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.
Write the book however it needs to be written.
Here’s the scene: it’s the fall of 2020, my second novel isn’t even on shelves yet. I need to come up with something to pitch to my publisher (who will ultimately pass on it as too weird, but I have no indication of that yet). I’ve had to do fairly big structural revisions on both The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, so my agent and I assume this project will be exactly the same. But I write fast, so how about I just write the thing, and we figure out what we’d change, and that can be the pitch?
Except this book has multiple points of view (something I’ve never done) and is set in a secondary world that looks like medieval western Europe (something I’ve never done) and has a far more sprawling cast and setting than my other work (oh yes, something I’ve never done).
Cue panic. Crippling, terrible anxiety. Second book syndrome. The yips. Whatever you want to call it. I was absolutely terrified. But I also knew I wanted to write this book, and I knew I had to get started.
So I wrote The Starving Saints out of order.
I don’t mean I wrote some chapters and then had to rearrange them. I don’t even mean I hopped ahead to write a scene I was excited about, then worked my way back. I mean that, in the depths of deep anxiety over if I could pull this thing off, I wrote sentences out of order. Just little blips of phrase, floating in a big blank space, and then I’d patchwork-jigsaw them together over the course of days.
Not all of it was like this – there were some scenes I could write start to finish, the way I usually draft. But more often than not, I had to write out of order to trick myself into getting words on the page. I could come up with a sentence in isolation! That was doable! And then, look, surprise, I could see how to catch up to it eventually.
This came to a head in the final climactic fight. I had borrowed a relative’s apartment for the weekend while she was out, and had loaded up on food (and not a small amount of alcohol). I was going to finish this book, dammit. So I wrote out several pages of notes: which characters had which items and which unfinished business and which existing wounds, and then I started juggling.
I have never written a book like this before or since. It was wild. It was uncharted territory. It was as anxiety inducing as it was relieving. But it worked, and that’s the important part: sometimes you just have to change up your process to get a book out. I’ve run into it in the several books I’ve written since (while we quietly looked for another home for The Starving Saints), and each one I’ve had to find new and different techniques for getting around various blocks and anxieties and life changes.
Follow the bouncing ball.
The Starving Saints was the first multi-POV book I ever wrote. This might come as a surprise; I feel like most fantasy writers come to larger casts quite naturally. But for me, I’ve always been a solo narrator kind of girl; knowing when to change cameras, so to speak, while still maintaining a coherent vibe and narrative, felt impossible.
But I went into this book knowing I had three leads. Three voices I would need to balance and trade between. This book started its life as a game concept, with three initial character ‘classes’ to serve as inspiration. That’s right: Ser Voyne is the warrior, Phosyne is the mage, and Treila is the rogue.
I could tell you the nuts and bolts version of how I tracked the POVs (it involves color labels on scrivener files), but what stood out more to me and informed the final feel of the book was the experience of following the characters. I quickly established a rhythm that felt, for all the world, like a continuous camera shot, focused on a plate moving through a busy kitchen. Every time the plate changes hands, the camera follows the plate, and we learn something about the person carrying it.
This isn’t always literal; chapters don’t start immediately from something that ended the previous one. The characters do get physically separated at times. But I always chased that feeling; when I couldn’t capture that momentum, I knew something was going wrong. Back up, try again. Follow the bouncing ball.
Magic can be ineffable.
I wrote The Starving Saints fresh off of editing The Death of Jane Lawrence. For those of you unfamiliar with Jane, the magic system in that book is based on real world esoteric magical practices combined with some chaos magic, which is probably most quickly described as, imagine you’re in The Matrix. Will equals reality type stuff. Jane is also from the perspective of an autistic accountant who’s getting really into calculus during the events of the book, which combines into a tense mash up of rules-based logic and force of will power.
Going into The Starving Saints, I wanted to do something different. On the one hand, I could have gone in the direction of magic is known, magic has rules, magic is essentially a math equation with limits. On the other hand was something far more wibbly-wobbly: instinctive but nonsensical appearing power.
Like in Jane, I thought it would be more interesting for our magic user (in this case, the heretical nun Phosyne) to not understand what the fuck she was doing. And, more importantly, she can’t explain it to anybody else, either. She can purify water. How? It involves rat poop! An ever-burning candle? Some sulfur and a particular musical note. She has no spellbooks available to her, no tutors, not even really trial and error. She comes from a religious background based in engineering and the scientific method, but she winds up relying on intuition and coincidence. The sort of magic you only learn by catching a particular angle of the sun on the river, and something inside of you clicks into place.
Of course, you (the writer) still need to establish some rules behind the scrim of unreliability. I can tell you Phosyne’s magic is ultimately element-based, with some connections to alchemical theory. I can tell you who can and can’t access these skills, and what it means that Phosyne is seemingly a natural. And through the book, I’ll give you the crumbs you need to put it together yourself, or, at least, to believe what I’m telling you. But overall, the effect is this: magic is not something designed for humans to understand.
The creatures that do are dangerous.
Cannibalism comes in many flavors.
Ah, cannibalism. Gut-turning, triggering, and–sexy?
Broadly speaking, I find cannibalism falls into a few distinct camps in the public consciousness:
- True crime cannibalism. The gross-nasty. Dahmer and Nilsin. For some reason, a lot of these real-life cases and stories inspired by them include absolutely atrocious attempts at cooking.
- Survival cannibalism. Your Donner Party, your tragedy of the Essex, your Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes. Depending on how people are driven to eat each other, we feel either pity or queasy sympathy.
- Xenophobic exaggerated cannibalism. You know the kind; such and such ‘savage’ tribe eats people! How monstrous! Except, when you dig a little deeper, it’s usually not so simple, or so legit. Accusing another group of society-level cannibalism is a great way to dehumanize them.
- Aesthetic cannibalism. This is where we hit NBC’s Hannibal, and a shocking amount of queer media. Cannibalism as art, cannibalism as desire, cannibalism as transgressive temptation.
For The Starving Saints, I pulled heavily on both survival and aesthetic cannibalism. The people of Aymar are poised on the edge of eating their dead to survive when the Constant Lady and Her saints arrive with feasts; the king and his council are discussing the best way to process the dead and distribute the meat as part of rations in a way that won’t spark panic. And when the Constant Lady sets Her tables, Her dinner guests can’t see the true nature of what they’re eating.
In both cases, the origin of the food is intentionally concealed.
There’s nothing people hate more than being tricked into cannibalism. And it can be argued that cannibalism is a cheap trick all around. An easy way to disgust the average reader. But, done well (and by well, I mean thoughtfully, with nuance and specificity), there’s much to mine from it. Luxurious descriptions of feasts can both turn the stomach and entice. And there’s a certain intimacy involved, when the food is beautiful and delicious, when it is fed by hand, when everybody around you is indulging and in ecstasy from the transgression. When there’s no other food available, wouldn’t it be pragmatic to give in?
And is one bite really enough to damn your soul?
Lady knights can be sad war criminals, too.
Okay, upfront: we’re not talking about genocide here. I do have lines that can’t be crossed for me to still find a character sympathetic. But war is gnarly, and soldiers are constantly put in positions of complicity, guilt, heroism, honor… and lady knights are a fantastic place to play with all of that complexity.
My OG lady knight obsession was Ser Cauthrien from the video game Dragon Age: Origins. She’s Teyrn Loghain’s right hand woman, before and after he heinously betrays the country of Fereldan in an attempt to protect it from a perceived foreign enemy, Orlais. He grew up in a country under occupation and is the hero who liberated it; she grew up in that shadow and was shaped indelibly by it. So when he becomes obsessed with the idea of Orlais re-invading, to the point where he ignores the actual big bad and does horrible things to the country he loves, she’s along for the ride… right up until she is faced with the player characters, who can convince her that she’s chosen the wrong side. (Or who can just lock swords with her for one of the most difficult optional fights in the game.)
Has she done horrible things? Absolutely. But she did them out of loyalty and love, and is haunted by them all the same. It’s tragic and crunchy and messy.
So back to The Starving Saints, and one of the protagonists, Ser Voyne. Ser Voyne was a war hero, but she’s now been reduced to, essentially, a trophy; she’s at the king’s side whether she wants to be or not, paraded around looking fancy but kept from doing what she really wants to do: serve her country. She’s got skeletons aplenty behind her, and regrets, and a whole lot of impotent rage at her situation… and that’s before she’s trapped in a castle under siege, unable to liberate it herself, unable to do anything but watch everything fall apart.
And then one day, the goddess she regularly prays to appears in the flesh, offering a better leader to serve…
Mmm mmm mmm, that’s some good cooking.
Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence and the Bram Stoker-nominated The Luminous Dead. Her newest novels, The Starving Saints and The Graceview Patient, epitomize her love of genre-hopping horror; her bibliography spans besieged castles, alien caves, and haunted hospitals. Her short fiction has been published by GrimDark Magazine and Neon Hemlock, and her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia.
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