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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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June 3, 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.
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 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 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!
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Thank you to Bloomsbury for the gifted copy - all opinions are my own.
In stunning theatrical prose, Katherine Packert Burke tells the tragic story of the St. Cloud family and the worst night of their lives.
We follow the St. Cloud family at their annual ritual of reenacting a horrific act of violence; their sibling Roland’s slaying of teenager Edna’s three best friends. Edna, Roland’s twin sister, will insist on re-enacting this night with her family every year. The morbidity of it is waning on some nearly two decades after the event, however. Woven around and within this macabre ritual, we see the tragedy of Roland unfold. The story of a trans girl coming of age in the 1990s.
This artful story is told in a brilliant narrative style that’s uniquely fitting to the characters and setting. The St. Cloud family is composed of gifted artists working in various formats; theater, film, photography, etc. Each has a story to tell and a unique way of doing so. Though we spend all of our time at the St. Cloud estate, the different character perspectives told through their respective mode of media builds a rich and layered story. Through fragmented pieces; we eventually collect the full dreadful night that would be the St. Cloud family’s undoing.
The knowledge the author possesses in the arts is profound and inspiring. Seriously, it reinvigorated a love for theater in me that had lain dormant for years. The story was shocking and the pacing built unbelievable, almost unbearable, dread.
I recommend for fans of tragedies, theatrical prose, and unforgettable stories. I’ll be picking up the authors next work.
In stunning theatrical prose, Katherine Packert Burke tells the tragic story of the St. Cloud family and the worst night of their lives.
We follow the St. Cloud family at their annual ritual of reenacting a horrific act of violence; their sibling Roland’s slaying of teenager Edna’s three best friends. Edna, Roland’s twin sister, will insist on re-enacting this night with her family every year. The morbidity of it is waning on some nearly two decades after the event, however. Woven around and within this macabre ritual, we see the tragedy of Roland unfold. The story of a trans girl coming of age in the 1990s.
This artful story is told in a brilliant narrative style that’s uniquely fitting to the characters and setting. The St. Cloud family is composed of gifted artists working in various formats; theater, film, photography, etc. Each has a story to tell and a unique way of doing so. Though we spend all of our time at the St. Cloud estate, the different character perspectives told through their respective mode of media builds a rich and layered story. Through fragmented pieces; we eventually collect the full dreadful night that would be the St. Cloud family’s undoing.
The knowledge the author possesses in the arts is profound and inspiring. Seriously, it reinvigorated a love for theater in me that had lain dormant for years. The story was shocking and the pacing built unbelievable, almost unbearable, dread.
I recommend for fans of tragedies, theatrical prose, and unforgettable stories. I’ll be picking up the authors next work.
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!
May 19, 2026
Katherine Packert Burke's debut novel STILL LIFE is fantastic and I recommend it all the time. I was thrilled at the opportunity to read the author's sophomore novel ALL US SAINTS. At first, the novel truly delivered as a mysterious, atmospheric story. The introduction of the St. Cloud members gathering to commemorate the anniversary of the night Roland St. Cloud murdered his twin sister's best friends was fascinating. It became very clear that Edna's husband Roger had made quite a fortune and reputation for himself by writing multiple books about the murders. There was a performance to the "remembrance" that night.
And that's where I began to struggle. The details of the murders were so gory that I I had to put the book down several times. They were well done and very evocative of 90s horror movies. I am not a horror fan, so that, unfortunately, is where the novel lost me. I did not finish the book and from the sounds of other reviews, it seems like I missed out on not getting Roland's POV on the whole situation. Maybe I'll try again. Or maybe I'll wait to see what Katherine Packert Burke does next. This author is still very much on my list of writers to watch.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of the eARC.
And that's where I began to struggle. The details of the murders were so gory that I I had to put the book down several times. They were well done and very evocative of 90s horror movies. I am not a horror fan, so that, unfortunately, is where the novel lost me. I did not finish the book and from the sounds of other reviews, it seems like I missed out on not getting Roland's POV on the whole situation. Maybe I'll try again. Or maybe I'll wait to see what Katherine Packert Burke does next. This author is still very much on my list of writers to watch.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of the eARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to the author and NetGalley for this ARC copy!
Wow! The description of the story was what prompted me to request this as an early read.
I really enjoyed how the book jumped around to explore each family member and their dealings with their own personal trauma. It's a powerful thing to read about one family's attempt to erase one of their own all the while almost "honoring" what their direct actions did to alter their dynamic for years in the future. The author dives into a glimpse of violence and gender identity in a way that makes the reader want to know more, and want to understand from all perspectives present. I really enjoyed how the timeline of the story shows a stark contrast of what was and what could be.
Wow! The description of the story was what prompted me to request this as an early read.
I really enjoyed how the book jumped around to explore each family member and their dealings with their own personal trauma. It's a powerful thing to read about one family's attempt to erase one of their own all the while almost "honoring" what their direct actions did to alter their dynamic for years in the future. The author dives into a glimpse of violence and gender identity in a way that makes the reader want to know more, and want to understand from all perspectives present. I really enjoyed how the timeline of the story shows a stark contrast of what was and what could be.
May 24, 2026
I feel a little flayed by this book. Hooked to every page, I devoured this one. Between a horrific event in the past followed by years of perpetual self inflicted salt in the wound, and characters that are all complex, each filled with the capability for so much bad, this book takes you on a winding path. All of these people are toxic. None of them are really people you want to root for, but as the mystery unfolds and you get to know each of them a little more, all of the dark and gritty secrets come out.
This book was so insanely good and the narration by Sena Bryer was phenomenal.
This book was so insanely good and the narration by Sena Bryer was phenomenal.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Conflicted on how I feel about this one. I thought it did a good job with some of the themes and ideas around family, trauma, and gender, but the ending didn’t really work for me. I sort of wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if it had been written in a different way, instead of just focusing on the two nights a year apart,
January 25, 2026
I was unsure how this book would play out and I thought about DNF a few times, but overall I’m glad I continued with it. The story was more heartbreaking than anything else. It explores familial trauma, demons (the internal kind) and sexuality and gender identity.
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
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.
May 26, 2026
Holy sh*tballs. This book is a LOT. Like any of us are at any given time. Capable of sheer crazy, evil, sick, greatness and change at all times. Every family member has absorbed trauma in entirely different ways and you get it all. A great, absorbing read.
May 30, 2026
I didn’t really get it tbh. heather was the only person with sense (she also pegs her bf which I love) that whole family is out of touch and I really was thinking there was going to be more of a finalized conclusion. but really pretty cover!
Review of advance copy
disclaimer: i worked on this book
May 26, 2026
4.5⭐️
For fans of: occult stories, weird lit, halloween (movie), toxic familial relationships
I couldn’t put this down! It was a wild, weird ride.
For fans of: occult stories, weird lit, halloween (movie), toxic familial relationships
I couldn’t put this down! It was a wild, weird ride.
May 26, 2026
3
Setting: Virginia
Rep: queer and trans characters
I really don't know what to say about this one, I don't think I really get it enough tbh
Setting: Virginia
Rep: queer and trans characters
I really don't know what to say about this one, I don't think I really get it enough tbh
May 29, 2026
Boring!!! Nothing happens. Characters are flat. Ughhhhh.
June 2, 2026
Maybe I’m not cut out to care about other peoples fictional family drama 🥲 felt anticlimactic in the end. My favorite part was Roland’s chapter
June 3, 2026
Holy shit this is so so SO GOOD. I'm going to need at least a week to recover but this is easily one of the best books I've read this year so far!! RTC.
June 4, 2026
3.75⭐️
June 4, 2026
Was really hard to follow in audio, would have probably enjoyed it more reading it.
June 4, 2026
YEESH.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Burke is doing something new here in writing a trans-southern-gothic, but through the cis gender gaze. Riffing off of the transphobic media of trans femininity in horror, the book is structured as a two act play, with an interlude from The Monster.
I had no idea how the book was going to go, and after finishing I still went back to the beginning. All I can say is this book rewards a reread. It includes a complex meta commentary for readers who are keen to look. In an intersection of genre and form, this gothic story was effed up, and so so good.
I had no idea how the book was going to go, and after finishing I still went back to the beginning. All I can say is this book rewards a reread. It includes a complex meta commentary for readers who are keen to look. In an intersection of genre and form, this gothic story was effed up, and so so good.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews