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My horror streak has been amazing, and I'm not stopping now. I was on the holds list for the audio version of The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling for weeks. When it was my turn, I devoured this book.
We find ourselves in a medieval castle but in a slightly altered world where they worship the Constant Lady and her saints. The castle is under siege, and they are running out of food. The King demands the castle's so-called madwoman, Phosyne, to create food from nothing. While this is an impossible task, weeks earlier she magically turned foul water into potable water. Phosyne is chaotic; her mind is an unreliable narrator of her own past.
Ser Voyne, a war hero and now pent in by the King, is tasked to keep an eye on Phosyne and make sure she stays on track to feed the hundreds of starving people. Little does Ser Voyne know, another inhabitant, Treila, is hell-bent on avenging the death of her father at Ser Voyne's hands.
An already tenuous situation is turned upside down when the Constant Lady and her Saints materialize in the courtyard. The castle descends into madness under their strange powers. What unfolds is a horror show of cannibalism and ever-shifting power dynamics.
What I loved about the book was that each of the three main characters had their own demons, distinct personalities, and internal struggles. None of them are without faults, cruelties, and desperate desires that the Constant Lady and her Saints use against them. The book is a fever dream with visceral descriptions of a world distorted and slowly but inexorably bleeding like paint on a canvas, where the colors blend into a kaleidoscope of chaos.
The sapphic longing among the three women is delicious. It's fleeting and intertwined with pain and a vicious craving. The spice level is very low, more thoughts than action. The gore level is high. Did I mention cannibalism? And the audiobook is fantastic.
Yeeeessss... I'm now hunting for something to follow my amazing horror streak. Going from Buffalo Hunter Hunter to You Weren't Meant to be Human to The Starving Saints was so amazing I fear I won't find something to follow it up.
/rae/