| Summary: | Brian Attebery writes in Strategies of Fantasy (1992) about reading fantasy as a mode rather than a genre. Following his lead, I look at Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006) as a revenge tragedy in the fantastic mode. I prove that the novel is a revenge tragedy by genre through tracing the elements commonly associated with Renaissance plays, as outlined in Wendy Griswold’s Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre 1576–1980 (1986). The Lies of Locke Lamora moves from city comedy to two different kinds of revenge tragedy, the English and the Senecan, of which the latter ends in disillusionment in terms of power hierarchies. Linda Woodbridge’s English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (2010) provides support for my argument that reading Lynch’s debut as a revenge tragedy reveals its political themes and places it in the context of the history of literature.
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