Milkteeth by Caitlin Starling
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic? MC
PoV: First-person, past-tense
Published on: 10th November 2026
ISBN: B0G75HHQRD
Goodreads
A dark, seductive tale of hunger, love, and transformation from the bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence.
The only thing more terrifying than a brood's hunger . . . is its mother's.
Beatrice is a broodmother: a vampire responsible for nursing newly made fledglings through the first years of their unlife. She nests in an abandoned, isolated warren of office space beneath her patron's skyscraper, where she raises her fledglings—two difficult, hungry children of the night.
But when she takes on a third, the balance ruptures. Her hunger swells beyond control. Her body alters, betraying its purpose, transforming her into something even more monstrous.
Desperate to master herself once more, Beatrice courts a mortal OBGYN who might be able to unravel the secrets of her unnatural anatomy. But soon their connection threatens the secrecy of her vampiric coven as well as the safety and development of her dependent nurslings… and in a world governed by secrecy, even the smallest revelation could prove fatal.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~what IF breastfeeding vampires???
~you have to enslave those whose work you depend on
~power-fantasy for everyone who’s ever cared for a baby
Please allow me to introduce you to my new favourite vampire novel.
Beatrice is something modern vampires try very hard not to acknowledge: a broodmother. The book description makes it sound like this is her job, a duty that might have been assigned, but that’s not it at all.
See, becoming a vampire? Is not a quick process. In most fiction I’ve come across, the transformation takes anywhere between a few minutes to a few days, but in Milkteeth, it takes YEARS. And while any vampire can kickstart that process – can bite a human – very, very few can keep their fledgelings alive until they can survive on their own. ‘Newborn’ vampires don’t have the memories of their human selves; they’re functionally infants. Worse, they can’t drink human blood yet! It’s toxic to them. They can only drink the blood of other vampires. And your typical vampire simply cannot keep a fledgeling fed – either the maker or the fledgeling, if not both, will die if they try.
Unless you’ve got a broodmother. The rarest kind of vampire, who can for some reason produce/contain enough blood to keep themselves healthy, AND feed a fledgeling or two.*
A broodmother like Beatrice.
This was IMMEDIATELY extremely cool to me, and the more the book went on, the more I loved the lore Starling created for her vampires. She even explains the folklore around vampires being obsessed with counting! And the thing with the novel Dracula – especially in hindsight, that delights me!
Beatrice does not, as you might expect, rule a coven of adoring vampires who all understand their lives and society depend on her. Instead she is relegated to the basement of an office building, bare except for the bloodstains, empty except for the fledgelings she’s currently taking care of. She has no books, no games, no friends, no hobbies. She is not allowed out of the basement. She doesn’t even get to hunt – prey is brought to her via freight elevator. And yet, what looks nightmarish to us is not, to her. When we first meet her, she isn’t chafing at her lack of freedom: she appreciates it. She has everything she wants. Her existence is – feral, primal, deeply Uncivilised, and that’s the way she likes it: down in the dark with her fledgelings.
(Well, not exactly her fledgelings. She didn’t bite either of them. But they’re hers to feed and care for.)
Then, like the book description says, she recklessly takes on a third fledgeling. (This is unheard of.) And in response, her body starts…changing.
Once I understood how important broodmothers are, I was baffled by Beatrice’s basement. Why was she locked up, and with no luxuries? Why is her work so unappreciated? Why must she beg for anything new she wants? Don’t the vampires understand there’d be no them without her???
(Yes, I AM dreadfully naive, why would do you ask.)
The subtext of Milkteeth is a pointed (one might even say, fanged) critique of the way we don’t value the ‘women’s work’ that is child-rearing, child-caring. Or, if you flip it around, that we value it to the point we must functionally enslave those who do it. (Because what if they stopped?) Because that’s the truth behind Beatrice’s situation: on the one hand, she’s in the basement because other vampires hate to be reminded that she exists, that they were once feral, bestial, mindless things down in the dark with her (or with someone like her). It shatters the myth they tell about themselves, makes a farce out of the luxuries and decadence they embrace once they’re mature enough not to need a broodmother. Because no, they’re not perfect and ‘civilised’; they’re monsters, and in a weird way, they don’t want to face that.
when he looked at me, vicious and starving, he saw a part of his reflection he was accustomed to not seeing.
And on the other hand, Beatrice is in the basement because she is valuable. Manon, the leader of the local vampires and Beatrice’s ‘patron’, clearly benefits from having a broodmother in her possession. Without a broodmother, Manon wouldn’t be able to grow her coven, or keep (by rendering immortal) the mortals she decides are special enough. Over the course of the book, I started to wonder how much of Manon’s power depended on having a broodmother; it’s against Manon’s law to make new vampires without permission, and since Manon has Beatrice, Manon gets to decide whether the vampires who come to her begging to be allowed to make their lovers immortal can or can’t. Even if they break the law and make vampires themselves, they can’t keep those fledgelings alive without Beatrice – and they have no access to Beatrice except through Manon. If Beatrice left or was stolen, would Manon stay in power?
Imagine, if she had put such chains on another of our kind.
The broodmothers are a clear metaphor, or stand-in, for human mothers and caregivers. De-valued, kept out of the way, their work something no one wants to look at – and yet, what civilisation could exist if we lost them? De-valued, and depended on. That’s Beatrice in a nutshell.
Bloody work, bodily work, tucked away into crypts and labyrinths, into mother-baby clinics and faceless forums online, all of it necessary, none of it glorified. Appreciated, perhaps, but not seen as powerful.
Starling doesn’t beat us around the head with this, though. This isn’t a preachy book with a nice clear moral at the ending. It’s horror, and it’s great horror. And a big, delicious part of that is the horror of – twisting this foundational but dismissed function (childrearing) into power. Making Milkteeth a magnificently cathartic, even wish-fulfilment novel for anyone who’s ever had to take care of a baby and never felt appreciated for it!
It’s also, as you might guess from the book description, big on the body-horror angle. Beatrice has no idea what is happening to her body – the closest thing she knows is the transformation of a vampire into a ghoul, a mindless monster who eats human meat rather than blood. Is that what’s happening to her? Lu, the third fledgeling she really shouldn’t have taken on, has gone partway down the path to ghoulhood – maybe feeding her is making Beatrice a ghoul too? Broodmothers are so rare, and so ‘protected’ (isolated) there might never have been a case of a ghoul or near-goul feeding on a broodmother, so no one can say it’s impossible. Certainly Beatrice’s hungers and cravings get stranger and more frightening chapter by chapter.
Which highlights her isolation, maybe for the first time. It’s chilling when Beatrice asks Manon to contact other broodmothers for her, thinking they can swap tips and questions – and Manon says she doesn’t know of any others. (Is this true? I think later events suggest Manon had a lot more knowledge about broodmothers than Beatrice did, but probably really didn’t know of any other living broodmothers, or she’d have made different choices.) How the hells is Beatrice supposed to get answers now – not just to what’s currently happening to her, but answers about how she works, what she is?
This, too, feels very like being a woman trying to get healthcare, trying to learn about her body through all of the nonsense and lies and gods-damn folklore that’s out there. (I was born in 1993, and went through sex-ed three times in three different schools. None mentioned that people with vaginas have orgasms too.) I suspect many readers are going to sympathise with Beatrice’s searching online forums and baby-feeding classes for information that might apply to her: I think most XX readers have been there at one point or another.
So some of the horror – comes from that, comes from digging into some of the horrifying parts of being (or being seen as) a woman in our society, but giving them a supernatural slant. It’s all very fun and deep and satisfyingly meaty. (Pun absolutely intended.)
But I cannot overstate how much Beatrice is not a sympathetic character, is not nice. Nothing about her is nice. She’s a monster, and she embraces that: she scorns the luxurious penthouse Manon lives in in favour of her nightmarish basement. The scenes where we get to see her hunt – as when several urban explorers make the fatal decision to break into the basement – are blood-curdling. Her dynamic with her fledgelings – most people would call it horrifically toxic, I think. The strange hungers Beatrice develops – she is afraid because she doesn’t know what’s happening to her, but she’s not afraid or disgusted of the hunger itself, even when that means cracking humans open to drink their marrow or eat their kidneys! WHILE THEY’RE ALIVE.
And my gods, what she does to Bajracharya, the OBGYN she connects with!!! Their relationship is so completely fucked-up – there’s a very sapphic overtone to it all, although they never date, but I’d like to shove Milkteeth at all the fans of ‘Dark Romance’ because THIS! This is how you do a dark romance, you milksops! The obsession, the no-holds-barred intimacy, the mind-control, the vivisection! These two never kiss and Milkteeth still wipes the floor with Gothikana and the rest of its ilk! TikTok could never.
I adored the ending. ADORED IT. It was everything I didn’t know to want – I had no idea the book was going in that direction, and I’m so glad it did. Terrifying! Awful! Glorious! Probably my favourite ending to a Caitlin Starling book so far. The way it tied so beautifully into the already-established lore! Just. *chef’s kiss*
I finished it an hour ago and I already want to reread it. It’s going on my Best of Year list for sure!
You can read an excerpt of Milkteeth here!
*Despite my Highlights above, they do not do this through literal breastfeeding…except one time right at the beginning!
Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »
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