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All Us Saints: A Novel
Bloomsbury presents All Us Saints by Katherine Packert Burke, read by Sena Bryer
“All Us Saints is a gorgeous puzzle-box of a book, with the pieces carved from dread, sex, and secrets. Katherine Packert Burke has inventively inverted the psycho-killer, revealing something new and, once again, shocking.” – Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition Baby
From the author of the "vibrantly, brilliantly alive" (James Frankie Thomas) Still Life, a haunted family reenacts the violent night their lives changed forever.
Exactly 19 years ago, in May of 1992, 17-year-old Roland St. Cloud fatally stabbed his twin sister Edna’s three best friends. The slaying became instant tabloid fodder leading to a bestselling true-crime book and horror movie franchise. Each year on the anniversary of her family’s undoing, Edna reenacts the murders. She is joined by her husband, Roger, the night's definitive chronicler; her younger sister Calla, a failed playwright who spends her days lost in online gaming; her younger brother James and his girlfriend Heather; and her teenage daughter Wren. Together, the St. Cloud family seals the windows and doors of the house and lights a grim candle. After their macabre theatrics there's nothing to do but wait for dawn, talk among themselves, and remember.
All Us Saints is a literary family drama packaged as a two-act play. Behind the curtain, Packert Burke unveils Roland’s childhood as a closeted trans girl in the early 90s and offers a brilliant and scathing commentary on the cisgender gaze.
“All Us Saints is a gorgeous puzzle-box of a book, with the pieces carved from dread, sex, and secrets. Katherine Packert Burke has inventively inverted the psycho-killer, revealing something new and, once again, shocking.” – Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition Baby
From the author of the "vibrantly, brilliantly alive" (James Frankie Thomas) Still Life, a haunted family reenacts the violent night their lives changed forever.
Exactly 19 years ago, in May of 1992, 17-year-old Roland St. Cloud fatally stabbed his twin sister Edna’s three best friends. The slaying became instant tabloid fodder leading to a bestselling true-crime book and horror movie franchise. Each year on the anniversary of her family’s undoing, Edna reenacts the murders. She is joined by her husband, Roger, the night's definitive chronicler; her younger sister Calla, a failed playwright who spends her days lost in online gaming; her younger brother James and his girlfriend Heather; and her teenage daughter Wren. Together, the St. Cloud family seals the windows and doors of the house and lights a grim candle. After their macabre theatrics there's nothing to do but wait for dawn, talk among themselves, and remember.
All Us Saints is a literary family drama packaged as a two-act play. Behind the curtain, Packert Burke unveils Roland’s childhood as a closeted trans girl in the early 90s and offers a brilliant and scathing commentary on the cisgender gaze.
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First published May 19, 2026
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Did Not Finish
June 9, 2026ive been having such a good spell with queer books lately (the fairy magic of the pride month trust), and i feel like this book is determined to spoil that. no bueno.
September 29, 2026
All Us Saints is a haunted-house novel about a trans killer, but it is really a novel about true crime and horror and the ritual consumption of fear as a way not just to manage fear itself, but to shape a narrative, to bend reality around one’s perceptions.
The novel is written in a very of-the-moment style that I find increasingly unbearable. It is constantly pausing to explain itself. No image can simply exist. All kinds of books have been doing this, recently, and I really do believe that a lot of readers like it. But it drives me nuts.
I’ll give a few really small examples:
"There is a pile of dusty bricks—the foundation for some project abandoned before it began."
"Maybe the religions that banned representational art were onto something. There is so much power in an image of the world."
"If Heather left him, he would never eat cake again. Each delicious bite would remind him only of his loss."
"She used to look at the inset maps: the names of countries that didn’t exist any longer, the borders redrawn. The world could just—change."
"I am ten when I find the first piece of wood. I wander the forest behind our house and the fallen branch calls out to me. Something dead and waiting for rot; something I might save by shaping it."
In the first four of these quotations, the second half restates the first half in a less subtle way. For me, somehow, each one is like taking a live butterfly and pinning it to a board.
The last sentence is the most complex and most frustrating. A child finds a dead branch and wants to keep and to carve it. Eventually, they will make many dolls from the wood they find. There is something very beautiful about this moment in its context. And the last sentence doesn’t exactly just explain it. But something about that sentence, the way it’s written, doesn’t just take me out of the story—it drives me batty.
Believe it or not, I haven’t belabored this point because I want to tear down Katherine Packert Burke’s prose. She’s a very good writer, and I don’t think it makes sense to blame a writer for working in a popular idiom. I’ve belabored the point because the novel does something slippery and interesting with this kind of language, despite how it irritates me.
I don’t believe in writing advice. But… if a house is haunted, you don’t have to keep telling the reader. The house should just be haunted.
Except, the thing is—what if the novel isn’t about a haunted house? What if the novel is about what happens when you say, over and over, “this house is haunted. this house is haunted. this house is haunted.”
All Us Saints claims, directly, but also through images and echoes and events, that “anything you give attention is alive.” And its corollary: that murdering a fictional character is still murder.
Burke is commenting on, or perhaps just reflecting back, I’m not entirely sure, the overwhelming significance of narrative itself—considered, in Foucaultian terms, as a kind of technology of power—as an overarching frame for understanding our resolutely non-narrative world.
All Us Saints is a book about the uncanny power of our nightmares to act in the world. It is—maybe, I think, possibly—about mindfulness and manifesting and empowerment, except all those Instagram-ready psychological tools are deployed in the name of self-immolation. The novel needs to continuously pause and explain itself—however irritating to me personally—because that is precisely the trap it is setting for its characters.
The truth is, I probably shouldn’t have written this review at all. I don’t feel confident I’ve understood the book.
Besides having read it in a drawn-out, distracted way, I’m not familiar with the movies the novel is responding to. A real critic would have watched some, probably. But no one is paying me for this, so… I did watch the first half of Silence of the Lambs in High School. I couldn’t finish it, despite being in a room full of friends—and that half still gave me nightmares. I eventually came to appreciate and in some cases even love horror, but I’ve seen none of the slashers this book is in conversation with.
Beyond that, I just feel like maybe I didn’t get it, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel that way. Still, for a book I didn’t much enjoy, I’m genuinely tempted to start over and read it again.
This review is also posted at Scorpion Review, with a longer, slightly rambling introduction more suited to a personal blog than a goodreads review...
The novel is written in a very of-the-moment style that I find increasingly unbearable. It is constantly pausing to explain itself. No image can simply exist. All kinds of books have been doing this, recently, and I really do believe that a lot of readers like it. But it drives me nuts.
I’ll give a few really small examples:
"There is a pile of dusty bricks—the foundation for some project abandoned before it began."
"Maybe the religions that banned representational art were onto something. There is so much power in an image of the world."
"If Heather left him, he would never eat cake again. Each delicious bite would remind him only of his loss."
"She used to look at the inset maps: the names of countries that didn’t exist any longer, the borders redrawn. The world could just—change."
"I am ten when I find the first piece of wood. I wander the forest behind our house and the fallen branch calls out to me. Something dead and waiting for rot; something I might save by shaping it."
In the first four of these quotations, the second half restates the first half in a less subtle way. For me, somehow, each one is like taking a live butterfly and pinning it to a board.
The last sentence is the most complex and most frustrating. A child finds a dead branch and wants to keep and to carve it. Eventually, they will make many dolls from the wood they find. There is something very beautiful about this moment in its context. And the last sentence doesn’t exactly just explain it. But something about that sentence, the way it’s written, doesn’t just take me out of the story—it drives me batty.
Believe it or not, I haven’t belabored this point because I want to tear down Katherine Packert Burke’s prose. She’s a very good writer, and I don’t think it makes sense to blame a writer for working in a popular idiom. I’ve belabored the point because the novel does something slippery and interesting with this kind of language, despite how it irritates me.
I don’t believe in writing advice. But… if a house is haunted, you don’t have to keep telling the reader. The house should just be haunted.
Except, the thing is—what if the novel isn’t about a haunted house? What if the novel is about what happens when you say, over and over, “this house is haunted. this house is haunted. this house is haunted.”
All Us Saints claims, directly, but also through images and echoes and events, that “anything you give attention is alive.” And its corollary: that murdering a fictional character is still murder.
Burke is commenting on, or perhaps just reflecting back, I’m not entirely sure, the overwhelming significance of narrative itself—considered, in Foucaultian terms, as a kind of technology of power—as an overarching frame for understanding our resolutely non-narrative world.
All Us Saints is a book about the uncanny power of our nightmares to act in the world. It is—maybe, I think, possibly—about mindfulness and manifesting and empowerment, except all those Instagram-ready psychological tools are deployed in the name of self-immolation. The novel needs to continuously pause and explain itself—however irritating to me personally—because that is precisely the trap it is setting for its characters.
The truth is, I probably shouldn’t have written this review at all. I don’t feel confident I’ve understood the book.
Besides having read it in a drawn-out, distracted way, I’m not familiar with the movies the novel is responding to. A real critic would have watched some, probably. But no one is paying me for this, so… I did watch the first half of Silence of the Lambs in High School. I couldn’t finish it, despite being in a room full of friends—and that half still gave me nightmares. I eventually came to appreciate and in some cases even love horror, but I’ve seen none of the slashers this book is in conversation with.
Beyond that, I just feel like maybe I didn’t get it, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel that way. Still, for a book I didn’t much enjoy, I’m genuinely tempted to start over and read it again.
This review is also posted at Scorpion Review, with a longer, slightly rambling introduction more suited to a personal blog than a goodreads review...
Read
June 10, 2026Pretty brilliant. An elegant dissection of horror, true crime, and trans narratives, all built around a glaring series of absences, some of which are filled in and some of which are not. As someone who writes a lot of stories about families torn apart by SECRETS, this book is as good as any to have done it.
Read
June 4, 2026A Family that Stabs Together Stays Together
TL;DR: A puzzle-box horror novel that takes the trans-killer trope apart with a small knife and builds something stranger and more human in its place. Packert Burke turns one locked house into a theater of dread, sex, and ritual, and never loosens her grip. Brilliant, fearless, impossible to put down. A monster of a book.
The book opens with a cast list. EDNA ST. CLOUD, 36. Eldest daughter; twin; massacre survivor; photographer. ROGER MERRILOW, 46. Edna’s husband; successful true-crime writer. It runs down through the daughter, the sister, the brother and his girlfriend, a local girl, and lands on a final entry that reads, in full, THE MONSTER. Then a setting (May 31, a brick house at 507 Hackberry Road, a small Virginia city) and a prologue with the stage direction HOUSE LIGHTS UP. All Us Saints is a horror novel wearing the clothes of a play and it does not let you forget the costume. There is an Act I and an Act II. There is an Intermission. There are Intertexts at the back, listed the way a program lists what it borrowed.
The premise is a closed room. Nineteen years ago a teenage boy named Roland St. Cloud killed his twin sister’s three friends during a basement séance, and the sister stabbed him on the stairs before he could finish her. He did not die. He does not speak. Every May 31 the surviving family gathers in the house where it happened, boards the windows, locks every door, and acts the killings out again, line by line, Roger narrating while the others step forward to be touched on the throat or the heart or the eye and blow out a candle. They call it the ritual. They believe it keeps them safe. Burke hands you the whole machine in the first thirty pages: the walkie-talkies, the candle that has to burn until sunrise, the bricked-over bedroom no one is permitted to breathe the air of.
The prose runs in present tense and slides from one head to another without a seam, which is the right engine for a book about people who have agreed to live inside a story. Brand names carry the dread. Roland used to walk little James down the horror aisle at Blockbuster because the boy was too scared to go alone. A three-thousand-dollar bottle of Château Pétrus, opened wrong, the cork shoved down into the wine. The medium-format Leica Edna saved up for at seventeen, before the knife. Shirley Bassey looping in her head for two decades. The named real thing in the wrong place, every time, doing the work that an adjective would do badly.
The center of the book is the Intermission, titled THE MONSTER SPEAKS, where the play apparatus drops away and Roland gets seventy pages of first person. It is the best writing in the novel and the most exposed, because it is the part most likely to be read wrong. The monologue keeps reopening on the same question, addressed to you: What would you want? You came for the origin story. You want the boy explained. Burke gives you an origin and then refuses to let it function as one. There is the doll-carving mentor, Mr. Catten, with his hand laid over Roland’s hand on the knife. There is a man in the woods named Patrick, pornography hidden in a hollow log, a catalogue of mutilated saints recited like comfort. There is the photographer twin who poses her brother naked in the dirt and tells him to shave the hair off his lip. And there is a Friday night at the movies where Roland watches a man with almost his brother’s name skin women to make himself a softer skin, and takes it as instruction. (This is how you make yourself, the screen tells him.) A line runs through all of it like a stitch pulled tight. I never try on the dress. The dress is in the closet for the length of the book and the book never once lets him wear it.
What Burke is doing is putting Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill and Angela from Sleepaway Camp on a table and taking them apart with a small knife. Roland is a closeted trans girl in 1992 Virginia who is handed, by the culture and by every adult whose hands find her, one available script for what she is, and the script is killer. Roger’s bestseller is called Doll Parts: Isolation, Transvestism, and the St. Cloud Family Murders, and we read long stretches of it, and it is exactly the confident, sympathetic, wholly wrong book the genre manufactures. He invents a diary Roland never kept. He explains. The quietest horror in the novel is watching a family slowly believe the version of themselves a stranger wrote down for money.
The thread that ties the house together is three words that turn up in nearly every bed in it. Tell me I’m a good girl, James whispers to Heather with a tartan skirt around his thighs. Good girl, the local girl says to Calla. That’s a good girl, Edna says to her fifteen-year-old, Wren, the only one in the place looking for a door. The same phrase means tenderness, control, want, and threat depending on the mouth, and Burke trusts you to feel which without a footnote.
The reservation is the single voice. This is a family of storytellers (dead parents who wrote plays, an aunt who writes plays, a husband who writes books, a wife who makes pictures) and every one of them talks the same way, which is to say beautifully, constantly, in quotation. Wren is homeschooled and fifteen and she clocks Eliot and Barthes and Auden before her aunt can finish the reference. Calla reaches for Sontag. It is plainly on purpose, a house where everyone was raised inside one library, and it is also the cost: the people start to sound like a single very well-read mind distributed across seven bodies, and the one outsider, Heather the baker, keeps getting pulled up into the family register when the book needs her sharp. The Intertexts page at the back, with Carol Clover and Janet Malcolm and Rachel Monroe on it, is honest about how much theory is loaded into the chassis. Most of it the book carries. Some of it you can see riding.
Burke comes from the literary side of the room, though the wall is thinner than it looks. Still Life (Norton, 2024) was an autofiction-adjacent novel about a trans woman writer in a red state, grief, and Sondheim, the kind of quiet interior book where the tension never quite snaps; one review faulted it for promising an explosion it declined to set off. She trained at the Clarion Workshop, which is a horror and science fiction shop, and the Alabama MFA, which is not, and All Us Saints reads like a writer using both halves at once. In an interview she traced the book to Ed Gein, and to the way one obviously sick man in 1950s Wisconsin, reported to be sewing a suit of his mother’s skin, became the blueprint for Psycho and Texas Chain Saw and The Silence of the Lambs. She also put the difference between her two novels plainly: the first is about what happens when you leave, this one about what happens when you stay. The second act, a year on, takes the apparatus apart. The ritual begins to forget its own lines. And when the chamber piece finally goes off, and it does go off, the machinery that gets it there (a new lover, a plan, a red can of gas) is the most conventional thing in the book, the part that looks most like a horror movie and least like the strange theatrical animal around it. Still Life withheld its explosion. This one delivers. I am not convinced the explosion is the best thing in it.
There is a video game running underneath all of this, a procedurally generated world several characters disappear into, where you can build the house and burn it and build it again, and where a vault grows in the basement that no one can open. When it opens there is nothing behind it. Sometimes, the girl who opens it is told, we put too much power into a thing. The St. Clouds have spent nineteen years putting everything they have into a single locked room. The book never tells you whether they were wrong to. It boards the windows, lights the candle, and leaves you in the house to wait out the dark, which is the only thing the family knows how to do and the only thing it has ever asked of them. What were they keeping out. The candle burns until sunrise. Then someone has to open the door.
TL;DR: A puzzle-box horror novel that takes the trans-killer trope apart with a small knife and builds something stranger and more human in its place. Packert Burke turns one locked house into a theater of dread, sex, and ritual, and never loosens her grip. Brilliant, fearless, impossible to put down. A monster of a book.
The book opens with a cast list. EDNA ST. CLOUD, 36. Eldest daughter; twin; massacre survivor; photographer. ROGER MERRILOW, 46. Edna’s husband; successful true-crime writer. It runs down through the daughter, the sister, the brother and his girlfriend, a local girl, and lands on a final entry that reads, in full, THE MONSTER. Then a setting (May 31, a brick house at 507 Hackberry Road, a small Virginia city) and a prologue with the stage direction HOUSE LIGHTS UP. All Us Saints is a horror novel wearing the clothes of a play and it does not let you forget the costume. There is an Act I and an Act II. There is an Intermission. There are Intertexts at the back, listed the way a program lists what it borrowed.
The premise is a closed room. Nineteen years ago a teenage boy named Roland St. Cloud killed his twin sister’s three friends during a basement séance, and the sister stabbed him on the stairs before he could finish her. He did not die. He does not speak. Every May 31 the surviving family gathers in the house where it happened, boards the windows, locks every door, and acts the killings out again, line by line, Roger narrating while the others step forward to be touched on the throat or the heart or the eye and blow out a candle. They call it the ritual. They believe it keeps them safe. Burke hands you the whole machine in the first thirty pages: the walkie-talkies, the candle that has to burn until sunrise, the bricked-over bedroom no one is permitted to breathe the air of.
The prose runs in present tense and slides from one head to another without a seam, which is the right engine for a book about people who have agreed to live inside a story. Brand names carry the dread. Roland used to walk little James down the horror aisle at Blockbuster because the boy was too scared to go alone. A three-thousand-dollar bottle of Château Pétrus, opened wrong, the cork shoved down into the wine. The medium-format Leica Edna saved up for at seventeen, before the knife. Shirley Bassey looping in her head for two decades. The named real thing in the wrong place, every time, doing the work that an adjective would do badly.
The center of the book is the Intermission, titled THE MONSTER SPEAKS, where the play apparatus drops away and Roland gets seventy pages of first person. It is the best writing in the novel and the most exposed, because it is the part most likely to be read wrong. The monologue keeps reopening on the same question, addressed to you: What would you want? You came for the origin story. You want the boy explained. Burke gives you an origin and then refuses to let it function as one. There is the doll-carving mentor, Mr. Catten, with his hand laid over Roland’s hand on the knife. There is a man in the woods named Patrick, pornography hidden in a hollow log, a catalogue of mutilated saints recited like comfort. There is the photographer twin who poses her brother naked in the dirt and tells him to shave the hair off his lip. And there is a Friday night at the movies where Roland watches a man with almost his brother’s name skin women to make himself a softer skin, and takes it as instruction. (This is how you make yourself, the screen tells him.) A line runs through all of it like a stitch pulled tight. I never try on the dress. The dress is in the closet for the length of the book and the book never once lets him wear it.
What Burke is doing is putting Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill and Angela from Sleepaway Camp on a table and taking them apart with a small knife. Roland is a closeted trans girl in 1992 Virginia who is handed, by the culture and by every adult whose hands find her, one available script for what she is, and the script is killer. Roger’s bestseller is called Doll Parts: Isolation, Transvestism, and the St. Cloud Family Murders, and we read long stretches of it, and it is exactly the confident, sympathetic, wholly wrong book the genre manufactures. He invents a diary Roland never kept. He explains. The quietest horror in the novel is watching a family slowly believe the version of themselves a stranger wrote down for money.
The thread that ties the house together is three words that turn up in nearly every bed in it. Tell me I’m a good girl, James whispers to Heather with a tartan skirt around his thighs. Good girl, the local girl says to Calla. That’s a good girl, Edna says to her fifteen-year-old, Wren, the only one in the place looking for a door. The same phrase means tenderness, control, want, and threat depending on the mouth, and Burke trusts you to feel which without a footnote.
The reservation is the single voice. This is a family of storytellers (dead parents who wrote plays, an aunt who writes plays, a husband who writes books, a wife who makes pictures) and every one of them talks the same way, which is to say beautifully, constantly, in quotation. Wren is homeschooled and fifteen and she clocks Eliot and Barthes and Auden before her aunt can finish the reference. Calla reaches for Sontag. It is plainly on purpose, a house where everyone was raised inside one library, and it is also the cost: the people start to sound like a single very well-read mind distributed across seven bodies, and the one outsider, Heather the baker, keeps getting pulled up into the family register when the book needs her sharp. The Intertexts page at the back, with Carol Clover and Janet Malcolm and Rachel Monroe on it, is honest about how much theory is loaded into the chassis. Most of it the book carries. Some of it you can see riding.
Burke comes from the literary side of the room, though the wall is thinner than it looks. Still Life (Norton, 2024) was an autofiction-adjacent novel about a trans woman writer in a red state, grief, and Sondheim, the kind of quiet interior book where the tension never quite snaps; one review faulted it for promising an explosion it declined to set off. She trained at the Clarion Workshop, which is a horror and science fiction shop, and the Alabama MFA, which is not, and All Us Saints reads like a writer using both halves at once. In an interview she traced the book to Ed Gein, and to the way one obviously sick man in 1950s Wisconsin, reported to be sewing a suit of his mother’s skin, became the blueprint for Psycho and Texas Chain Saw and The Silence of the Lambs. She also put the difference between her two novels plainly: the first is about what happens when you leave, this one about what happens when you stay. The second act, a year on, takes the apparatus apart. The ritual begins to forget its own lines. And when the chamber piece finally goes off, and it does go off, the machinery that gets it there (a new lover, a plan, a red can of gas) is the most conventional thing in the book, the part that looks most like a horror movie and least like the strange theatrical animal around it. Still Life withheld its explosion. This one delivers. I am not convinced the explosion is the best thing in it.
There is a video game running underneath all of this, a procedurally generated world several characters disappear into, where you can build the house and burn it and build it again, and where a vault grows in the basement that no one can open. When it opens there is nothing behind it. Sometimes, the girl who opens it is told, we put too much power into a thing. The St. Clouds have spent nineteen years putting everything they have into a single locked room. The book never tells you whether they were wrong to. It boards the windows, lights the candle, and leaves you in the house to wait out the dark, which is the only thing the family knows how to do and the only thing it has ever asked of them. What were they keeping out. The candle burns until sunrise. Then someone has to open the door.
June 9, 2026
I actually surprised myself and finished this book. No matter how much I read, I think the only person I actually cared about was Roland, who was the killer. His addition to the story made me realize what a twisted family dynamic these kids survived. Hardly any of them have redeeming qualities and they all seem to want to whine about how bad their life is. It just became overwhelming. Not a book I would recommend.
June 11, 2026
I’m still processing this one, but I don’t think I recommend it. I feel like queerness is used to shock readers rather than really challenge narratives as other reviewers have said.
May 29, 2026
Boring!!! Nothing happens. Characters are flat. Ughhhhh.
June 2, 2026
4.5 stars!!
Story felt unique to other things I’VE read. The St. Cloud's experienced a SERIOUSLY UNFORTUNATE night in 1992 including one of their siblings. Every year on the same day they all come back together to preform a ritual..... Is this keeping them stuck is some weird trauma bonding Olympics? Idk but they def need to find new therapists. This family is made up of creatives and people with big feelings that don't know how to share them. I kinda wish this book would've been slightly longer bc the ending fell off for me. Needed a little more.
Overall, I enjoyed this book so much.
I would not be dating anyone in this family.
Story felt unique to other things I’VE read. The St. Cloud's experienced a SERIOUSLY UNFORTUNATE night in 1992 including one of their siblings. Every year on the same day they all come back together to preform a ritual..... Is this keeping them stuck is some weird trauma bonding Olympics? Idk but they def need to find new therapists. This family is made up of creatives and people with big feelings that don't know how to share them. I kinda wish this book would've been slightly longer bc the ending fell off for me. Needed a little more.
Overall, I enjoyed this book so much.
I would not be dating anyone in this family.
July 9, 2026
i wanted to like this book but i kept thinking there was going to be More—some big reveal, some confession, some character development that felt real—and there wasn't. also, although roland's parts felt very well researched and real, there was still a lot i didn't like. i don't know. maybe i'm a hater but i was pretty uncomfortable with the way transness and queerness were treated in this book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 24, 2026
2.5 stars. I just couldn't connect with this book. The characters are really unpleasant-there was not a single one to like. The writing style was off putting. And the story was promising but ended up just being too weird to stay engaged with or care about.
June 22, 2026
For those going into this expecting a horror novel, they will be disappointed. But if you love brilliantly written and uniquely formatted gothic family dramas, you will love this book. These characters are alive and awful and complex and strange, and the storyline and its looming villain is not an easy one. It is classically gothic in its claustrophobic confinement of the house, redoubled by the turmoil inside each character's head. It lives in the complicated legacy of Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and related true crime, a subject Burke clearly has a forensic knowledge of as a horror fan who is also a trans woman. I highly recommend this interview with Burke, who says, "It isn’t trans lit’s job to make transition easier. Trans lit has the same job all literature does: to give an honest glimpse of some corner of the world": https://thenerddaily.com/katherine-pa.... Really a stunning work.
June 2, 2026
On 31st May 1992, Roland (17 and a twin to Edna) kills her three friends and attempts to kill Edna too in their family home. Edna survives, and Roland is shipped off to a psychiatric ward. 19 years later, Edna is now living in the same family home with her husband Robert and her daughter Wren. Her younger siblings Calla and James return for the anniversary ritual, of checking the house is empty of ghosts, ghouls and monsters and then lighting a candle, none of them sleeping until they can see day light. This year it’s different, James brings Heather (his girlfriend) along for the experience.
Roland has clearly been misunderstood and sexually abused for the short 17 years of their life when all Roland was likely trying to do is understand and come to terms with their own identity, and unforgivably thought murder would set them free. There is a big indication that Edna didn’t believe Roland when they’d confessed everything that had happened to them, and showed Edna to be the selfish character she is.
Edna seems the most unhinged, she seems to want to forget Roland, by covering up the door to their room and never speaking their name. However, she remains in the house as if it’s her duty. Almost punishing herself but lowkey enjoying it. I still don’t understand how Edna could marry Robert, the guy who capitalised and wrote a book based on her experience and tragedy, surely that’s like reliving the murders every day in a sick way.
Calla is lost on what to do with her career, a play write who isn’t doing much. When she returns home, she doesn’t like it because the house was left to Edna when their parents died. Calla is focused more on her virtual reality game then living her real life and after the ‘first act’ of the book, decided to stay home for an extra year, despite not being a fan of Edna.
James and Heather are busy experimenting sexually. The sex scenes / descriptions do not hold back. However, Heather is also weighing up the benefits or negatives of marrying into a family with such a history and what it would mean for her, she believes James should put the past behind him and put distance between him and the house.
The book had some spookiness to it, like the end of ‘part one’. However, I feel like as a reader I wanted to know what was behind that covered up bedroom and almost the ending of the book felt very flimsy and not as detailed as the rest of the book. Edna was giving ‘final girl’ energy being self absorbed and believing she’s still owed her comeuppance and that if she didn’t do the ritual then someone bad would happen.
I enjoyed the authors consideration of what it is like for trans women, and how quickly people can turn on them and label them as monsters and how society doesn’t do enough to understand people.
Roland has clearly been misunderstood and sexually abused for the short 17 years of their life when all Roland was likely trying to do is understand and come to terms with their own identity, and unforgivably thought murder would set them free. There is a big indication that Edna didn’t believe Roland when they’d confessed everything that had happened to them, and showed Edna to be the selfish character she is.
Edna seems the most unhinged, she seems to want to forget Roland, by covering up the door to their room and never speaking their name. However, she remains in the house as if it’s her duty. Almost punishing herself but lowkey enjoying it. I still don’t understand how Edna could marry Robert, the guy who capitalised and wrote a book based on her experience and tragedy, surely that’s like reliving the murders every day in a sick way.
Calla is lost on what to do with her career, a play write who isn’t doing much. When she returns home, she doesn’t like it because the house was left to Edna when their parents died. Calla is focused more on her virtual reality game then living her real life and after the ‘first act’ of the book, decided to stay home for an extra year, despite not being a fan of Edna.
James and Heather are busy experimenting sexually. The sex scenes / descriptions do not hold back. However, Heather is also weighing up the benefits or negatives of marrying into a family with such a history and what it would mean for her, she believes James should put the past behind him and put distance between him and the house.
The book had some spookiness to it, like the end of ‘part one’. However, I feel like as a reader I wanted to know what was behind that covered up bedroom and almost the ending of the book felt very flimsy and not as detailed as the rest of the book. Edna was giving ‘final girl’ energy being self absorbed and believing she’s still owed her comeuppance and that if she didn’t do the ritual then someone bad would happen.
I enjoyed the authors consideration of what it is like for trans women, and how quickly people can turn on them and label them as monsters and how society doesn’t do enough to understand people.
June 2, 2026
How are we to live in the world? We emerge into life and find that the stage has already been set for us. We have been assigned our parts, there are lines we must learn. Unseen powers pull and prod us, legacies of loss and love and violence trail in the wake of all who came before. We are less and less ourselves, increasingly we become manifestations of the histories and mythologies that have preceded us. We find ourselves reenacting life from life’s image, we do no living of our own. How are we to live in the world? And in such a world as this, what does it mean to live?
In All Us Saints, Katherine Packert Burke weaves these questions around the swirling dark mass at the heart St. Cloud family’s mythology—the brutal murder of Edna St. Cloud’s three closest friends by her twin, Roland, a closeted trans woman. This atrocity becomes the subject of a bestselling book (written in the immediate aftermath by the man who will become Edna’s husband) and a hit film, and in both Roland is made into a caricature of transfemininity to embody the “transvestite” killer trope. The novel begins on the day of the crime, nineteen years later, as the St. Cloud family ritualistically reenacts Roland’s murders in a theatrical ceremony. Importantly, the structure of this novel echoes its plot; the story is told in two acts, the day of the crime—nineteen and twenty years later—with a dark mass of an intermission at the center in which Roland speaks.
On one level (nearer to the surface of this novel’s great depths), Saints is interested in interrogating the cult of true crime obsession; when Roland finally takes the stage, the murders are barely discussed and Roland’s motive for the killings is dubious at best. In comparison, the family returns ceaselessly to the killings—both of the novel’s acts begin with the ritual, Edna is wracked with paranoia all night long, Roger (Edna’s husband) rereads his own book on the subject, James (the youngest brother) rewatches the film made about the murders, Calla (the younger sister) performs apathy by playing a game called The Neighborhood, where she repeatedly burns down and rebuilds a replica of the sprawling St. Cloud home, and obsesses with a vault door which appeared in the basement in-game, which she can’t seem to get open. Nobody can get away from Roland’s crime, yet there are never any satisfying explanations or easy answers. The crimes may be a locked vault door, but there is absolutely nothing behind it.
This fetishization of the brutal act, however, offers more than just a critique of true crime; the novel becomes increasingly about one’s relationship to the past and adherence to the structures of the normative world. I finished Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood just after this book, and this passage from the doctor stuck out to me as an essential insight into Saints:
“The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest […] It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago, not that he remembers, but the crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.”
The St. Clouds attempt to lay their hands on this shuddering atrocity, however, as the doctor explains, this is not actually a remembrance but a representation of the past in the ideal image. Here, of course, the ideal is that Roland is the monstrous trans woman with a poorly made dress and sloppy makeup. The St. Clouds, even the siblings who are queer themselves, all refer to Roland with intense transphobic vitriol; they practically worship this image of Roland because it is perfect in its simplicity. On the narrative level, however, actual lived transfemininity is repeatedly obfuscated. Roland’s intermission only obscurely references transness, and another trans woman exists, entirely faceless, on the other side of a phone call. These trans women, each in their own way, are essential to the narrative of Saints, but their trans identities exist only as interpreted by those around them.
Endlessly, the novel swirls around these murders. They are the focal point of the narrative as much as they are of the lives of the St. Clouds. However, coursing beneath the surface of this history is the equally insidious legacy of the St. Cloud family, even before the atrocity of this generation. The parents of Edna, Roland, Calla, and James are so in love with one another that they practically neglect their children. Any time they do spend with their children is effectively a performance of their love for each other— in simpler terms, the children are little more than dolls for their parents to play with. Even before this, the earliest St. Clouds birthed a massively successful weapon of war that was far more destructive than the murders of Roland, whose three lives taken are pithy in comparison. These violences are referenced throughout the novel, but lack the narrative magnitude of Roland’s killings. Instead, each of these events become vague elements of the St. Cloud mythology, a sensation of the unique inescapability of this specific family’s history. The St. Clouds thus become trapped in this swirling around the dark heart of their world, they are stagnant before the weight of their legacy.
Perhaps, at its core, All Us Saints is about our ability to conceptualize the world. Katherine Packert Burke gazes into the abyss to consider what and how we see, think, feel, live. This is a truly fantastic novel of magnificent intensity, a remarkable feat of contemporary literature.
In All Us Saints, Katherine Packert Burke weaves these questions around the swirling dark mass at the heart St. Cloud family’s mythology—the brutal murder of Edna St. Cloud’s three closest friends by her twin, Roland, a closeted trans woman. This atrocity becomes the subject of a bestselling book (written in the immediate aftermath by the man who will become Edna’s husband) and a hit film, and in both Roland is made into a caricature of transfemininity to embody the “transvestite” killer trope. The novel begins on the day of the crime, nineteen years later, as the St. Cloud family ritualistically reenacts Roland’s murders in a theatrical ceremony. Importantly, the structure of this novel echoes its plot; the story is told in two acts, the day of the crime—nineteen and twenty years later—with a dark mass of an intermission at the center in which Roland speaks.
On one level (nearer to the surface of this novel’s great depths), Saints is interested in interrogating the cult of true crime obsession; when Roland finally takes the stage, the murders are barely discussed and Roland’s motive for the killings is dubious at best. In comparison, the family returns ceaselessly to the killings—both of the novel’s acts begin with the ritual, Edna is wracked with paranoia all night long, Roger (Edna’s husband) rereads his own book on the subject, James (the youngest brother) rewatches the film made about the murders, Calla (the younger sister) performs apathy by playing a game called The Neighborhood, where she repeatedly burns down and rebuilds a replica of the sprawling St. Cloud home, and obsesses with a vault door which appeared in the basement in-game, which she can’t seem to get open. Nobody can get away from Roland’s crime, yet there are never any satisfying explanations or easy answers. The crimes may be a locked vault door, but there is absolutely nothing behind it.
This fetishization of the brutal act, however, offers more than just a critique of true crime; the novel becomes increasingly about one’s relationship to the past and adherence to the structures of the normative world. I finished Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood just after this book, and this passage from the doctor stuck out to me as an essential insight into Saints:
“The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest […] It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago, not that he remembers, but the crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.”
The St. Clouds attempt to lay their hands on this shuddering atrocity, however, as the doctor explains, this is not actually a remembrance but a representation of the past in the ideal image. Here, of course, the ideal is that Roland is the monstrous trans woman with a poorly made dress and sloppy makeup. The St. Clouds, even the siblings who are queer themselves, all refer to Roland with intense transphobic vitriol; they practically worship this image of Roland because it is perfect in its simplicity. On the narrative level, however, actual lived transfemininity is repeatedly obfuscated. Roland’s intermission only obscurely references transness, and another trans woman exists, entirely faceless, on the other side of a phone call. These trans women, each in their own way, are essential to the narrative of Saints, but their trans identities exist only as interpreted by those around them.
Endlessly, the novel swirls around these murders. They are the focal point of the narrative as much as they are of the lives of the St. Clouds. However, coursing beneath the surface of this history is the equally insidious legacy of the St. Cloud family, even before the atrocity of this generation. The parents of Edna, Roland, Calla, and James are so in love with one another that they practically neglect their children. Any time they do spend with their children is effectively a performance of their love for each other— in simpler terms, the children are little more than dolls for their parents to play with. Even before this, the earliest St. Clouds birthed a massively successful weapon of war that was far more destructive than the murders of Roland, whose three lives taken are pithy in comparison. These violences are referenced throughout the novel, but lack the narrative magnitude of Roland’s killings. Instead, each of these events become vague elements of the St. Cloud mythology, a sensation of the unique inescapability of this specific family’s history. The St. Clouds thus become trapped in this swirling around the dark heart of their world, they are stagnant before the weight of their legacy.
Perhaps, at its core, All Us Saints is about our ability to conceptualize the world. Katherine Packert Burke gazes into the abyss to consider what and how we see, think, feel, live. This is a truly fantastic novel of magnificent intensity, a remarkable feat of contemporary literature.
June 5, 2026
this is a hard book to put into a goodreads review. experimental, dark, incredibly astute and intelligent, and overall just a really great read. i find the way gender and trans identity is written of, or often not explicitly written of, in this book to be so intriguing. this book to real bravery and it really paid off as i found katherine packert burkes writing & story telling to be truly remarkable & i will be reading burkes other work asap. a very layered story—rich with character, with desperation, with history and with cutting honesty shrouded in purposeful obfuscation and warped memories—i had a truly thrilling time reading this!
thank u eloise for this gift!
thank u eloise for this gift!
June 27, 2026
You will either lover or hate this book. All of the characters are flawed in a multitude of ways. There’s a lot of layers to each but at the end of the day, the only draw felt like the massacre that happened to the family. Rather than healing it seems like a continuous cycle. And maybe that’s the point? A lot of to chew on.
Anyways, the intermission is by far the best part of this book.
Anyways, the intermission is by far the best part of this book.
August 30, 2026
i really loved the concept of this book and i still do, but i fear the writing style just wasn’t working for me. interesting to be reading this when i went to see teenage sex and death at camp miasma tho!
June 7, 2026
Dark and smart. Also any text quoting Atlantic City necessarily gets 5 stars, I’m a simple man.
September 5, 2026
I wanted to like this book more than I did. A trans woman writer? Yes! A dysfunctional family? Yes! A spooky house vibe? Also, yes! But, as much as I enjoyed the syntax, the plot, the buildup, I couldn’t get past the need to make everyone so transphobic that it hurt to read. I was a teenager in the early 2000’s and heard a cis-sapphic say the t-slur once in my life. It was almost unbelievable characterization to see an outside lesbian throwing around anti-trans and anti-gay slurs because she was trying to be edgy. I could see it from the family that was hurt, misguided by their un-therapized pain, sure — but some random punk girl? No. Idk maybe she was supposed to be a TERF? It was a lot all at once. Having said that, everyone else was written with such meticulous care that I truly believed these horrible, unhealed people found each other to torture for the rest of their lives. The pseudo-intellectualism of the father, the precocious teenager, the neurotic mother, and the suppressed brother living in his murderer brother’s shadow, were all believable and interesting. I read the book all the way through in two sittings because of the characterization outside of Sarah and Calla. I found Calla well-written, but so unlikable that I almost wish she weren’t in the book at all. The weaponization of queerness stretched beyond showcasing realism in queer characters and lives and reached fully into villainizing us all over again. I think if the narrator had pushed the inaccuracies surrounding the anti-trans sentiments and anti-gay sentiments, I would’ve found it more palatable. Having the intermission of Roland explaining their thought process did save the book for me in that way. I’d love to read something else by this author that doesn’t focus on questionable queer characters, though. She’s an excellent writer.
June 17, 2026
It could've been good lol. This is a rare book where there is basically not a single likeable character (I think that was intentional on the author's part at least) with the exception of MAYBE the daughter. OH and the killer??? Might've translated better to a movie. LOTS of problematic relationships, and I saw another review that said it was like "some weird trauma bonding Olympics", which felt ACCURATE. The best line in all of the book was when the girlfriend of one of the siblings said they all maybe needed better therapy because WOOF THAT WAS TRUE.
July 21, 2026
really enjoyed the premise but a lot of this fell flat to me unfortunately. dialogue felt stilted and unrealistic at times, and the characters often felt more like archetypes than real people. like others have said, i think roland's pov was the best part. i wish the book had leaned in more to the whole "play as framing device" thing, tbh.
May 23, 2026
It starts strong and interesting with odd, dark characters but they are all pretentious and self-hating. The ennui that delivers the story makes the proceedings rambling and feverish. After 54%, I just don't care. DNF
June 29, 2026
Is this book good? I don't know. I'm sure there are brilliant literary minds who will tell you about its genius. But, I hated it. Did I finish it? Yes. So I guess two stars.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
I loved Burke's debut, Still Life, but this is something entirely different. That first novel followed closely the story of a trans woman and the messiness of her life and relationships. All Us Saints is, at its heart, about a trans woman but this time her perspective is mostly gone, written over by a family struggling with the aftermath of the horrific violence she perpetrated.
It's a fascinating look at the way we construct our own narratives around family, who is listened to and who is not. Even without a shocking act of violence, we see a family trying to erase one of its members from their lives, as if they'd never existed, which can often happen after someone transitions. Burke frames all of this through our societal obsession with violence, horror movies, and art about trauma. (It is more of a novel about horror than a horror novel.)
The violence may have scarred this family, but it also made them. It launched the careers of photographer Edna and her eventual-husband writer Roger. And that association in turn led to Calla's life as a playwright. But Edna doesn't take pictures anymore and Calla doesn't write plays. Roger has already moved on to newer, juicier stories. In this stagnancy, we twice follow them as they go through Edna's demanded ritual, locking themselves into their house--the scene of the ghastly crime--on the anniversary of the deaths. There is a desire to close up the outside, to run away from it, but there is also a yearning to break out of it, to confront it. Calla obsesses over a video game, trying to open an always-locked door, burning down the computerized facsimile of their house over and over again.
Newcomer Heather, girlfriend of the youngest sibling James, is okay playing along, but never really buys into all of it. And it's Heather and James that have some of the most interesting development. James is questioning his own gender and sexuality, the two of them try to find ways to talk about it and break out of their patterns.
There is a pile of family history and resentments. Edna takes ownership not only of the house but of the tragedy, as the only one who lived through it. She is also the most trapped, the least able to be anyone else. Edna's twin is the one responsible for all of it, so she also bears a kind of ownership that she doesn't ever seem to want to acknowledge. There is also a history of profiting off of violence, a fortune made through weapons and war, a history no one wants to talk about and that is virtually erased.
At one point we do finally get the point of view of Roland, and of course it shifts the entire narrative to see things from that new perspective. There is pain and rage, of course, but there's also a family that has always been suspicious and uncomfortable, always wanting someone a little different and a little more normal. We also see in much more detail how the twins' relationship itself shaped everything that happened, which only makes it more clear how much Edna is in denial about herself and her own culpability. This "final girl" is not who the world thinks she is.
Like Still Life, this is not an entirely cohesive novel. It feels more like performance art much of the time. Nevertheless I was drawn back to it over and over, there is something about the darkness underneath it all, a low frequency pulse that mesmerizes you as a reader. And I constantly kept wondering what it was Burke was trying to say. I would love to just sit and listen to her talk about this book. Especially the history of trans women as villains and killers in horror and as the frequent target of misinformation in present day violence.
This book is very heavy, very dark, and very strange. But it's also a work that wants to burrow through all that pain to a kind of catharsis.
It's a fascinating look at the way we construct our own narratives around family, who is listened to and who is not. Even without a shocking act of violence, we see a family trying to erase one of its members from their lives, as if they'd never existed, which can often happen after someone transitions. Burke frames all of this through our societal obsession with violence, horror movies, and art about trauma. (It is more of a novel about horror than a horror novel.)
The violence may have scarred this family, but it also made them. It launched the careers of photographer Edna and her eventual-husband writer Roger. And that association in turn led to Calla's life as a playwright. But Edna doesn't take pictures anymore and Calla doesn't write plays. Roger has already moved on to newer, juicier stories. In this stagnancy, we twice follow them as they go through Edna's demanded ritual, locking themselves into their house--the scene of the ghastly crime--on the anniversary of the deaths. There is a desire to close up the outside, to run away from it, but there is also a yearning to break out of it, to confront it. Calla obsesses over a video game, trying to open an always-locked door, burning down the computerized facsimile of their house over and over again.
Newcomer Heather, girlfriend of the youngest sibling James, is okay playing along, but never really buys into all of it. And it's Heather and James that have some of the most interesting development. James is questioning his own gender and sexuality, the two of them try to find ways to talk about it and break out of their patterns.
There is a pile of family history and resentments. Edna takes ownership not only of the house but of the tragedy, as the only one who lived through it. She is also the most trapped, the least able to be anyone else. Edna's twin is the one responsible for all of it, so she also bears a kind of ownership that she doesn't ever seem to want to acknowledge. There is also a history of profiting off of violence, a fortune made through weapons and war, a history no one wants to talk about and that is virtually erased.
At one point we do finally get the point of view of Roland, and of course it shifts the entire narrative to see things from that new perspective. There is pain and rage, of course, but there's also a family that has always been suspicious and uncomfortable, always wanting someone a little different and a little more normal. We also see in much more detail how the twins' relationship itself shaped everything that happened, which only makes it more clear how much Edna is in denial about herself and her own culpability. This "final girl" is not who the world thinks she is.
Like Still Life, this is not an entirely cohesive novel. It feels more like performance art much of the time. Nevertheless I was drawn back to it over and over, there is something about the darkness underneath it all, a low frequency pulse that mesmerizes you as a reader. And I constantly kept wondering what it was Burke was trying to say. I would love to just sit and listen to her talk about this book. Especially the history of trans women as villains and killers in horror and as the frequent target of misinformation in present day violence.
This book is very heavy, very dark, and very strange. But it's also a work that wants to burrow through all that pain to a kind of catharsis.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
“Telling anyone’s story is an act of either love or cruelty.”
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Bloomsbury on May 19th, 2026.
Katherine Packert Burke’s All Us Saints feels less like a traditional thriller and more like walking through a haunted archive that refuses to let its occupants leave. The St. Cloud family gathers every year to reenact the night Roland St. Cloud murdered three girls in thirty minutes, sealing themselves inside the family mansion as if repetition itself could preserve meaning. The result is a novel obsessed with ritual, performance, inheritance, and the stories families tell in order to survive themselves.
What struck me most was the book’s interrogation of the cisgender gaze and the violence of narrative framing. Roland exists in the cultural imagination as a “monster,” immortalized through Roger’s exploitative true crime book Doll Parts and its slasher adaptation Dollmaker, which helped create the “transsexual slasher” archetype within the novel’s world. But Burke keeps pushing past that flattening. Roland emerges not as a caricature of transness, but as someone shaped by dysphoria, abuse, isolation, objectification, and a family that transformed pain into spectacle long before the murders ever occurred. The horror here is not trans womanhood. It is the machinery around it: the voyeurism, the mythologizing, the willingness of cis people to turn trans suffering into narrative currency.
Burke’s prose is sharp, theatrical, and densely metaphorical. Trauma becomes architecture. Family history becomes fire. The St. Cloud house itself feels alive, preserving grief instead of releasing it. I especially loved the book’s fixation on art and reenactment: photography, dollmaking, true crime, gaming, filmmaking. Everyone in this family is trying to reshape reality into something survivable, even as those acts deepen the wound.
I did think the novel occasionally struggled under the weight of its own ambitions. There are so many layered threads about gender, capitalism, media exploitation, inherited violence, performance, and family mythology that the emotional center sometimes blurred. Even so, I found the book incredibly smart and emotionally unsettling in a way that is still lingering, weeks after finishing it.
📖 Read this if you love: experimental literary horror, gothic family dramas, meta-commentary on horror media, books about ritual and inherited trauma, or Model Home by Rivers Solomon.
🔑 Key Themes: Transphobia and Media Portrayals, Family Trauma and Ritual, Storytelling As Violence, Performance And Identity, Survival and Memory.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Murder (severe), Transphobia (severe), Bullying (severe), Death of Parent (severe), Sexual Assault (severe), Homophobia (severe), Sexual Content (moderate), Infidelity (moderate), Cancer (minor), Suicide (minor), Fire (minor), War (minor), Animal Death (minor), Drug Use (minor), Alcohol (minor).
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US by Bloomsbury on May 19th, 2026.
Katherine Packert Burke’s All Us Saints feels less like a traditional thriller and more like walking through a haunted archive that refuses to let its occupants leave. The St. Cloud family gathers every year to reenact the night Roland St. Cloud murdered three girls in thirty minutes, sealing themselves inside the family mansion as if repetition itself could preserve meaning. The result is a novel obsessed with ritual, performance, inheritance, and the stories families tell in order to survive themselves.
What struck me most was the book’s interrogation of the cisgender gaze and the violence of narrative framing. Roland exists in the cultural imagination as a “monster,” immortalized through Roger’s exploitative true crime book Doll Parts and its slasher adaptation Dollmaker, which helped create the “transsexual slasher” archetype within the novel’s world. But Burke keeps pushing past that flattening. Roland emerges not as a caricature of transness, but as someone shaped by dysphoria, abuse, isolation, objectification, and a family that transformed pain into spectacle long before the murders ever occurred. The horror here is not trans womanhood. It is the machinery around it: the voyeurism, the mythologizing, the willingness of cis people to turn trans suffering into narrative currency.
Burke’s prose is sharp, theatrical, and densely metaphorical. Trauma becomes architecture. Family history becomes fire. The St. Cloud house itself feels alive, preserving grief instead of releasing it. I especially loved the book’s fixation on art and reenactment: photography, dollmaking, true crime, gaming, filmmaking. Everyone in this family is trying to reshape reality into something survivable, even as those acts deepen the wound.
I did think the novel occasionally struggled under the weight of its own ambitions. There are so many layered threads about gender, capitalism, media exploitation, inherited violence, performance, and family mythology that the emotional center sometimes blurred. Even so, I found the book incredibly smart and emotionally unsettling in a way that is still lingering, weeks after finishing it.
📖 Read this if you love: experimental literary horror, gothic family dramas, meta-commentary on horror media, books about ritual and inherited trauma, or Model Home by Rivers Solomon.
🔑 Key Themes: Transphobia and Media Portrayals, Family Trauma and Ritual, Storytelling As Violence, Performance And Identity, Survival and Memory.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Murder (severe), Transphobia (severe), Bullying (severe), Death of Parent (severe), Sexual Assault (severe), Homophobia (severe), Sexual Content (moderate), Infidelity (moderate), Cancer (minor), Suicide (minor), Fire (minor), War (minor), Animal Death (minor), Drug Use (minor), Alcohol (minor).
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I'm really glad you all are having a good time with this one. It just isn't for me.
The St. Cloud family lives under the memory of a dire day - the day a teenaged Roland St. Cloud murdered three girls in his home while his sister, Edna, fought for her life. Years later, the St. Cloud's gather in the house on the murder's anniversary to complete a ritual of candle lighting and memory. But the children have grown up and all carry ghosts with them past the actions of their brother.
Reading this book coincided with a really interesting dinner that I think is analogous with my reading experience here (bear with me). I went out with some friends and ordered a truffle risotto. The dish came topped with a parmesean foam and smelled extremely strongly of truffle. One bite was intestly interesting and delicious. By the third, I was beginning to ask myself if I liked it or not. Halfway in, I gave up. The flavor was simply too overwhelming and rich to be consumed repeatedly with nothing else to cut down on the intensity of the truffle.
That's how I feel about this book. Far too rich to be consumed for a long period of time.
The writing in this book is absolutely decadent and is going to really hit with some readers. Our main crew is a group of highly artistic people, with the St. Cloud parents specializing in theater and all children getting their own artistic passion as they grew up. The way the family talks was mesmerizing at first, but then started to feel like it was being pompous on purpose. There were moments of sanity when outsiders to the family showed up and had some lines, but then we would dive back into the St. Cloud dialogue and be lost at sea once more.
See, even I'm starting to mix my metaphors.
While this book was not bad, I really came out of it wondering "So what?" I feel there was definitely a message that the author was trying to send me, but I was incapable of receiving. I actually stopped and started this book completely over when I initially hit the end of pt. 1 because I felt so lost on the characterization and actual plot. The 2nd read didn't clear things up much, apart from helping me remember which character is which a bit better.
I have no notes on this book other than it being beyond my capability to understand. There is a lot left unresolved at the end (which I supposed is the point) which left me feeling disappointed at the end of a long read about the lives of some very, very damaged people.
I would encourage lovers of tangled family secrets to read this, but to go into it with the knowledge that it balances the edge of literary fiction and fever dream fiction without really planting itself in the horror genre in the way I was really hoping for.
Thank you to Netgalley, Libro.fm and the publisher for a DRC of this title.
The St. Cloud family lives under the memory of a dire day - the day a teenaged Roland St. Cloud murdered three girls in his home while his sister, Edna, fought for her life. Years later, the St. Cloud's gather in the house on the murder's anniversary to complete a ritual of candle lighting and memory. But the children have grown up and all carry ghosts with them past the actions of their brother.
Reading this book coincided with a really interesting dinner that I think is analogous with my reading experience here (bear with me). I went out with some friends and ordered a truffle risotto. The dish came topped with a parmesean foam and smelled extremely strongly of truffle. One bite was intestly interesting and delicious. By the third, I was beginning to ask myself if I liked it or not. Halfway in, I gave up. The flavor was simply too overwhelming and rich to be consumed repeatedly with nothing else to cut down on the intensity of the truffle.
That's how I feel about this book. Far too rich to be consumed for a long period of time.
The writing in this book is absolutely decadent and is going to really hit with some readers. Our main crew is a group of highly artistic people, with the St. Cloud parents specializing in theater and all children getting their own artistic passion as they grew up. The way the family talks was mesmerizing at first, but then started to feel like it was being pompous on purpose. There were moments of sanity when outsiders to the family showed up and had some lines, but then we would dive back into the St. Cloud dialogue and be lost at sea once more.
See, even I'm starting to mix my metaphors.
While this book was not bad, I really came out of it wondering "So what?" I feel there was definitely a message that the author was trying to send me, but I was incapable of receiving. I actually stopped and started this book completely over when I initially hit the end of pt. 1 because I felt so lost on the characterization and actual plot. The 2nd read didn't clear things up much, apart from helping me remember which character is which a bit better.
I have no notes on this book other than it being beyond my capability to understand. There is a lot left unresolved at the end (which I supposed is the point) which left me feeling disappointed at the end of a long read about the lives of some very, very damaged people.
I would encourage lovers of tangled family secrets to read this, but to go into it with the knowledge that it balances the edge of literary fiction and fever dream fiction without really planting itself in the horror genre in the way I was really hoping for.
Thank you to Netgalley, Libro.fm and the publisher for a DRC of this title.
October 27, 2026
Katherine Packert Burke's All Us Saints is a haunting literary family drama that explores the complicated relationship between memory, identity, trauma, and the stories people tell about the past. Built around a family ritual that revisits a devastating night, the novel offers a disturbing look at how tragedy can become inseparable from the lives of those left behind.
Nineteen years after Roland St. Cloud fatally stabbed his twin sister Edna's three closest friends, the event continues to shape the family's existence. Each year, Edna reenacts the murders alongside her husband, siblings, and daughter, transforming their home into a stage where grief, remembrance, and deeply buried tensions converge. The ritual is unsettling in itself, but its emotional significance becomes even more compelling as the family gathers afterward to talk, remember, and confront the history they share.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the novel is its theatrical structure. By presenting the family drama as a two-act play, Packert Burke creates a sense of performance that reflects the characters' complicated relationship with their own past. The family does not simply remember what happened; it repeatedly stages its version of the event, raising questions about who controls the narrative and what might remain concealed behind it.
The revelation of Roland's childhood as a closeted trans girl in the early 1990s adds another important dimension to the story. It invites readers to reconsider the assumptions through which the tragedy has been understood and challenges the way identity, violence, and public fascination become entangled. The novel's examination of the cisgender gaze also gives its exploration of representation and social judgment a sharper critical edge.
What makes All Us Saints particularly compelling is its refusal to treat a notorious act of violence as an isolated event. Instead, it examines the family, the memories, and the interpretations that continue to surround it long afterward. The result is a premise that combines psychological unease with literary ambition and incisive social commentary.
For readers drawn to experimental literary fiction, dark family dramas, queer narratives, and unsettling explorations of identity and collective memory, All Us Saints offers a thought-provoking reading experience. It is a novel that asks readers to look beyond the spectacle of a tragedy and question the stories through which people attempt to make sense of it.
Nineteen years after Roland St. Cloud fatally stabbed his twin sister Edna's three closest friends, the event continues to shape the family's existence. Each year, Edna reenacts the murders alongside her husband, siblings, and daughter, transforming their home into a stage where grief, remembrance, and deeply buried tensions converge. The ritual is unsettling in itself, but its emotional significance becomes even more compelling as the family gathers afterward to talk, remember, and confront the history they share.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the novel is its theatrical structure. By presenting the family drama as a two-act play, Packert Burke creates a sense of performance that reflects the characters' complicated relationship with their own past. The family does not simply remember what happened; it repeatedly stages its version of the event, raising questions about who controls the narrative and what might remain concealed behind it.
The revelation of Roland's childhood as a closeted trans girl in the early 1990s adds another important dimension to the story. It invites readers to reconsider the assumptions through which the tragedy has been understood and challenges the way identity, violence, and public fascination become entangled. The novel's examination of the cisgender gaze also gives its exploration of representation and social judgment a sharper critical edge.
What makes All Us Saints particularly compelling is its refusal to treat a notorious act of violence as an isolated event. Instead, it examines the family, the memories, and the interpretations that continue to surround it long afterward. The result is a premise that combines psychological unease with literary ambition and incisive social commentary.
For readers drawn to experimental literary fiction, dark family dramas, queer narratives, and unsettling explorations of identity and collective memory, All Us Saints offers a thought-provoking reading experience. It is a novel that asks readers to look beyond the spectacle of a tragedy and question the stories through which people attempt to make sense of it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for an eARC of this work!
The St. Cloud family is a complex cast of characters, each dealing with their own internal struggles and traumas. Each year they convene on their childhood home and hold a vigil for the victim’s of their brother’s murderous rampage. But, the St. Clouds aren’t the only ones in the house; they’re also bringing the secrets and ghosts of the past.
I’m extremely conflicted about writing this review, because I cannot say whether or not I *liked* this book. The writing was evocative, the story was unique, and the characters solid. There were also some interesting themes and discussions, especially around grief, trauma, and survival. I’ll also say that I truly enjoyed the middle vignette and it is probably my favorite part of the book because of the voice and visceral honesty. In many ways, that is what makes this book a standout.
That said, this book was not necessarily a pleasure to read. I felt at times that it dragged, and did not feel like it was hitting me the way that I was hoping for. Some of the dialogue is weird, like forced poetry into conversation and just all around unrealistic things being said. I’ll also say (without spoiling), that halfway through the book, I found myself not caring for the characters as much as I had in the beginning. I’m unsure if this was intentional on the author’s part, but if it wasn’t, then maybe I just wasn’t as invested as I should have been.
I plan to meditate on this book for a while, and perhaps I’ll get a better understanding of my feelings. At this point, I’ll say I’m squarely in the middle and cannot learn one way or the other. However, this was still an overall fascinating work and something that I’ll be thinking about for days to come.
The St. Cloud family is a complex cast of characters, each dealing with their own internal struggles and traumas. Each year they convene on their childhood home and hold a vigil for the victim’s of their brother’s murderous rampage. But, the St. Clouds aren’t the only ones in the house; they’re also bringing the secrets and ghosts of the past.
I’m extremely conflicted about writing this review, because I cannot say whether or not I *liked* this book. The writing was evocative, the story was unique, and the characters solid. There were also some interesting themes and discussions, especially around grief, trauma, and survival. I’ll also say that I truly enjoyed the middle vignette and it is probably my favorite part of the book because of the voice and visceral honesty. In many ways, that is what makes this book a standout.
That said, this book was not necessarily a pleasure to read. I felt at times that it dragged, and did not feel like it was hitting me the way that I was hoping for. Some of the dialogue is weird, like forced poetry into conversation and just all around unrealistic things being said. I’ll also say (without spoiling), that halfway through the book, I found myself not caring for the characters as much as I had in the beginning. I’m unsure if this was intentional on the author’s part, but if it wasn’t, then maybe I just wasn’t as invested as I should have been.
I plan to meditate on this book for a while, and perhaps I’ll get a better understanding of my feelings. At this point, I’ll say I’m squarely in the middle and cannot learn one way or the other. However, this was still an overall fascinating work and something that I’ll be thinking about for days to come.
October 25, 2026
3.5 stars. I saw that this book had fairly bad reviews but decided to read it anyway. I didn't really read them since I didn't want spoilers but I get why now. For me, I'm not that big of a fan of literary fiction. Being set up like a play wasn't a big deal and it was pretty much just the formatting of the chapters. I almost DNFed this in the first third of the book. It got so pretentious and I didn't like a single character. Even Wren, the daughter, is pretentious and isn't that different than her parents, aunts and uncle. I get that she's indoctrinated into all the psycho crap that happened with her family but she did go to public school for years and still, she's nothing like a regular kid. Because I didn't like anyone I was just a fly on the wall, watching to see what happened, instead of feeling any sympathy, heartache or joy for the characters. I think I hated the husband the most. Ugh, he was such a conceited little shit. I enjoyed "the monster's" viewpoint the most I think. I'm not sure how I feel about people thinking he was trans or the other horrible names he was called. It didn't seem like he wanted to be a girl specifically, but more having the soft body and things that went along with being a girl, if you can see the difference. And I guess some things can be put down to this being set 15 years ago and the killings 35 years ago. All the characters were so f'ed up and even with the ending saying what happened with some of them I would think they'd all have very unfulfilling, crappy lives. I think if this was more of a typical horror book rather than literary fiction I would have liked it more.
June 15, 2026
📚 Two very different books, one unforgettable reading experience!
I recently read The Savvy Ally by Jeannie Gainsburg and All Us Saints by Katherine Packert Burke, and both left a lasting impression for completely different reasons.
The Savvy Ally is one of the most approachable and practical guides I've read on LGBTQ+ advocacy. I appreciated how Jeannie Gainsburg combines humor, compassion, and real-world advice to help readers become more confident allies. The book breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand lessons and offers actionable tools for creating more inclusive spaces and navigating important conversations with respect and empathy.
On the other end of the spectrum, All Us Saints is a dark, atmospheric family drama wrapped in true-crime intrigue. I was immediately drawn into the unsettling annual ritual of the St. Cloud family and the secrets, grief, and complicated relationships that unfold throughout the night. Katherine Packert Burke creates a haunting story that explores trauma, memory, and the ways families cope with tragedy. It was emotional, thought-provoking, and impossible to put down.
Together, these books reminded me how powerful nonfiction and fiction can be whether teaching practical skills for positive change or exploring the complexities of human nature through storytelling.
✨️Thank you Bloomsbury, Jeannie Gainsburg and Katherine Packert Burke for sharing The Savvy Ally and All Us Saints with me!
I recently read The Savvy Ally by Jeannie Gainsburg and All Us Saints by Katherine Packert Burke, and both left a lasting impression for completely different reasons.
The Savvy Ally is one of the most approachable and practical guides I've read on LGBTQ+ advocacy. I appreciated how Jeannie Gainsburg combines humor, compassion, and real-world advice to help readers become more confident allies. The book breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand lessons and offers actionable tools for creating more inclusive spaces and navigating important conversations with respect and empathy.
On the other end of the spectrum, All Us Saints is a dark, atmospheric family drama wrapped in true-crime intrigue. I was immediately drawn into the unsettling annual ritual of the St. Cloud family and the secrets, grief, and complicated relationships that unfold throughout the night. Katherine Packert Burke creates a haunting story that explores trauma, memory, and the ways families cope with tragedy. It was emotional, thought-provoking, and impossible to put down.
Together, these books reminded me how powerful nonfiction and fiction can be whether teaching practical skills for positive change or exploring the complexities of human nature through storytelling.
✨️Thank you Bloomsbury, Jeannie Gainsburg and Katherine Packert Burke for sharing The Savvy Ally and All Us Saints with me!
March 5, 2026
4.5 stars!!
This one was so interesting- in a good way? In a mysterious and anticipatory way? I don’t know. But I really enjoyed it!
There was some jumping between narrations and POVs which- at first, was confusing, but got better once I kept reading and understood the writing better- was very interesting. The writing is so unique and brought so much emotion and tension to the plot.
There’s of secrets and mystery in this one; it made the narrative feel almost unreliable, even though we were getting everyone’s POVs and thoughts- which again, was very interesting.
The plot and timeline overall were written in some scattered bursts, going between past, present, and even future which really added to the unique writing, and I really loved it.
There was so much suspense, but it’s broken by a surprising amount of comedic relief throughout which I loved and found very compelling.
I also really loved the concept of the “Acts,” and the interlude between them added so much depth and context which I loved and it just held my attention.
Their stories are captivating but also very tragic.
There’s an overall sense of anticipation, with a mix of intense suspense and intrigue, family drama, humor (but dark), and also interesting dynamics (with some dysfunctions)
I overall really loved this one and definitely recommend reading it!!
Thank you Bloomsbury Books for the gifted copy!
This one was so interesting- in a good way? In a mysterious and anticipatory way? I don’t know. But I really enjoyed it!
There was some jumping between narrations and POVs which- at first, was confusing, but got better once I kept reading and understood the writing better- was very interesting. The writing is so unique and brought so much emotion and tension to the plot.
There’s of secrets and mystery in this one; it made the narrative feel almost unreliable, even though we were getting everyone’s POVs and thoughts- which again, was very interesting.
The plot and timeline overall were written in some scattered bursts, going between past, present, and even future which really added to the unique writing, and I really loved it.
There was so much suspense, but it’s broken by a surprising amount of comedic relief throughout which I loved and found very compelling.
I also really loved the concept of the “Acts,” and the interlude between them added so much depth and context which I loved and it just held my attention.
Their stories are captivating but also very tragic.
There’s an overall sense of anticipation, with a mix of intense suspense and intrigue, family drama, humor (but dark), and also interesting dynamics (with some dysfunctions)
I overall really loved this one and definitely recommend reading it!!
Thank you Bloomsbury Books for the gifted copy!
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