Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence (2021), Last to Leave the Room (2023), and the Bram Stoker-nominated The Luminous Dead (2019). Her upcoming 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.
Caitlin is represented by Caitlin McDonald at Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Author Links:
Website: caitlinstarling.com
Instagram: @AuthorCStarling
X/Twitter: @see_starling
Bluesky: @caitlinstarling.com
Facebook: /caitlinstarlingauthor
Goodreads: Caitlin_Starling
Interview Introduction
INTRO: “Southern Gothic” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CMR: Hello, and welcome back to Eldritch Girl, and we have some content warnings for this episode, which is a bonus interview with Caitlin Starling. I know some listeners have some issues with medical horror and hospital horror, so I just want to flag that we will be talking about both in detail; there will also be discussions of surgeries, and the early days of surgeries, sort of the Heroic Days of Medicine, which involves early procedures, amputations, etcetera, that sort of thing will be discussed – not in too much detail, but it will be discussed.
There will also be some content warnings for The Starving Saints, which is Caitlin’s novel coming out in May 2025. That is a medieval-set horror that takes place within an alternative medieval Europe, with a castle as its main setting, which is under siege, hence the title. There is a lot of cannibalism in the book, but also while under siege they do eat hounds and horses. So there will be discussion about those sorts of things that happen, not in detail, not descriptive, but just to flag that when we do talk about Starving Saints, we will be mentioning that there is animal cruelty, animal death, and butchery, and we will talk about it in a little bit of detail but nothing too descriptive.
If you want to continue with the interview, this is basically [all the CWs for the episode] – apart from the usual Gothic Horror, death and ghosts. Those things will be mentioned. So, just giving you a head’s up.
CMR: Caitlin, would you like to introduce yourself?
CS: Yeah. So I’m Caitlin Starling. I’m the author of now multiple books, what I like to call genre-hopping horror. I write a lot of genre mashups, sci-fi, horror, fantasy, horror, that sort of thing. I’m based out of the US in the Pacific Northwest. Most of my books are queer in some way. Most of my books are body horror in some way. Yeah! I have way too many books coming out in 2025. My brain is melting out my ears.
CMR: I’m really excited for Starving Saints in particular, so maybe we’ll get round to that one a little bit later. But for now you’re going to read an extract of, was this your 1st book?
CS: Luminous Dead was first, and then Yellow Jessamine, if you count a novella, because some people only go by novels, if you count novellas as books. That I guess, was my second book, because it came out in between Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence.
The order of writing books is a little bit different than that, but yes.
CMR: Sure, yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is an extract from the death of Jane Lawrence, which is your love letter to Gothic Horror.
CS: Yes.
CMR: If you would like to introduce the extract and just give us a little bit of context.
CS: The Death of Jane Lawrence, like you said, is very much a love letter to Gothic fiction. It follows the story of Jane Lawrence, although she starts off Jane Shoringfield. She has made a marriage of convenience with a local doctor. It’s supposed to be a business arrangement. The only rule, of course, is she can never go to his ancestral home just outside of the town.
She ends up there immediately the first night after they’re married. And surprise, it appears to be haunted. Of course, that rolls out slowly over the course of the book. And the nature of the haunting is a bit more complicated than it appears at first.
There’s a whole lot of esoteric occult magic practice in it. There is a lot of, not a lot of calculus. There’s enough calculus that it scares some people. There is a lot of Victorian surgical horror. There’s a fair amount of cocaine.
So at the point that I’m going to read, this is after Jane has spent her first night in the house. Nothing super strange happened except that her husband was very confused and freaked out when she showed up and was acting very erratic. But he has since been called away to attend to a patient, leaving her stranded at the house. There’s no other way for her. The road has washed out. One carriage got through. He’s taken it.
I think he actually maybe walked over and borrowed someone’s horse. Like I said, it’s been a couple of years since I read the book or wrote the book.
So she has been alone in this house kind of stewing in this strange tension filled new world, but nothing overt has happened yet.
And she has just kind of, she’s been working all day. She’s a bookkeeper. And she started, she overhears the two servants of the house talking.
Extract from The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling
Mrs. Luthbright and Mrs. Purl were once again in earshot speaking in the dining room as they set out for supper.
Jane rose and went to the sideboard pouring herself a small measure of drink.
She did not mean to eavesdrop, but their voices were soothing and she drew close enough to make out the words.
“Mr. Purl ought to stop coming around to bring me home when I can walk just as well,” Mrs. Purl was saying. “He’s going to get himself lost or thrown some night with these rains. And you know, just last week I was already in bed when he rides in over the hill between here and there smelling like whiskey and asks me about the red-eyed woman. I kept telling him there is no woman or if there is, he’d better not tell me about her.”
“It’s a spirit,” Mrs. Luthbright said all solemn sobriety. “He should wear his shirt inside out when he comes by so as not to be bewitched by it.”
“It’s a spirit, all right,” Mrs. Purl snorted. “A spirit made of barley. He says he went to knock at the front door here, but the lights were all out. So he turned to go and then there she was looking at him. But I ask you, if there was a spirit living in the house, wouldn’t we have seen it in these past three months? I can honestly tell you I haven’t seen a single thing here or on the path back home.”
Jane did not believe in spirits, and yet she had to suppress a shiver at the thought.
“Truly it must be a ghost,” Mrs. Luthbright said. “Don’t you remember that nice carriage that came by here two years ago? A few months before they closed up the hall?”
“There were always nice carriages back then,” Mrs. Purl responded slowly. “So no, not as such.”
“A young woman moved into the house from Camhurst.”
Jane frowned. A young woman from Camhurst, a sister perhaps or a cousin, perhaps even one of his schoolmates, a fellow surgeon.
“And how do you claim to know this?”
“Mrs. Young reminded me of it, just last night.” Mrs. Luthbright’s voice dropped low, and Jane crept closer to the doorway, drawn as a moth to fire. “A few months after the woman moved in, the undertakers came up the lane, but there was never any funeral. And then the doctor’s family up and left, and boarded up the hall.”
A young woman, undertakers, no funeral.
The pit of her stomach filled with ash. It meant nothing at all, and yet the dread was back, sevenfold, all the relief of her work dashed.
“I’ve never heard of any of this,” Mrs. Purl said. “I think Mrs. Young is just trying to scare you.”
Mrs. Luthbright said nothing for a long stretch, the only sound the soft tap of silverware being set out. “I did see something, once,” Mrs. Luthbright finally confessed.
“When?” Mrs. Purl demanded, sounding eager.
“But it wasn’t a woman.”
“Of course it wasn’t a woman,” Mrs. Purl scoffed, but Jane could picture her leaning in, thrilled by this old-world, superstitious talk.
“It was more like a shadow,” Mrs. Luthbright said. “That time I stayed a bit past sundown, because the doctor wasn’t home yet and I didn’t want to leave the soup cold on the stove. I was in the dining room for just a minute, putting out the candlesticks I’d polished. There was something there, in the hallway.”
“No!”
“Truth, Genevieve. Absolute truth. I saw it with my own eyes. It walked past the door, and I thought maybe the doctor had come in quietly, but then he rode up a few minutes later.”
“Did you tell him?”
“And be discharged? Don’t be silly.”
“He wouldn’t do that!”
“Can never be sure.”
“True enough.”
Their voices faded and she heard the kitchen door swing shut. Jane tried to remember how to breathe. The stories—they were haphazard. Half-truths, rumors, ramblings of drunken men. None of the pieces fit together, and the environment did tend to influence one’s thoughts. A crumbling house, alone on the hill, was enough to make isolated women given to wild imaginings, herself included.
But then she thought of Augustine, afraid she wasn’t real, frightened by the storms. All that meant was that it affected them all in similar ways. She had slept well last night, but how many times in the past had she woken up disoriented and anxious, with her thoughts tumbling with numbers, sums that made no sense, and ledgers that rearranged themselves?
There was nothing for it but to wait for the unsteadiness to pass, as he had.
Dinner was quiet and simple, baked eggs with gravy.
As she ate, she heard the rattle of Mrs. Pearl closing the house up for the night.
Strange the night before it had been left unlocked, but she assumed the two women must have been in a hurry to get home.
By the time she was finished, the dining room had grown dark, with long shadows stretched across the table.
The gasolier suspended above not turned up bright enough to illuminate the whole room.
Jane rubbed her brow as she stood.
She was halfway to the door when something moved in the corner of her eye.
Jane turned to find nothing, save for her reflection in the darkened window. But for just a moment, her reflection looked short, hunched perhaps, and Jane frowned, stepping closer.
Her reflection had red eyes.
Interview Transcript
CMR: Oh my gosh! I love that bit. So I really like that trope of the gossiping servants who are very superstitious. And you get that in a lot of classic Gothic Horror novels as well, Gothic Terror novels.
CS: I felt so self-conscious writing it, and I still feel self-conscious reading it. I’ve tried to shift what bit I was going to read, but this is the one we wanted to do for this. But you feel so self-conscious having people go, no, tell me more. It’s just so convenient. But at the same time, it does set the mood, right?
CMR: Yes, but it’s so good. And I feel like it’s not a proper love letter to Gothic Horror novels if you don’t have the servants in it. Because I feel like the working class elements of Gothic Horror novels are often overlooked. And I really enjoy the servant characters.
And I really like that you also have a servant character there who is not as credulous or not as superstitious, and offers that kind of balance of, “Well, I don’t actually believe in ghosts. No.” And then you have, “Well, actually, I do believe in ghosts because I think I’ve seen one.”
And that to me feels like a much more natural conversation than the 18th century Gothic Terror novels where it’s all exposition via the servants and they all always have seen ghosts, and they give you this full kind of story about all of the hauntings in this castle. And there’s a screaming skull probably somewhere, and somebody’s walled up somewhere else. Like, you know, and I really enjoy that because I like storytelling within stories. I just enjoy that.
So we are going to talk about how like fictional folklore plays into this.
So how did you come up with the different ideas for your layers here?
CS: Well, for the two servants in particular, from the beginning, I didn’t want them to just be there as mouthpieces for me to kind of feed the audience information, right.
These two people are working for Augustine. And so I had to figure out, okay, who would do that? Who would be who would take these jobs? They’re both married women. They live on nearby farms. Probably at some point Augustine’s parents were their landlords. They might even still be absentee landlords. He doesn’t need a lot of work done. He’s barely there.
He just most of the house is closed up and he just needs, you know, food on the table, and kind of, things washed up. But this is not where he does… he performs any of his medical practice or anything else.
And so they only need to be there from dawn till dusk. They’re not supposed to be there overnight. They don’t live there very importantly, which is also part of why they’re married women with their own households, instead of having your unmarried young maid.
They’ve lived in it, around the house, for as long as Augustine’s family. You know, they’ve been there at the same time. And so they’ve seen things, but they haven’t worked there before. So they don’t know the whole story. Because I really like to give characters conflicting, or not necessarily conflicting, but incomplete pictures of what they’ve seen.
And I think that both adds a lot of verisimilitude to the world building and to the characters themselves, but also allows me some more grey areas to play with in terms of what I do decide is true in the narrative, or what I hint at, but never confirmed, because I’ve always taken the approach of my characters don’t ever know everything, and we only know what the characters know.
I’m not giving you an omniscient narrator. I’m giving you a very limited narrative setup.
CMR: Yeah. Ghost stories are really cool ways to bring in atmosphere and that kind of thing, and there’s a fascination with telling ghost stories, and I like that it’s a very natural thing for people to talk about.
And I also like that because they’re not live-in servants, they also can bring in things that have happened outside of the house or, you know, on the road or like other places that the spirit has been seen, or like you get that kind of village and farm and rural kind of thing brought into it as well.
The whole like, “wear your shirt inside out” is quite a nice touch. Is that a real bit of folklore that you put in or is that something you invented?
CS: I am almost certain I heard it somewhere. I could not tell you where, but it feels very real. So I think I probably snagged it. I’m very much a magpie with details like that. But it’s definitely a very kind of old way of dealing with spirits.
CMR: I think I’ve heard that before as well. And I also don’t know where I’ve heard it.
CS: Yeah, I could not even begin to guess.
CMR: We need Icy Sedgewick, I think. I’ll see if Icy’s done a [post].
The Folklore of Clothes: icysedgwick.com/folklore-of-clothes
Icy Sedgewick (top) & John Kruse (bottom)
and
Cornish/Kernewek folklore especially: britishfairies.wordpress.com/2024/01/25/if-you-go-down-to-the-woods-today-disguises-and-faery-magic
CS: You can do footnotes afterwards.
CMR: Yeah. I think that does sound real to me. And I really like that because also you don’t have to clarify it with why. It just sounds like the right kind of thing to say. And so it adds this extra layer of like, realness, I guess, to that conversation.
CS: There was this challenge that I had with Death of Jane Lawrence, and I’m not sure how successful I was with it. So Death of Jane Lawrence is in a setting that is similar to but not Victorian England, on many different axes. There are some crucial differences. The country has a different name, although it’s a very clear cipher for Britain. In particular, this world doesn’t have like a, a current widespread state-supported religion. They got rid of it. They dismantled it in the wake of a war that was in a lot of ways kind of the Crimean War, World War One and World War Two all mashed up together in terms of the impact on the country itself.
And so, you know, I don’t know if I ever decide decided which of, if either, of the servants or both are still actually religious, because, of course, you get rid of structural religion, people are still going to have their own beliefs and their own faiths.
But there’s no priest you can go to for like an exorcism. You know, there’s no there’s no authority that you can say, hey, something’s happening. And instead, it’s just another way to strand Jane in this house, where… who does she turn to for help that isn’t going to say, perhaps you should be committed in a mental institution, which is a real fear of hers at one point, because the things she’s experiencing by the later parts of the books are unhinged.
I ended up having to be sparing with what details I picked for the other characters to have as a reaction to the ghosts, because I didn’t have a structure for them to draw from.
CMR: Yes, so the idea of different ghost belief[s] is a tricky one, isn’t it? Because if you’re not building on a specific… Obviously in the in the 18th and 19th centuries, you’ve got a lot of variety of ghost belief and even within sort of the Church of England and Low Church, High Church and then Protestant kind of things coming in, you’ve got a lot of conflicting ideas about what ghosts are, and whether they’re proof of the afterlife, and that’s good or they’re, you know, sort of fanciful things that we should get rid of. But if you get rid of ghosts, do you then get rid of this idea that God exists?
You know, like all of this kind of stuff?
CS: Yeah.
CMR: So it’s how did you tackle that in the in the book? Like, how did you set out to kind of work that in?
CS: Mostly by avoiding it.
CMR: Yeah.
CS: So it helps that Jane is extremely rational minded and she also, the Church was abolished when she was very, very young. And so she basically comes into this with with no preconceived notions except that in her opinion, death’s the end and ghosts aren’t real.
But then so then she has to figure out, okay, well, then how am I explaining what I’m seeing to myself, because I am seeing people that I know to have died, and they know things that only those people would know.
But they are behaving in ways that are not like, “the person just happens to be here” – they are they are behaving in strange ways.
At one point, there was a woman who she tended to at one point after an abdominal surgery related to an ectopic pregnancy. And the ghost of this woman instead has a skull being birthed out of her abdomen and is unresponsive to two attempts to interact. But other times, these ghosts seem to want things from her.
So she’s trying to figure out does seeing the image of somebody mean that they’re dead? Because she loses contact with a lot of the outside world and suddenly she these — sorry, there’s gonna be a lot of spoilers in this discussion because the book has been out for three years. But she sees – let’s just say, people important from her past, she hasn’t heard anything about them dying, and suddenly they’re there in the house with her, and she’s like, well, does that mean that they’re dead? If they are dead, how did they find me here?
And she’s trying to basically come up with a set of rules all on her own with very little help.
CMR: I really like that. I find that really interesting. I like the ghost body horror as well. I find the concept of a ghost birthing another ghostly object, I suppose, quite a compelling image. So I thought that would segue us nicely into talking about death.
[Laughter]
CMR: Yay!
CS: It’s in the title!
CMR: Yaaah! So, you deal a lot obviously with the intersection of body horror and death and what death does to the body. And sort of the way that a ghost is completely disembodied. So you’ve got that going on.
So how do you work with body horror and Gothic horror and death in your in your work in general, but in The Death of Jane Lawrence in particular?
Discussion of abdominal surgeries and medical horror/medical history below
CS: Death of Jane Lawrence in particular has a guiding element, which is that Augustine is a surgeon. Augustine is familiar with the body. He has a certain amount of power over the body that Jane is in awe of when they first meet; on their first date, so to speak, a major trauma comes in and he presses her into helping as a nurse during another abdominal surgery.
There’s a lot of abdominal surgery in the book for those of you who have not read it.
Originally actually, the first surgery was just a leg amputation, but then I decided to make it much weirder. And instead, the patient who comes in is complaining of belly pain. He’s tried to scratch his belly open. And when they incised, they find that his large intestine has turned into a Klein bottle. Its inside is also its outside, and it is sealed off. And this obviously makes no sense, and kicks off some parts of the book.
So Jane’s first introduction to medicine, to being a doctor’s wife, is one of the most intense surgeries that you could probably sit through.
I mean, it’s viscera, it’s blood, it’s gore.
The the poor man has tried to harm himself. He’s now etherized on the table, but ether isn’t great. It doesn’t work very well. But Augustine is able to save this man’s life. He excises that part of the bowel.
He creates an ostomy, which you could actually have that it was it was tricky to do, but it has a fairly long history. So and it looks like this man is going to live. But the next time Jane comes to see him, she’s riding this high of having having participated in the surgery, but she also has these conflicting feelings because she’s kind of being married/hired to do his books because she’s an accountant and she is having thoughts about health insurance, essentially, and health care costs.
And his wife is now you know, he’s going to be out of work. His wife probably doesn’t have a lot of income. How would they pay for this massive surgery that, of course, seems like it’s a big enough deal to be paid quite well, but you can’t ask someone to pay for that when they have no money and all this stuff.
She’s very conflicted and trying to figure out she wants to do this, but she’s now determined she’s going to figure it out. She’s going to become this guy’s wife [Dr Lawrence’s].
And she comes to visit and the patient is dying on the table again because he actually has a post-operative infection. And she’s there helping with a repeat surgery when he dies. And that’s like within the first five chapters of the book.
And so, that kind of obviously set the tone for the rest of the book.
You can’t just drop that in the beginning of the book and then never talk about body horror again, right, because you’re making a promise with that kind of opening that you then have to deliver on.
But also this is now inextricably linked to Jane’s being drawn into the this complicated, dangerous, gothic world that her husband, her new husband inhabits.
And at first, you know, that appears to only be on the level of, OK, this is his job and I’m going to be helping. But then it extends to, sort of, I mean, if you think of the Gothic Manor as an externalized element of the internal realities of the characters who inhabit it, it’s going to be gory. It’s going to be bloody.
But when I was writing it, a lot of it to me was functional. Like: that’s what an abdominal surgery would be like; I’m just describing an abdominal surgery. You know, I’m just I’m just describing the effects of scarlet fever on a young boy later on. I’m just explaining yellow fever. I’m just describing these things.
But I found that it can be very intense for readers because kind of I wouldn’t say dispassionate, but just objective detail about gross things is not always something that we encounter. And it’s a useful tool, I have found, for both setting tone and also kind of demonstrating various characters’ comfort levels with their own bodies and things like that. I don’t know. To me, it’s just it’s just very natural that it’s in there.
And it tends to crop up in my books, even if there’s not supposed to be… it… Like, my third novel, Last to Leave the Room, the characters say multiple times they have no medical training. And somehow that does not stop them from having to deal with an enucleation and an ankle surgery at one point. So my brain just goes there.
CMR: Oh, God.
CS: Yeah. I’m sorry. I probably have just disgusted like all of the listeners.
CMR: No, no, they should be used to it. They’re fine. There’s an expectation on this show.
[laughter]
CS: Okay, good.
CMR: If you’re new, though, welcome. [laughs] Yeah. So — I really like that. And I really like gothic horror, gothic storytelling, as a very natural medium for doing those sorts of things and for looking at anxieties around mortality and death in general. Did it feel like you were going to write this kind of love letter to gothic horror?
CS: I definitely set out to write a gothic novel. I had just watched Crimson Peak in theatres and I kind of walked out and going I enjoyed that, I enjoyed that. There are some things I would I would do differently. And that became the seed that became The Death of Jane Lawrence.
And from the beginning, I knew that the spouse was going to be a doctor of some kind, both because I was disappointed in the doctor character in Crimson Peak as not feeling very realized, or very, you know, it was a very sanitized doctor.
CMR: Also being utterly useless.
CS: Yes.
CMR: For the whole film. Sorry for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Useless.
CS: Yeah, he’s just he’s just there to be a port in the storm at the end for the main character, I feel like. But then also because I I just have a personal fascination with medicine and medical memoirs. And I was reading a book. I want to say it was When Breath Becomes Air, but that might not be the one because I’ve read I’ve read so many doctor’s memoirs.
But there is a sort of a traditionally shared story about the in the Age of Heroic Medicine [1780-1850] of somebody… I think there’s a bunch of stories that kind of all run together, so I can’t remember if this was a specific instance, or was part of the larger mythos, but of a doctor who was doing internal cardiac massage. That’s when you have your hand inside the chest and you’re squeezing the heart in rhythm to how it needs to be, to try and keep this patient alive. And it failed.
And the description was that he was he stood there “soaked in blood and failure”.
And that’s the kind of medicine I wanted to put in the book because it’s a lot less sanitized. It’s a lot less professionalized, I guess you could say, right? It’s not, you go into the hospital, and then you either come out, or you die. And it is much more personal. And there’s also a level — there’s an ongoing discussion between Jane and Augustine in the book, that Augustine thinks that because he is a good surgeon, that he should be able to save everybody. If you can’t save everybody, that means he has failed.
That is not how living bodies work.
But it is a really interesting set of ideas about how life should work for the main character to grapple with, because she also thinks she should be able to control everything if she just tries hard enough.
And the Gothic doesn’t seem to respond well to being controlled.
CMR: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a really good way to put it. It’s like the wildness and the subversion versus characters who need to control things and have things neat. And yeah, I think that’s a really good point.
Let’s talk about the historical setting. I know it’s an AU so it’s an alternative universe world. So not quite a second world fantasy but an alternative fantasy world. In that case, why did you choose that 19th century setting? I think you’ve touched on it a little bit with the Age of Heroic Medicine, which makes total sense and the kind of the but you’ve also got overtones of the Haunting of Hill House which is — well, when it was written, was a contemporary Gothic novel, and that’s when like 1940s, 50s?
CS: My brain’s saying ’54 but I don’t know.
CMR: Yes, I thought ’50s. And so you’ve got that kind of age of early medicine but it’s obviously not as visceral as the sort of 19th century experimental stuff and early-day kind of stuff.
CS: 1959.
CMR: Ah, 1959.
How did you feel about so did you always know from the Crimson Peak film I guess as well that you wanted the same sort of aesthetic or you wanted the same sort of timeline?
CS: Yeah. I wanted the same sort of aesthetic because it’s very legible to a reader. I ran into this with The Luminous Dead. The more speculative you make things, the more you tend to have to explain, and the more you explain, often the less scary something gets.
So The Luminous Dead, even though it’s on an alien world and it’s Science Fiction and all this stuff, it takes place in one cave, and that really limits the amount of world building I do, and that really that allows the story to focus on the horror.
With Death of Jane Lawrence, some of it was just general goth kid fascination with the Victorian era that was still definitely — I mean I wrote the first draft I think when I was 25. Some of it was having seen Crimson Peak. Some of it was intentional, because I knew I wanted that specific vibe and aesthetic to come across. And then some of it was because of the type of medicine I wanted folks to be practicing.
And then things got a bit tricky because two different things started pulling me away from that time period.
One was that I wanted Jane to have experienced a gas attack. And obviously gas as weapon, that’s mostly starting in World War I. And then to have it be in a major city in my fictional England, well that’s pretty Blitz-y. So now we’re up to World War II. But then at the same time, for various reasons, I wanted calculus to just have come into play, and calculus started in the 1600s.
But obviously the medical stuff isn’t going to be up to snuff and I’m not going to be able to have the same sort of early modern vibe for a young professional woman going around, and you know.
And then I wanted to have female doctors and that throws a whole wrench in it.
So I had to basically throw out the idea of doing something actually directly historical, because I wanted all of these elements to come together in a way that historically they did not come together.
CMR: Yeah, that’s a challenge. [laughs]
CS: I have a sequel to Death of Jane Lawrence in my heart. And that sequel would be highly reliant on the fact that this is not our world and it would put a lot of these things into more context.
CMR: Okay.
CS: Unfortunately, I have not been able to convince my publisher that the world needs a Death of Jane Lawrence sequel.
I have it set aside and waiting. It’s there. One day. [laughs] Hopefully.
CMR: I think a few people would want a Death of Jane Lawrence sequel. I would want that.
CS: It heavily involves Dr. Aditya Nizamiye. It involves Augustine realizing a couple things in the wake of the first book about himself.
CMR: Mmhm.
CS: And it has a lot more weird psychological drama going on and a lot more ritual magic. It would definitely be a weird book.
CMR: I think the weirdness of Jane Lawrence was undersold to be honest.
CS: It was an interesting thing! So, you know, to me, a Gothic novel, the third act, goes completely off the rails.
CMR: Oh yeah. Totally unhinged. Bonkers.
CS: Yeah! But there were many people who said that Jane was not particularly Gothic because the third act went off the rails. And I was sitting there like, what?
CMR: [mmmnnnyeehhh noise of disapproval]
CS: And I think that there’s two ideas of the Gothic in people’s minds. There’s one that’s very aesthetic and there’s one that’s structural that also includes the aesthetic as well, but is structure-based. So you have books that are, you have stories that are very moody Gothic stuff, but that don’t go off the rails and are just sort of very goth friendly.
CMR: Yeah.
CS: And I have no problem, and to be clear, I have no problem with this. I very much enjoy them. But then there’s also a subset that has very much to do with the structure of, you know, of isolation and lies and power dynamics and all this other stuff that tends to just build up to a bizarre reveal in the third act.
CMR: Oh yeah. I mean, you’ve got like classic, if you want to use the word classic, but you know, the Gothic Horror and Gothic Terror novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, which spawned the horror genre, and you’ve got naked pirate fights in them for no apparent reason. And like, I’m sure it does make sense in that, well, does it?
Like the whole genre kicked off because a gigantic helmet fell out of the sky and killed a guy for no, again, for no reason. And thus the entire genre was born.
And like The Castle of Otranto, my husband read it recently and said, it feels like even though none of the cliches had been invented yet, that Horace Walpole had used every single one and that they felt already on the page like they were cliches, even though nobody had ever written them before. And it was like, how do you do that? That’s genius.
But, and yeah, I think there’s this sort of the Gothic as was kind of generated by Gothic romance, which is great, like, you know, the golden age of Gothic romance and all the pulp gothics. And I think that’s still in people’s minds as well, isn’t it? That sort of like, you’ve got the romance bit and it follows familiar beats and it’s a familiar kind of plot.
And then you’ve got like the paranormal kind of Gothic that dabbles in magic or dabbles in the supernatural, but in a way that’s quite not formulaic necessarily, but that is familiar.
And it doesn’t do what, you know, the older Gothic novels do, which is like, by the time you get two thirds in, something absolutely off the charts bonkers is about to hit the fan. And like, you just have to go with it and it’s like, how many things can you cram into a one book? And the author’s like, oh, if you think this is mad, like, wait until you get to my next novel.
CS: Yes. [laughs]
CMR: And I just love that. And I feel like, yeah, it’s the expectations, isn’t it? Like you just have to, you just have to roll with it.
CS: We ran into something with the hardcover of The Death of Jane Lawrence, which I was lucky enough that it was a Barnes & Noble pick of the month, which meant a lot of people picked it up.
They probably would never have even heard of it otherwise, which for better or worse.
CMR: Mm. Yes. Yeah.
CS: It was very nice for my royalty statements; my Goodreads ratings will never recover.
CMR: [laughs]
CS: But the big thing is that my, the original cover copy never mentioned magic.
CMR: Oh no.
CS: And it turns out that some people get very mad if a book that they thought was kind of historical, non-speculative, has…
CMR: Oh, is a fantasy novel with magic in it?? Yeah.
CS: Yeah. We got, we even got some, some responses along the lines of, you know, if I had known this was like a “devil magic book”… it’s like, well, there’s no devil in this world. But you know, so I made sure that for the paperback, we snuck in a, a, a mention of magic, because it’s hard to sort of communicate where this book is going to go.
You know, to me, it makes perfect sense, but to anyone who doesn’t have the specific stew of influences in their brain that I do, how, how do you get to ritual magic plus dividing by zero plus eating fertilized eggs that get weirder and weirder and weirder?
CMR: Mm, yeah.
CS: Like to me, that all makes sense. And apparently my editors also were like, yeah, sure. This is great. But sometimes you serve that up to people and they’re like, what did I even just read?
CMR: Yeah.
CS: It was, it was a lot. I still am — I’m very proud of that book. And it is also, I still am like amazed that it exists in a lot of ways. But I get to keep working.
I actually have, I’ve just turned in copy edits for my next Gothic novel, which we’re calling Hospital Gothic. So it’s contemporary and it’s set in a hospital, but I tried to structure it as much like a Gothic novel as I could. It’s a little bit constrained by the fact that the main character, our POV character, is mostly stuck in her hospital room.
But there’s hauntings, maybe … there’s drugings, maybe. Well, yes, there are. Are there intentional drugings to distort her perception of reality? Maybe.
There’s, you know, strange dreams and night midnight walkings and the, the, the hospital as character, as if it’s an old manor house, and all that fun stuff. I just finished like another read through and I am happy to announce that it still slaps. It’s great. I wrote it in a very compressed period of time, and so I kind of wasn’t sure.
CMR: Yeah.
CS: But it turns out I still got it.
CMR: Yeah. [laughs]
CS: So if you’re excited for more, this is not from the perspective of a character who understands much about medicine. So there are fewer gross details, I think, in — it’s called The Graceview Patient — than The Death of Jane Lawrence.
But it is potentially more disturbing because you’re in the perspective of the person being in — she’s under, she’s in treatment and they may or may not have her best interests at heart.
I will say too, I wanted to write a hospital horror novel where it wasn’t like, oh, cackle, cackle, evil nurses, evil doctors. There is something else going on.
CMR: Okay. Yeah. Hospital horror is pretty gnarly sometimes.
CS: Yeah, I’m very interested to see if people respond to it. I’m currently writing like a discussion guide set of questions. And I’m like, every question I come up with, I’m like, oh, no, I cannot ask anyone to answer that question in front of people they may or may not know very well. It’s just too intimate.
CMR: Yeah, yeah. I think the idea of going down the hospital as manor house route and the parallels that people could draw with that is really cool. And I love the idea of a hospital room as your haunted claustrophobic gothic space. Yeah, I really like that.
CS: The official comp titles are like Misery meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I like to say it’s The Yellow Wallpaper mixed with your favorite medical drama.
CMR: I literally just thought of The Yellow Wallpaper. Yeah. That meets The E.R. or something.
CS: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I know, I know that you want to talk about The Starving Saints if we talked about the other book, but I really thought you needed to know about The Graceview Patient —
CMR: I did.
CS: Because Gothic brought into new settings.
CMR: I did need that. I used to live with a nurse, as well, so.
CS: We can still talk about cannibalism.
CMR: Oh, good, good. [Laughs]
CS: I don’t want to say you can’t have any cannibalism.
CMR: Oh man, I am… I do enjoy cannibalism [laughter], but I also, I enjoy medieval settings as well because I’m a trained medieval historian, is my background. Every time I see a new book, I’m like, yes, okay. I don’t care if it’s just vibes, it’s fine.
CS: My, my “just vibes” are, are highly influenced by, again, my spouse, not historian, but he has a lot of opinions about unnecessary modernization of historical settings. When I was plotting the book and I was yelling at him about random points, he brought in, along with some historical alchemy stuff — and this is for The Starving Saints, which comes out in May of 2025 — we started talking about concepts of fealty and obligation and hospitality and guest rights and kind of hierarchy, because The Starving Saints is set in a castle that is currently under siege when figures that may or may not be their goddess and three of her saints appear in the lower yard saying they’ve brought food, but like, the gate hasn’t opened. There are no wagons of food.
Stuff is happening. Stuff is strange. And then, and then everything starts to fall apart.
And it was so interesting to me because as I was writing the book, this all became very second nature to me of how the characters would think in terms of what they owe other people, and what are expectations of behavior, things like that.
And my editor was like, I don’t understand how this magic is working. I’m like, well, the magic is running on all of those lines. Like, and I thought I had explained each of them individually, but I had to really break it down because to a modern audience, it feels very alien in some ways.
CMR: Yes. Yeah. I think that’s, it’s, it’s really hard to get into a fealty or a feudal mindset because people think they know what that means, and they don’t, I think.
CS: I’m really excited for you to read it. You can tell me if I did a good job or not.
CM got an ARC of this book after this interview and can confirm Caitlin did indeed to a good job
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7085105222
CMR: Yeah, okay!
CS: Because again, I am not, this is not my, like, this is, this is received knowledge by me as opposed to things that like I have personally spent a lot of time with. But I like to think that I at least got it close enough that the characters feel like they are experiencing the same thing, and have the same sense of rules behind them, whether that’s necessarily historically accurate or not.
Because of course there’s also different things, like there’s no, there’s no Catholicism in this medieval setting. They have a different set of religions, very much like Death of Jane Lawrence. The Constant Lady is their main deity and she is, her holy order is entirely based around, basically engineering, and timekeeping, and also bees.
CMR: Oh, yes. I was going to say, what’s that, what’s that thing we’re going to throw it at the end? Yeah, bees. And that makes sense. (CMR was thinking about very similar combinations of things for Catholic saints, like St Valentine – patron saint of lovers, epilepsy sufferers, and beekeepers, possibly not all intended to be the same guy)
CS: And bees think very orderly and specifically, just like with Jane, how I moved calculus late with them, I moved Langstroth’s concept or formalization of the Bee Space.
CMR: Okay.
CS: Which is a Victorian, Langstroth was 1800s, I can’t remember his name, but he is a guy who I believe has been confirmed, he was pretty darn autistic, obsessed with bees. And he figured out that there is a certain distance that if you put two panels that distance apart, bees will not connect to them with comb.
CMR: Okay.
CS: Because if you’re, if you’re farming bees before modern hives, which he is responsible for, you would have something called a skep, which is a woven basket. The bees build comb in it. At the end of the season, you kill all the bees and you crush the hive and you get the honey out.
CMR: Nooo!
CS: Or you wait, or you wait for them to leave, and if they leave, they’re probably not leaving honey behind, right? They’re going to eat it. So that you get honey, but you only get honey every so often. And it’s a destructive process and it’s not renewable.
And of course, most people are familiar now with modern beekeeping. You can have hives for multiple years and they kind of, you’ll get new queens sometimes, but we have these frames, and these frames are a set distance apart because the bees will not build comb between them.
So you can remove the comb, remove the frame, harvest the honey from that frame, put the frame back in, especially if you don’t take the wax, they will just refill the wax because the wax is there and then they’ll cap it. You can harvest better, you can inspect better. And it’s just a very orderly nice thing. And it just happens to be that, that European honeybees have a specific [distance] and it’s consistent.
And so in The Starving Saints, the Constant Lady’s acolytes have figured this out and it’s part of the mythos and all this other stuff. And so it’s very much a taming of the wild sort of vibe.
CMR: Yeah.
CS: But then when the Constant Lady shows up, the bees start building in the Bee Space, among other things.
CMR: Oh no.
CS: And like, it’s one of those little things where like two people are going to read it and when they see that they’re building in the Bee Space, they’re going to be like, “oh no, something’s gone very wrong”. And I’m writing for those two people.
CMR: Yes. I think also all the listeners on this podcast now can be like, I am one of those two people.
CS: Yes, you now know about the Bee Space and how terrible violation of the Bee Space is. Yeah, it’s, it’s a very fun book and there is a lot of cannibalism in it.
I mean, I think there, so this is, this is the same problem I had with The Death of Jane Lawrence; I got so used to all the surgery that I’ll go, oh yeah, there’s some surgery in it. And then at one point I had to flag where all of the actual surgeries were for an early reader who needed them as content warnings.
CMR: Right.
CS: And I started to see how much of the book was actually surgery. And I was like, oh, that’s a lot. But The Starving Saints, I’m like, well, of course there’s cannibalism, but it doesn’t happen that much. …I have been informed that there’s a lot of cannibalism.
CMR: Right. Yeah.
CS: And it’s, and that it’s a, again, a very gory book, which in my mind, I, I felt like maybe I didn’t go far enough.
CMR: A siege situation. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, well, you know, things, things happen. You just have to kind of outlast…
CS: You have to make difficult decisions.
CMR: Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously in, in, oh God, no, don’t let me do it. I’m going to do it. Okay. So obviously in real life situations, you don’t have to outlast the siege. You have to outlast the money to pay the people to besiege you.
CS: Yes.
CMR: And all you have to do is go up the top of the tower and have a look. And if you start seeing ones at the back packing up to go, that’s when you know that everybody’s in trouble over that side, and you just have to wait them out. Genuinely.
CS: Yeah.
CMR: because they only owe a certain number of days of service.
CS: Yeah.
CMR: So if you go past, so you have to make sure that you [have] say double or triple that in your stores. And as long as you’ve got enough food for a set number of people that you know in advance, because you know how many the castle garrison are, you know roughly about who you’ve got coming in from the villages and farms, if that’s necessary. You burn all of that so that they [your enemies] can’t have it. And then you take everything else in and you can probably outlast a siege. And a lot of sieges did end just because the king or the whoever it was couldn’t afford to pay people to stay longer than their fealty [feudal obligations] made them stay.
And also if you reach that point, nothing can happen to you if you just pack up and go. So it’s like, well, if you’re not going to pay us, we’re gone. So yeah, so, but if you could, if you could do that, then yes, like people stuck in a castle are going to be in a lot of trouble if the siege can afford to outlast the stores.
CS: Or if you have more people there than should have been there.
CMR: Yes. Yeah, that’s the other one.
CS: For instance, the king was visiting at the time and brought his retinue and-
CMR: Oh, then you’re fucked. Yeah.
[Laughter]
CS: Yeah. Unfortunately. But it’s okay, because the, the hound master has dogs.
CMR: [sadly] Oh no.
CS: Yeah, that does happen.
CMR: [sadly] And horses, they’ve got horses.
CS: Yes.
CMR: Yeah, they’re the first things to go there. You have to get rid of– like…
CS: This was a thing I caught late in edits. The horses probably did last longer than they should have.
CMR: Well-
CS: Because they kept thinking, well, we’ll need them to retake the thing.
CMR: Yeah, you will, because also cavalry are very highly prized. You don’t just go and kill, you don’t just go out and kill your horse. Like hounds, like one horse, sure, that’s, but like you don’t want to kill all your horses because they are literally your transportation. It’s like taking the engine out [of] your car.
CS: Yeah. And to some extent they do keep better alive to a point.
CMR: Well, yeah, they do. If you don’t have enough salt to preserve the meat, it’s just going to spoil.
CS: Hey, salt comes up in this book too!
CMR: Yeah? Ahhh!
CS: As a backstory point, but yeah, there’s some salt political drama happening.
CMR: You use– okay. Yeah, I see it. I like this world building.
CS: It’s very much in the background. We are wildly off topic at this point.
CMR: I know. I know.
CS: I think I did push this to the point of maybe horrifying your listeners.
CMR: So let’s, let’s bring it back because I think we are kind of running out of time, but before you go, would you like to just tell us what you’ve got coming out in 2025, what to look out for and also how to support you, any links, any websites, newsletter links, so people can sign up for updates, anything like that. This is your space.
CS: Okay. I need to write a script for this because 2025, I have, I have made some choices in my life.
The first book that comes out in 2025, before this episode airs, my first book of the year is in January. It’s called The Oblivion Bride. It is not horror. It is a queer kind of Romantasy novella from a small press called Neon Hemlock, and it’s an arranged marriage story with a death curse involved. It’s very sweet and sad and very different from what I normally write, but also not different at all. But there is minimal body horror in it. There’s fertility feelings and like miscarriage feelings in it. So there is that. So that comes out in January.
In May, The Starving Saints comes out from Harper Voyager. That’s the bees and cannibalism book.
And in October, The Graceview Patient hospital horror comes out from St. Martin’s Press.
My backlist includes The Luminous Dead, which is sci-fi caving horror; The Death of Jane Lawrence, which you’ve heard a lot about today; Last to Leave the Room, which is a contemporary sci-fi thriller horror novel about memory and identity and obsession and too many Zoom chats that may or may not have been written during the height of COVID; as well as a novella, Yellow Jessamine, that is also from Neon Hemlock, that is very Gothic as well.
I’ve got stories in The Crawling Moon, which is a great collection of queer gothic horror tales. And I’ve also got very stories elsewhere.
They are all linked on my website, which is CaitlinStarling.com.
There you can find links to sign up for my newsletter, you can buy my books, you can listen to other podcasts I’ve been on… and you can find me on social media. At this point, I am mostly on Instagram and BlueSky when I am on anything at all, which is not often because I am busy.
My Instagram handle is AuthorCStarling and my BlueSky handle is CaitlinStarling.com. It’s basically just linked to my website, so it should be pretty easy to find. I think that’s everything.
And that’s not even getting into 2026.
CMR: Okay, I’m really excited, especially for May. It’s been absolutely lovely talking to you and hearing about all of your projects and I really hope that you get a chance to breathe in 2025 and have a little bit of time for yourself as well.
But congratulations on all of your publications and things coming out so far.
Congratulations for getting through 2024.
CS: Thank you very much.
CMR: And that is all we’ve got time for. So that is goodbye from me, and goodbye from Caitlin.
CS: Bye.
CMR: Bye.
OUTRO: “Southern Gothic” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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