Caitlin Starling’s The Starving Saints invites readers into a chilling, spiritually fraught descent into madness, transformation, and divine horror. Following the footsteps of her previous triumphs (The Luminous Dead, The Death of Jane Lawrence), Starling once again delivers a visceral narrative grounded in psychological complexity and creeping dread. Yet this novel stands apart for its intricate interweaving of medieval theology, queer longing, alchemical speculation, and siege-born desperation.
It is not a book that asks you to believe — it forces you to question everything you already do.
A Castle Besieged — By Hunger, by Holiness, by Heresy
Set within the crumbling fortress of Aymar Castle, the story opens on the brink of collapse. Besieged by enemy forces for half a year, the castle’s inhabitants teeter on starvation. Then, salvation arrives — or so it seems. The Constant Lady and her angelic Saints descend into the castle as if from heaven, untouched by the laws of reality. They offer food, healing, and divine comfort. But what they truly feed is far more insidious.
Starling crafts this miracle as menace with literary sleight-of-hand. Her divine intruders are not overtly monstrous, and yet every gift tightens a noose. As Aymar’s people gorge, forget their dead, and sing praises, the reader can see the cracks form beneath their feet.
Characters Forged in the Furnace of Faith
Voyne: The Soldier as Supplicant
Ser Voyne’s struggle is the beating heart of this narrative. A hardened soldier and defender of order, Voyne’s gravitation toward the Constant Lady speaks volumes about what unprocessed guilt and suppressed vulnerability can become when channeled into religious fervor. She is the embodiment of discipline undone by desire — not romantic, but existential.
Phosyne: Alchemist, Heretic, Visionary
Phosyne, equal parts sorceress and scientist, provides a deeply unsettling mirror to divine intervention. Her concoctions mimic miracles, and her guilt — over what she’s created or allowed to fester — corrodes her from within. Her madness is not madness at all, but clarity no one else is ready to face. Starling allows Phosyne to be grotesque, raw, and revelatory.
Treila: Masked Vengeance
Treila’s storyline dances between revenge and revelation. Her true identity, stitched together with secrets, serves as a wrench in the machinery of control. As she delves into the buried horrors beneath the castle, she becomes less a servant and more an avatar of reckoning. Her voice is the most human — confused, angry, reactive — and thus, the most vital.
Gothic, Grotesque, Glorious: The Style and Substance
Starling’s prose oscillates between opulence and economy. She writes decay with beauty, and transformation with terror. Her gothic tone is tinged with modern skepticism, which makes the horror feel both ancient and timely.
Key stylistic hallmarks:
- Dense, poetic passages in moments of psychological collapse
- Unnerving precision in bodily and architectural descriptions
- Dialogue that brims with theological undertones
Aymar Castle is as much a character as its inhabitants: damp, dying, divine. Every floorboard groans with centuries of faith, and every corridor hides a spiritual test.
Sacrament and Sacrifice: The Book’s Core Themes
The tension between miracle and manipulation pulses throughout this novel. Starling’s horror is never arbitrary; it is always asking, what does salvation cost?
Themes explored in The Starving Saints:
- Faith as Consumption: From communion to cannibalism, the sacred becomes edible. Belief is not metaphorical — it is swallowed whole.
- Queerness as Otherness: The characters, particularly Phosyne and Treila, defy heteronormative narratives and ecclesiastical roles. Their resistance to the Lady’s doctrine is also a reclamation of selfhood.
- Science vs. Sanctity: Phosyne’s experiments raise questions about what counts as divine intervention. Her “heresies” are rooted in physics, not blasphemy.
Critique and Complexity
Though The Starving Saints is a masterclass in tone and tension, some areas do falter:
- Pacing Stumbles: The middle third lingers too long in philosophical exposition, which might test readers craving action.
- Ambiguity Overload: While ambiguity fuels the novel’s dread, it also muddles some character motivations, especially in key revelations.
- Missing Payoffs: Some narrative threads (like Jacynde’s defiance) are introduced with promise but conclude quietly, almost forgotten.
These, however, do little to dim the impact of the novel’s core achievement — a sustained, intelligent, and emotionally wrenching descent into divine terror.
Literary Kin and Lineage
Readers who admire the unsettling theology of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series or the ritualistic horror of Brian Evenson will find familiar echoes in “The Starving Saints”. Starling also draws on Shirley Jackson’s sense of domestic doom and the symbolic body horror reminiscent of Clive Barker.
LGBTQ Underpinnings and Liberation
The Starving Saints is not a romance. It’s not even explicitly erotic. And yet, queerness permeates every page. Starling treats queer identity as something integrated, unspoken but undeniable — subtext rendered sacred.
- Voyne and Phosyne’s tension reads as spiritual intimacy born from shared heresy.
- Treila’s shape-shifting loyalties reject purity and align her with queer-coded liminality.
- The Saints themselves, with their genderless beauty and fluid performance of grace, read as divine queerness made flesh.
Starling’s queerness resists categorization. It does not seek validation. It devours categorization and asks, what comes after?
Closing Communion: A Book Worth the Faith
The Starving Saints is not simply a horror novel. It is a theological inquisition wrapped in velvet rot. It dares readers to hunger for truth, and then questions whether truth ever existed. In a genre too often reliant on jump scares and gore, Starling delivers something far more insidious: a quiet corruption that whispers rather than screams.
This is a book to read with the lights on, the windows barred, and your own beliefs laid bare. Because by the final page, you may not recognize yourself — and that’s exactly the point.