Review: Star Eater
Kerstin Hall
436 pages
Tor (2021)
Read this if you like: Unique magic systems, religious dystopias
tl;dr summary: Young Acolyte living on a floating city is caught up in the intrigue of her cannibalistic magic sisterhood.
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I like books that drop you right into the world and expect you to figure it out as you go, and Star Eater certainly fits that mold. The story is told by Elfreda (El), an Acolyte in a theocratic sisterhood that wields magic (known as Lace, in the world) and runs the floating city-state of Aytrium. When the book opens, El is on a routine mission to maintain the pillars holding up the world, which is interrupted by the appearance of a Haunt, an indestructible zombie/vampire-type monster that they deal with by basically throwing them overboard.
That’s a lot of details to absorb as a reader, and I felt a bit unmoored until El arrives back in the main city of Ceyrun. Partly this was because El is disoriented, too. She also sees visions, one that look completely real to her. Since she’s the first-person narrator, that added an extra layer of difficulty for the reader, who has to parse which details are worldbuilding and which are in El’s head while still trying to get their footing in the world. El moves from place to place quickly in the first two chapters, too, which is an effective way to give the reader an overview of the setting but does make it harder to settle in to the reality.
All that being said, once the story reaches Ceyrun in chapter 3, I was able to get immersed and stayed there clear through to the end. Star Eater has a complex and fully thought-out fantasy reality, with a distinctive mythology and a consistent logic to its magic system that’s rooted in Aytrium’s history. The lace system gave me shades of the One Power from Wheel of Time, largely in how only women can use it and it destroys men exposed to it. It certainly doesn’t feel derivative, though, and without giving spoilers I will say that I appreciate the grotesque elements of the lace use and the way it takes concepts from Earth religions to their extremes. The way the Order has mythologized their past reads true and it creates a believable dystopia. Their rituals are horrific, but once you learn the circumstance that led to them, it’s clear how and why they were allowed to develop.
Maybe my favorite worldbuilding element in Star Eater, though, are the Haunts (though the giant cat mounts are a close second). They’re an intriguing twist on the zombie and well-utilized throughout the story, from their first use as the inciting incident. I’d be curious to find out if Hall was inspired by candlestick fungus with that detail, similar to the creator of the zombies in The Last of Us. A microbial cause of the condition would track logically with the creation story of the first Haunts, as well as its source of transmission being primarily through sexual contact but potentially also airborne, especially from someone who has a lot of lace (e.g. a high viral load).
I try to learn one major lesson from each well-built world I read, and my big takeaway from Star Eater was the value of a tight worldbuilding focus. I’m sure somewhere in Kerstin Hall’s house there’s a Silmarillion-sized file detailing the entire history of Aytrium and the city it was before it went airborne—it reads like a world that’s been thoughtfully, thoroughly constructed. But she fills in only those details that matter to the present moment, as El discovers them or is prompted to think of details from her past, and this makes the worldbuilding itself an extra source of tension and mystery.
Of course, while I admire Hall’s restraint, I personally could have done with a few more details. I felt this particularly in the final section, which to me felt a smidge rushed compared to the pacing of the earlier chapters (and, narrowing in further, it’s mostly the resolution of Finn’s storyline that felt a bit thin to me). I would happily have spent another hundred pages in this world, which is honestly is as much a compliment as it is a critique.
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