Do not let the honey touch your lips
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| cover artist: Owen Corrigan |
The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling is one of a raft of medieval fantasies from the last few years (possibly led by 2012’s Between Two Fires by Chris Buehlman, reissued in 2026). They are an interesting subgenre of stories that take fantasy seriously but also take medieval Europe seriously – putting the work in to get at both the sensibility of a holistic world but also at the cultures, political currents and day to day lives of people from this long period of time.
Specifically I often find European stories featuring periods where religious life is central to living underbaked and, honestly, completely misrepresent the nature of a religious life as I understand it, especially one in which the entire world is seen as intrinsically connected. A holistic worldview is so far from the modern world (even for people who still centre magical thinking which is absolutely not the same thing at all despite claims otherwise) that writing it feels very challenging and it’s not surprise that so many writers just glide over it with a much more modern atomistic capitalist approach to culture and society.
Starling’s The Starving Saints feels like it gets it – that she is able to build a world where life revolves around ritual and repetition and, crucially, place. Not just the place itself – in this case a small castle housing a fleeing king and his entourage among the normal citizens but the place of people within that society, ordained by religious faith to know who they are, what is wanted of them and who stands above and below them on the ladder. All of this is by way of saying that Starling manages to conjure a sense of time and place that feels alien and familiar all at once, a world which we would be utterly lost in but also one we can recognise as being entirely coherent for its inhabitants without an ounce of absurdity or knowing wink at the possible silliness of their lives.
Into this landscape she tells a genre defying tale of devotion, exploration, survival and grief. This is very much a lockdown novel, not just because everyone in the book is trapped in a castle and slowly losing their minds over the pressure of it but because it’s about who we find ourselves to be when pressed like this.
I came out of lockdown (I didn’t contract Long Covid until the middle of 2024) with two convictions that have only deepened over time. The first is that we have no sense of the collective trauma we experienced, not simply because of lockdown but because of Covid itself. I see it slowly blossoming in my now adult children and have not the mirror to understand how it reflects in me. All I can say is that I do not think we’ve still understood the extent of our reaction to it and our need for a catharsis as a society. The Starving Saints captures that trauma in its months-long application to people who just prior to this were living normal lives that made sense, who could plan for the future and know what tomorrow would bring.
The second is this: we don’t know how to talk about it, not individually although that’s true enough, but socially. There is no great Covid literature, not directly and not that’s broken containment to become the thing we’ve all stood around discussing. I am not surprised – the more I read about the 1918 flu and its complete absence from literature and collective thought in the years following, the more I realise that we too will perform the same dance of forgetting as quickly and as determinedly as possible. The Starving Saints plays with memory, with how we remember and how easy it is for us to blank suffering in the name of recovery, in the name of trying to get back to normal. It plays with the idea that we will willingly exchange one kind of suffering for another, our own suffering for someone else’s, and we will celebrate our metamorphosis given the chance. It is deeply disturbing to see the metaphor here so clearly played out in the real world. It is also deeply uncomfortable to see people portrayed as knowing what they do, how they make this trade of one pain for another for the sake of the idea of relief (and not relief itself). Starling’s characters find one pain so unbearable they are willing to trade for another form of suffering knowing it won’t set them free. If that sounds horrific, it is.
Starling takes it further by making all of this deeply carnal, the world inside her castle is fleshy and physical, full of meat and blood and wine and honey and bone and stink and fluid. There is no escape from these bodies, from their needs and their deterioration when those needs aren’t met.
In that sense The Starving Saints is wholly about grief – about the grief of things coming to birth and being lost in the process, about worlds we knew dying even as we’re trapped unable to affect any kind of outcome. This grief is dipped in honey throughout her novel, coming to us pretending to be something other, something calming, a balm for our confused and shocked souls. Instead the moment the honey touches our lips we succumb and in that succumbing we lose ourselves because no amount of external comfort can soothe our aching souls.
There is no finding oneself again. There is no freedom. Saints posits that there’s only belonging to one force or another. And it is brilliant for it. Our heroes are surviving. Maybe. And in that survival there is collaboration and betrayal, a little success and a lot of failure.
I felt like I was reading something designed to poison the romantic soul, something Shelley or Inchbold would have been disgusted by and I was glad to be part of it.
This is a story in which magic, the act of knowing, cannibalism/starvation, loss, anger, hope, faith and grief are central. It’s a story in which the act of survival leaves us weakened and traumatised because to survive means there has been a catastrophe for us to emerge from – broken and battered. This is not heroism masquerading as overcoming the odds. This is survival by the skin of our teeth, survival when so many others don’t make it.
Lastly it’s a story that also considers faith, not in the protestant evangelical sense that pervades so much of western culture but in the sense of its practice, of the road lives take when they hold onto faith and how that is both a comfort and a struggle. It wrestles with the possibility of faith being nothing more (and nothing less) than our attempt to make sense of a world, not alone, but as a community of people. How our shared ideas offer us meaning and how that meaning naturally breaks down when its foundations are eroded by catastrophic uncertainty.
Knowing tomorrow will bring pain is more manageable than not knowing if tomorrow will be bring salvation or suffering. It is the uncertainty that kills us.
This won’t be to everyone’s tastes – it is gruesome and horrific as much as it has notes of beauty and hope, but this reader loved it.
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The Math
Highlights:
- A familiar but fantastical world that understands itself and its place
- A compelling tale of the trauma of lockdown on society
