The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MCs
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 20th May 2025
ISBN: B0CWJXF9K4
Goodreads

From the nationally bestselling author of The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, a transfixing, intensely atmospheric fever dream of medieval horror.

Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months. Food is running low and there has been no sign of rescue. But just as the survivors consider deliberately thinning their number, the castle stores are replenished. The sick are healed. And the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints have arrived, despite the barricaded gates, offering succor in return for adoration.

Soon, the entire castle is under the sway of their saviors, partaking in intoxicating feasts of terrible origin. The war hero Ser Voyne gives her allegiance to the Constant Lady. Phosyne, a disorganized, paranoid nun-turned-sorceress, races to unravel the mystery of these new visitors and exonerate her experiments as their source. And in the bowels of the castle, a serving girl, Treila, is torn between her thirst for a secret vengeance against Voyne and the desperate need to escape from the horrors that are unfolding within Aymar’s walls.

As the castle descends into bacchanalian madness—forgetting the massed army beyond its walls in favor of hedonistic ecstasy—these three women are the only ones to still see their situation for what it is. But they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters… or each other; and their shifting alliances and entangled pasts bring violence to the surface. To save the castle, and themselves, will take a reimagining of who they are, and a reorganization of the very world itself. 

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

~bees > holy communion
~fealty
~a failed Lionheart
~a voice (and mouth) in the dark
~is it cannibalism if it started as a fingernail

This sounded like everything my weird little heart could desire, but unfortunately it ended up pretty underwhelming.

The first third or so is great: Starling leans into Medieval Weird, replacing the Catholic church with a Lady and bees, and each of our three protagonists – Phosyne, Ser Voyne, and Treila – are deeply imperfect, all sharp, broken edges and contrasting flavours of unlikeable. Tensions are high, no one in charge really ought to be, and the situation is desperate. All of this came through to me beautifully.

Then the supernatural arrives.

Horror, I think, must be one of the hardest genres to write, and I suspect supernatural horror is even more difficult than other kinds. On the one hand, keeping the reader ignorant of what your monster/magic can do can up the fear factor – but if you don’t convince your reader that you know what it can do, the fear factor dissolves completely. You can’t dread something when you don’t know what to fear, and it’s easy for abrupt reveals to come across as random and disjointed rather than shocking.

Which is basically what happened with Saints. Starling makes up her own kind of demony creatures, and because I never knew what they were or what they could do, I stopped being scared of them pretty quickly, and was just left confused instead. I didn’t know what to dread, and I guess in theory that could have turned into dread that they might do anything at all…but it didn’t. Every new reveal of their capabilities just struck me as freaking random, irritatingly so, because none of their powers or goals seemed to fit together, more of the rules that bound them could be inferred from previous ones. It made for a lot of telling-not-showing as the characters ‘deduced’ each new thing and informed the reader of it. Borderline info-dumpy, at times.

The longer the story went on, the more annoying this got, the less impactful each subsequent reveal was – not just about the not-demons but also about the characters and their capabilities. Phosyne in particular becomes a kind of rival to the Lady, and I never understood how that was happening. The alchemy/magic Phosyne has been experimenting with at the beginning of the book, and which she grows more proficient in as we go along…it’s maddeningly vague, and seems to be, and be capable of, whatever the plot requires in the moment. The vagueness would be less maddening if Phosyne’s main arc wasn’t studying the magic, trying to make it make sense. Hand-waving it as ‘not human logic’ isn’t bloody good enough; I was never convinced that Starling knew how it worked or what-all it could do, and the magic ended up playing deus ex machina far too often.

(I had the vague impression Phosyne was meant to be neurodiverse, and that might be why she can grasp the magic at all, but that wasn’t very clear to me so don’t quote me on it.)

The pattern of abrupt reveals ruined pretty much every aspect of the book. Treila especially does a couple of 180s that weren’t the slightest bit convincing, and the magical reveal about her in the final showdown made no sense; I wanted to throw the book across the room and SHRIEK. At another point, a character is brought back from the dead WITH NO EXPLANATION WHATSOEVER; no one even expresses confusion about it! By the time bits of reality were dissolving up into the sky I had long since stopped caring.

All our protagonists were set up to be extremely interesting, but in the end they were each defined by just one or two traits that never deepened or developped – just flip-flopped like a dying fish. Phosyne went from feral mess to queenly with no transition. Treila discarded everything that made her great (vicious, out for herself, a survivor) for no apparent reason. Voyne…I don’t even know.

The cannibalism, especially the hypnotic feast sequences, was amazing: horrifying on every level, full marks, excuse me while I go throw up. The feverish quality to many scenes: superb. But the moment the book stepped away from that – in its attempt to paint some kind of Big Picture horror – it all fell apart, and kept falling.

(For all that this was trying very hard to be a queer book, none of the queer configurations had any real chemisty, by the way (even if Ser Voyne’s need to serve was delicious) and I remain very confused by a) the Relationship Status of the ending and b) how the m/f dynamic was so much sexier and more interesting than any other set-up. Seriously, what was going on here?)

This is the first Starling book that hasn’t worked for me. I’m disappointed, but it won’t be the last book of hers I try. I’ll cross my fingers for better luck next time – but I really can’t recommend Starving Saints at all.

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