Mrs. Lovett’s backstory, blending dark humor with unsettling twists. The epistolary format added depth, though at times I found myself flipping back to keep track of the correspondents. Despite this, the narrative’s eerie atmosphere and character development kept me hooked. If you’re open to a macabre tale with a unique structure, this one might just surprise you too.