Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater is deeply disturbing and impossible to put down

Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater is not going to be a book for everyone. It feels important to get that acknowledgment out of the way first thing, mostly because it’s true. This is a deeply disturbing story, with an uncomfortable premise and violent scenes full of body horror, rape, and gore. It is capital D dark and there’s no point pulling any punches whatsoever about that fact. If these are things that are just not in your wheelhouse as a reader, you deserve to know that going in.

But Star Eater is also one of the most wildly original, compulsively readable stories you’ll encounter this summer. I suspect this title will be somewhat controversial when it hits shelves, if only because it’s hard to talk about a book that involves regular depictions of cannibalism and not have people react strongly to it, one way or another. But, at the very least, Hall deserves praise for pushing boundaries and telling one of the most innovative stories that I’ve personally seen in fantasy in some time.

Star Eater is set in the world of Aytrium, a floating island kingdom that was literally lifted to the sky and set upon giant pillars by a semi-divine being known as the Star Eater centuries before. Its currently lead by the Sisterhood, an order of priestesses whose special genetics allow them to control magic known as lace, which is basically like a fancier, more versatile version of Spider-Man’s web-shooters. But in order to produce lace, members of the Sisterhood must literally feed on the flesh of their mothers, who are kept in a sort of humane unconscious stasis in an eerie building known as the Martyrium.

The Sisters are the only group capable of protecting the kingdom from the gruesome creatures known as Haunts – feral, zombie-like men who become infected from sex or other close contacts with the women of the Order. But since there’s only one way to create more members of the Sisterhood – the monthly “renewal” ceremonies in which criminals and other undesirable men are forced to have sex with the sisters in the hopes of getting them pregnant – there’s a lot of opportunities to create Haunts.

To make things even grimmer, while pregnancy is a desirable condition in terms of keeping the Sisterhood going, it’s also basically a death sentence for its members. Because the moment a Sister gives birth to a daughter – don’t ask what happens to their sons – the clock starts ticking on when they too while have to be martyred for the good of Aytrium.

(I told you this book was seriously dark.)

Star Eater follows the story of Elfreda, a young Acolyte whose mother was only martyred a year ago and who feels wildly uncomfortable with many of the things that the Sisterhood has required her to both sacrifice and do. She fears pregnancy, despises Renewal ceremonies, and doesn’t know what to do with her feelings for her best friend Finn, since she knows that she could infect him if they ever give in to the attraction between them. She’s also having disturbing visions and fears she may be going mad.

As El struggles to survive, the world of Aytrium is also splintering. A dangerous drought will soon bring famine to the capital city of Ceyrun, a rising civilian Resistance wants to destroy the Sisterhood and its influence forever, and competing factions within the Order itself – some who wish it to claim even more power, and others who wish to change the uncomfortable rituals its members are forced to endure – are all raising dangerous questions. There are plots to overthrow the government and others to snuff out the Sisterhood, both of which bring about potentially deadly consequences.

Along the way, Elfreda is faced with difficult questions of where her loyalties lie, and Star Eater brims with complex subplots, betrayals and twists. It’s a marvelously rich bit of world-building on Hall’s part that readers are not just dropped into the world of Aytrium and expected to sort out how things like lace and magical cannibalism work, but to reckon with complex questions of lineag, power, and inheritance. Are we ever really free to make our own choices? How much are those decisions subtly influenced by the histories we learn and the structures we follow? Are those even still choices at all?

Star Eater also has a fair share of horror elements, from the grotesque descriptions of the Haunts’ shambling twisted bodies to public executions and gory descriptions of death. Plus there’s, you know, the cannibalism thing, which is at several points depicted in shockingly gory detail.

Occasionally there’s almost too much going on – I’d have liked to spend some more time with several of the story’s secondary characters like Osan (who seems amazing) and even Finn (for far too much of the story he’s little more than a cipher). The world-building here is so rich and varied that it seems a shame we don’t get to spend more time in it. (I’m personally curious about how the system of pillar defense cottages came to be and/or how they’re maintained.)  And the ending comes off as more than a bit rushed, nor does it explain the fallout from its events fully enough for my liking.

But no matter its flaws – and there are several – Star Eater is a book that feels destined to stay with readers long after the final page.

Star Eater is available now. Let us know what you think of the premise – and how likely you are to check it out.