Find the Time, Read Messy, "The Starving Saints"

One of the things I absolutely hate about the academic semester is I find myself using all of my mental energy on my classes and assignments, with nothing left for the things I enjoy. I like to think of myself as a creative person, but by the time October rolls around, all of the energy I have to create things has gone to making semi cohesive notes, passable discussion posts, and essays I actually feel okay turning in. So I find myself in the car with a friend trying to come up with my feelings about a new album other than just, “I liked this song” while she does a lyrical analysis, or trying to tell someone about a book I read and only coming up with an incoherent rambling, realizing I was entirely passive in my consumption of this media. 

And while I myself am bored of reading the fifth article for a class about actively engaging with a text and giving something a close read, this idea is not without merit. It does, in fact, have a lot of merit, especially in a time when there cannot be enough said about the importance of media literacy. But even with this understanding, giving a text a close read is not my typical instinct when reading for pleasure. And so I end up paying half attention to the media I am consuming or more likely scrolling online instead of actually thinking. But that’s not what I want to do, or sometimes want to want to do, and that's not what I want for others either. So I’ll try or try to try to step out of passive habits. 

The Starving Saints

With The Starving Saints, I picked one of the many books I had taken a photo or screenshot of with the guise of eventually, probably, maybe borrowing it from the library. This time I followed through.

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling is a 2025 release. The novel is set in a medieval fantasy world in a castle under siege; reading like a bottle episode, the characters barely escape the castle walls. The castle is crowded with refugees, the king, his people, religious groupings, and castle workers. Six months into the siege, desperation and hunger is overwhelming and is only worsened when three saint looking figures miraculously appear within the gates and reality tangles. 

Using third person point of view, The Starving Saints shifts perspective between the main three protagonists: Phosyne, Ser Voyne, and Treila. Phosyne is a disorganized miracle worker. Phosyne is under pressure from the king to solve the castle's problems, as the organized religious group present in the castle is unsuccessful in their attempts for solutions. Formerly a military leader, Ser Voyne is one of the king’s knights, who is frustrated with her lack of action. She faces guilt and a lack of guilt resurfacing from her militant past. Ser Voyne is assigned to watch over Phosyne as her experiments appear unsuccessful. Treila has a complicated history with Ser Voyne. Treila grew up nobility but lost her status and a decent bit of her dignity. She has lived in the castle beyond the siege and is now sneaking her way around in a self-preserving manner. 

Going into this book, I did something many readers might hate, I knew frankly nothing about it. I assumed I had at the very least read the back of the book, but I truly hadn’t. Horrorlit is a genre I cannot confidently say I have read before. Even though I found myself drawn to this book, I likely would have been scared off by the genre; it worked out well that I had no knowledge of it before reading. 

The Starving Saints illustrates shocking depictions of the gruesomeness of human desperation as magic and inhuman creatures exacerbate the horrors. As a queer cannibalistic novel, this book will likely be enjoyed by fans of the show Yellowjackets. It has very dynamic female characters to the point where you can’t really tell which characters you actually like, and by the time you make a decision on a character, their moral grayness shifts in tint. 

As the novel shifts in perspective and the characters nearly lose their minds, the characters’ confusion of reality lends to a similar experience for the reader. What is truly happening is not always clear, but the fever dream-like feeling of the novel is not entirely unpleasant.

For a novel that focuses heavily on desire, it is entirely inexplicit, yet the intense imagery of desire and symbolism is comparable to 1950s area films that utilized symbolism to work around Broadcast Standards and Practices that restricted what could be included in film. Where the desire is directed in the novel is rarely clear leading to what is frankly a sapphic mess; this is not the book to read if you want a monogamous, or even clear non-monogamous, romance to root for. 

A Taste of the Text

“It looks for all the world like a bloom nestled between two lips, but when she blinks again, the lips are the convolution of a mushroom, and it is the bloom that is made of peels of flesh. Another blink and it is pastry and fruit.”

I often find myself being struck by a particular line or passage, for The Starving Saints, this was one of them. The protagonists nearly take turns losing their grasps’ on reality. Bewitched, they cannot tell the difference between a feast and the flesh of their friends. 

.5

A pleasant read with plenty of symbolism to engage with, but not consistently believable even within a fantasy world, leaving me caring about the results of the story but not the fates of the characters. If that’s not clear, well neither are my feelings about this book.