Caitlin Starling, acclaimed for The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, returns with another triumph of horror and speculative fiction in The Starving Saints. Set within the claustrophobic walls of Aymar Castle, besieged and desperate, this novel is a fever-dream tapestry of religion, starvation, madness, and uncanny salvation. Seamlessly blending medieval fantasy with body horror, theological critique, and queer undertones, Starling crafts a narrative that is both viscerally disturbing and intellectually exhilarating.
The Siege as a Stage for the Surreal
The novel’s backdrop — a castle under siege for six relentless months — serves not just as a physical prison, but as a crucible for spiritual, ethical, and psychological unraveling. Food stores dwindle, riots erupt, and hope withers alongside the garden plots. Just as the castle verges on collapse, divine figures arrive — not with battering rams, but with bounty and benediction. The Constant Lady and her Saints descend into Aymar with impossible gifts: restored food supplies, miraculous healing, and the disquieting aura of gods-made-flesh.
Yet their arrival through sealed gates, with no plausible explanation, casts an immediate pall of suspicion. Starling skillfully builds this unease into every interaction, cultivating horror from generosity. The feast becomes a trap, devotion a drug, and the Lady a deity whose love is indistinguishable from dominion.
Three Women, Three Paths Through Perdition
At the heart of the novel are three women: Ser Voyne, the war hero and right hand of the king; Phosyne, a heretic alchemist haunted by her miracles; and Treila, a servant girl with vengeance stitched into her skin. Through their alternating perspectives, Starling crafts a multilayered portrait of feminine agency under siege — from within and without.
Ser Voyne: Devotion and Disillusionment
Voyne is a study in restrained rage, honor bound yet spiritually adrift. As the castle’s enforcer, she clings to order and discipline even as those ideals rot around her. Her initial distrust of Phosyne and the Saints slowly gives way to a different hunger — for meaning, for absolution, for something real in a world of collapsing structures. Her arc, perhaps the most tragic, exposes the vulnerability behind strength and the peril in blind loyalty. The moment she bows to the Lady, willingly offering her blade and body, is chilling in its surrender.
Phosyne: The Madwoman as Prophet
Phosyne, once a nun, now a solitary sorceress, is a marvel of contradiction — frail yet defiant, scattered yet genius, faithful yet faithless. Her experiments with water purification and miracle-making tether the novel’s science-fantasy elements, and her tower becomes a grotesque laboratory of hope. Starling’s depiction of her decline into malnutrition-induced delirium mirrors the castle’s own moral starvation. Her creation of the Saints — whether intentional or not — positions her as both savior and summoner of ruin.
Treila: Revenge in Ragged Clothes
Treila’s role starts subtly but sharpens quickly. Posing as a common girl, she harbors a secret identity and a vendetta against Ser Voyne, who executed her father. Treila’s arc is laced with themes of class, survival, and calculated violence. Her descent into morally gray territory, culminating in her alliance with an unknown subterranean voice, injects Lovecraftian dread into the tale. Treila becomes the book’s most unpredictable element — a scalpel cutting at the heart of righteousness.
Theological Body Horror and the Inversion of Faith
What elevates The Starving Saints beyond gothic fantasy is its surgical dissection of belief. Starling interrogates religious structure, devotion, and sanctity with a scalpel honed by horror. The Constant Lady is not merely a benevolent god — She is a consumer of loyalty, a parasite of worship. Her gifts come with unspoken costs. Her Saints, painted and adorned like icons, seem too-perfect, too insistent on their divinity.
Phosyne’s alchemical experiments resonate as blasphemies and revelations alike. Her ability to purify water, to summon flame without fuel, to create light from blood — these are miracles, yes, but devoid of liturgical sanction. Starling pushes readers to ask: what differentiates miracle from monstrosity? And who gets to decide?
The novel’s most haunting image — the transformation of a saint from painted flesh to something visibly, viscerally Other — unravels the boundary between sacred and sinister. It’s not just that the divine is unknowable. It’s that it may be fundamentally alien.
Worldbuilding Through Desperation
Every inch of Aymar Castle is crafted with tactile dread. From the reeking cisterns to the pressed bodies in communal chambers, the castle itself feels like a body in decay. The hierarchy of suffering — nobles and soldiers eat better than mothers and boys — is rendered in painful detail. The casual brutality of survival (slaughtered dogs, calculated executions, the recycling of flesh) builds an ethos where horror feels routine.
Starling excels at immersion without indulgence. Her prose is sharp, textured, occasionally poetic — especially in scenes of bodily collapse and scientific obsession. The pacing, though slow in early chapters, crescendos into a fevered sprint by the final act. The shift from existential dread to escalating action is well-timed and thematically rich.
Critical Observations: What Weakens the Foundation
Despite its many strengths, The Starving Saints suffers from a few structural missteps.
- Pacing in the First Act: The early chapters, especially Phosyne’s internal monologues and lab rituals, drag in places. While atmospheric, they risk alienating readers looking for narrative propulsion.
- Obliqueness of the Threat: The Saints, particularly the Constant Lady, are purposefully opaque — and this works for much of the novel. However, the lack of concrete stakes around their agenda in the mid-novel leaves some tension deflated. Their horror is symbolic more than strategic.
- Underused Side Characters: A few supporting players, including Ser Leodegardis and Prioress Jacynde, are painted in compelling strokes but never given full resolution. Jacynde’s theological crisis is profound, yet the fallout of her resistance is underexplored.
These shortcomings, however, feel minor in the shadow of Starling’s grander design.
LGBTQ Themes and Queer Resistance
Though not overtly romantic, the novel is laced with queerness — in desire, in faith, in defiance of norms. Phosyne and Voyne’s relationship is charged with antagonistic intimacy. Their shared isolation, their roles as guardians of heresy and order, create a friction that speaks to both yearning and danger. Treila’s identity, too, is shaped by concealment and redefinition. Her intimacy with the darkness beneath the castle literalizes queer-coded otherness.
Starling’s queerness lies not just in character identity but in narrative structure — nonlinear, dissociative, defiantly disruptive. The Saints themselves may be divine drag. Faith is performance. Belief is transformation.
Final Verdict: A Feast of Flesh and Faith
The Starving Saints is an astonishing addition to Caitlin Starling’s catalog, offering one of the most unique visions in contemporary horror-fantasy. It demands slow digestion — like a bitter communion wafer stuck to the roof of your mouth. Not every bite is pleasurable, but every taste is earned.
Starling asks: what are we willing to eat, believe, become, to survive? In the world of The Starving Saints, the answers are never clean — but they are unforgettable.
