Caitlin Starling is the bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence, Last To Leave the Room, and the Bram Stoker–nominated The Luminous Dead. Her upcoming novels The Starving Saints and The Graceview Patient epitomize her love of genre-hopping horror, like her other works spanning besieged castles, alien caves, and haunted hospitals. Here, Starling discusses her latest book, medieval horror, and complicated women protagonists.

The Starving Saints is being described as a “fever dream of medieval horror.” How did you come to write this terrifying, immersive, imaginative story?

As with most of my books, I started with an initial scenario: a castle, under siege, reaching the end of its food stores—and then miraculously “delivered” by strange visitors bearing impossible feasts. Who would be swayed by these suspiciously timely guests? Who would be left out of the madness, abandoned on the fringes? Who would have deeper motivations leading them to resist temptation? And what sort of larger worldbuilding would I need to make it all feel horrifically real? What started as pragmatic answers (a knight past her prime desperate to belong to something greater, a former nun who’s fallen into strange magic, a “servant” girl who’s out for revenge, and a religion based in the juxtaposition of wild nature and precise engineering) turned into a world and a larger story that obsessed me.

While The Starving Saints is filled with magic, fantasy, and horror, you grounded it in a recognizably medieval world. How did you go about your research, and how did you decide where to let your imagination take over from reality?

A lot of it had been magpied into my brain over the years. I did do additional research into medieval European alchemy (particularly the Tabula Smaragdina and other sources related to the Philosopher’s Stone) in order to shape our former nun’s magical practice, and into some chemical reactions that might follow on from some of that research. I also spent a fair amount of time on castle construction, siege tactics, and, surprisingly, how cisterns have been built! And finally, I had several long conversations about how fealty, honor, hospitality, and guest right worked in various times and places throughout Europe in the Middle Ages with people who know a lot more than I do.

All of that created an understanding for me to pull from as I decided what my characters knew and understood. I’m a big believer in limiting the narration of a story to what the characters perceive and comprehend, or don’t. I keep my “camera” very zoomed in. Not only does it appeal to me as a storytelling mode in general, I find it also can enhance the horror of a book. We the audience may suspect or know there is additional information in a scene, but if the character isn’t aware of it, it leaves us in a delightful space of tension.

Your horror novels are wildly different, but they all are defined by an atmospheric tone, framed by strong and original worldbuilding, and focused on fully realized women protagonists. How you view the importance of these uniting throughlines?

The throughlines are largely just how my brain works! I try to push myself in new directions with each book, but at my heart I love a carefully and particularly told story about complicated and sometimes terrible women. I want to inhabit the minds of my characters and draw out every way they shape and are shaped by their circumstances. That naturally influences the language and tone, both in ways that set each book apart (florid Victorian-esque language in The Death of Jane Lawrence versus the more urgent tone of The Starving Saints, for instance; or modern hospitals versus fantasy castles) and also provide a continuity and a promise of what sort of storytelling you’re going to get.

For Last To Leave the Room, that meant following Dr. Rivers down some deep and twisted rabbit holes and figuring out if she’d still be the same person at her heart with everything stripped away from her. For The Death of Jane Lawrence, medicine, math, and magic were inextricably linked to Jane’s personality and, eventually, sanity. And for The Luminous Dead, I trapped myself and my readers down in that cave with Gyre; you needed to feel the claustrophobia yourself in order to follow her through the underground.

Speaking of The Luminous Dead, it is one of the 2025 Summer Scares Selections. Why do you think this book has so much staying power?

It truly astounds me that it’s struck such a deep chord! I’ll admit that when I was first drafting it, I didn’t think it would find a publisher, let alone such a vibrant and dedicated audience. Science-fiction horror, about two women in a strange, entangled relationship, set entirely in a cave with no spaceships, no colorful cast of side characters? I hadn’t seen anything quite like it. But maybe that’s just it: it was something new and unique that hit at just the right moment. When I set aside my personal surprise, what I see is an enticing combination of risk taking—the limited cast, the limited setting, the deep dive into an uncommon, complex, and divisive relationship—with an engaging and propulsive story of woman versus nature, versus herself. It straddles the line between survival horror and science-fiction thriller, and I think that gives it a very special and enduring allure.

What authors are you are loving and most excited about these days?

The top of my list has to be Christopher Buehlman. I started with his Between Two Fires, a medieval plague-centered horror novel, which completely floored me with its gritty but equally fantastical horror, then went on to read his incomparable The Lesser Dead, about entirely gross vampires in 1970s New York. I’m now working my way through his incredible fantasy offering, The Blacktongue Thief. I am obsessed with his range and his specificity of horror. I also got to read an early copy of S.A. Barnes’s Cold Eternity, and I think it might be my favorite by her yet. Absolutely fantastic and tense science-fiction horror, and we get a terrifying monster this time! And last, Isaac Fellman is a longtime favorite of mine, and his upcoming Notes from a Regicide is absolutely transporting. Not horror at all, it’s a fictional memoir of two trans artists from a homeland in revolution and the story of their adoptive son who tries to piece together their lives from sometimes conflicting information.