chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡'s Reviews > Star Eater

Star Eater’s premise stalled me in my tracks. It sounded, simultaneously, like nothing I’ve ever read and everything I never knew I needed: a story about an order of bureaucratic priestesses who practice cannibalistic magic in service of sisterhood. Also…zombies (with a deliciously hideous twist!). I was viciously intrigued.

Star Eater lives up to its billing, in the most fucked up and delicious of ways. It astonishes and harrows to the bone, all at once. We are plunged, from the outset, into a world where cannibalism is a hereditary ritual, borne out of rueful necessity more than anything else, an ostensibly sufficient sacrifice in exchange for the powerful lace-magic that preserves Aytrium. But that isn’t the only price. This is the trinity of a priestess’ fears: pregnancy, Haunts (i.e. zombies), and rot. The first (pregnancy) is carefully wrapped up in towering words of honor and duty and sacrifice, but is in truth “the beginning of the end”. The second (Haunts) is the vicious product of a renegade Sister. The third (rot) is more awful than death.

Star Eater has murder, martyrdom, and macabre political games: a necessary recipe for any vibrant and memorable tale. Throughout it all, the novel ponders very weighty questions: about lineage and power—power as a superlative performance, like a story well-told, power as corruption and gore, its cost and the question of who must pay it—and about the atavistic horror and silence of women’s inheritances and the virtuoso illusion of choice which can be, like any successful illusion, carefully unraveled.

Elfreda’s journey is the novel’s deep, bloody heart, and the unsettling specificities of her struggle against a system that ties her to it by chains that supersede both her will and her heart amount to a haunting illustration of how society’s memory—the stories we enshrine as something gleaming and shining and those we shake off as lies and rumors—can contribute to dangerous systematic misunderstandings. In that sense, Star Eater works as a brutal, sobering jolt of self-awareness, and an invitation to take a long hard look at the narratives we mechanically, unconsciously, and recklessly allow ourselves to follow and at the poisonous constructs within which we allow ourselves to live and fester. The slow unravelling of Elfreda’s certainties throughout the novel—like a hand shoving away cobwebs—is the novel’s most rewarding experience, and it empties Elfreda out of everything but an ineradicable desire to finally consider what she wants, what kind of person she might be when she isn’t bending like the stem of a flower for someone else’s will.

That said, I do have a real quibble with Star Eater which, despite my overall enjoyment, put a noticeable dent in my memory of it. For a novel set in a queer-normative world and in engagement with gender politics, the stark absence of trans and gender non-conforming people in both the world-building and plot is one that I stepped out of the story itching over, feeling bereft of answers to questions that weren’t even asked in the first place. I feel personally more and more out of charity for—and suspicious of—stories that treat queerness as the norm but markedly exclude trans and NB identities in their world-building. This inclusion is a missed opportunity to add sorely-needed depth to the novel’s gender politics, and would have filled many of the gaps pockmarked through the world-building.

All in all, this was an enjoyable read, with an origina premise and a (mostly) great execution.