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Milkteeth: A Dark, Seductive Tale of Hunger, Love and Transformation From Author Of The Starving Saints
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Beatrice is a a vampire responsible for nursing newly made fledglings through the first years of their unlife. She nests in an abandoned, isolated warren of office space beneath her patron's skyscraper, raising two fractious fledglings.
But when she decides to take on a third fledgling, Beatrice finds herself strained by her own ravenous hunger - her body is changing too, transforming her into something even more monstrous.
Desperate to master herself once more, Beatrice courts a mortal who might be able to unravel the secrets of her unnatural anatomy. But their connection threatens the secrecy of her vampiric coven and all the BEatrice holds dear to he runbeating heart.
But when she decides to take on a third fledgling, Beatrice finds herself strained by her own ravenous hunger - her body is changing too, transforming her into something even more monstrous.
Desperate to master herself once more, Beatrice courts a mortal who might be able to unravel the secrets of her unnatural anatomy. But their connection threatens the secrecy of her vampiric coven and all the BEatrice holds dear to he runbeating heart.
Kindle Edition
Expected publication October 20, 2026
About the author
Caitlin Starling
12 books2,322 followersCaitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence, the Bram Stoker-nominated The Luminous Dead, and Last To Leave The Room. Her upcoming novels The Starving Saints and The Graceview Patient epitomize her love of genre-hopping horror; her bibliography spans besieged castles, alien caves, and haunted hospitals. Her short fiction has been published by GrimDark Magazine and Neon Hemlock, and her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 263 reviews
April 12, 2026
Well, I guess I cancel my plans if becoming a vampire really is that stressful for everyone involved. You see, a simple bite is not enough to turn a mortal into an immortal being in Caitlin Starling's Milkteeth. Instead it's a long-winding process of feeding and being-fed-on that takes a sheer endless amount of blood. A new vampire is ever hungry but can't yet digest human blood or meat. If they do anyway they turn into brainless, violent creatures only driven by their hunger and not into the sophisticated beings of immortality and strength that are desired. It's the task of a broodmother to ensure the correct development of the young nurslings, to keep them safe and fed until they have matured. It's the whole life's purpose of the protagonist Beatrice. She spends her immortality in the dark and labyrinthine basement of an office building, always nursing one or two young vampires at a time. But things change when she decides to take on a third nursling, already half ghoulish by the time they meet for the first time. From that point on Beatrice is concerned about the nutrition of her blood and about how she can change her own body to give more. The depicted parallels between motherhood and vampirism were so intriguing to me and I think it quite the unique approach to a supernatural creature that is part of infinite other stories. There is also a very medical side to the plot. Before it's revealed that Beatrice is a vampire herself, we meet her as a normal young mother at a lactation group asking about physical and hormonal changes during the time of breastfeeding. She also kinda gets obsessed with the doctor who answers her questions and I was all ready for a bit of sapphic love, but this relationship really took turns I didn't expect. Apart from that it's more of a calm story. Yes, it's very bloody and violent, but Beatrice is such a steady character that her voice truly shaped the feeling of the story. Her mind is mostly focused on blood and on her nurslings and I can imagine how other readers would be bored by this, but it really made her character special for me. She was such a no-nonsense person. I really liked to read about her, even if her days were monotonous. I also simply love a protagonist who is unapologetically monstrous. She's killing people? Well, that's just what she does, deal with it. I must admit that I was a little confused near the end and I also must admit that I never read a Caitlin Starling book where I wasn't. Maybe it's just her thing. I can totally see why her books are never really that popular, but by now I know that I will always get something unusual with her books. I'm very excited to read more from her.
Huge thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing a digital arc in exchange for an honest review.
Huge thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing a digital arc in exchange for an honest review.
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April 12, 2026I was lucky enough to receive an ARC for blurbing purposes; here's my blurb:
“In 2026, it may seem impossible for any writer to pen a truly unique vampire tale, but Caitlin Starling manages just that with Milkteeth. With its compelling plot, deft writing, and original premise, this novel will quickly seduce you, but be careful: it has teeth."
“In 2026, it may seem impossible for any writer to pen a truly unique vampire tale, but Caitlin Starling manages just that with Milkteeth. With its compelling plot, deft writing, and original premise, this novel will quickly seduce you, but be careful: it has teeth."
Want to Read
March 30, 2026New Caitlin Starling book on NetGalley??? Scooped that up SO FAST. Let's get weird!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
3,5/5 ⭐️
when i first started the book i was a little wary because aren’t all vampire stories kind of done to death at this point? but no. caitlin starling made such an interesting and intriguing take on the whole topic that i was instantly sucked into the story. this is truly unlike everything i’ve ever read before (and i’ve read my fair share of vampire stories ever since twilight haha). it had just the right amount of plot, gore, and body horror for me, and it felt really well balanced overall. i also loved the emotional beats throughout the story and the way you could somehow always connect to our narrator. the parallels between vampires and motherhood were also extremely well done and really thought-provoking. it was my first of her novels but definitely not the last, and the characters and story will stay with me for a while. my only critique is that the pacing felt a little off at times and the middle dragged a little.
when i first started the book i was a little wary because aren’t all vampire stories kind of done to death at this point? but no. caitlin starling made such an interesting and intriguing take on the whole topic that i was instantly sucked into the story. this is truly unlike everything i’ve ever read before (and i’ve read my fair share of vampire stories ever since twilight haha). it had just the right amount of plot, gore, and body horror for me, and it felt really well balanced overall. i also loved the emotional beats throughout the story and the way you could somehow always connect to our narrator. the parallels between vampires and motherhood were also extremely well done and really thought-provoking. it was my first of her novels but definitely not the last, and the characters and story will stay with me for a while. my only critique is that the pacing felt a little off at times and the middle dragged a little.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I can’t explain how this wasn’t that long and yet it still felt too long. The plot felt stretched a little thin and was kind of repetitive. This may have been more successful as a novella?
This is has a great concept and the theme is spot on; being a woman and a mother is a hard and thankless job. And it’s a cool twist that the wet nurse is feeding little vampires. But aside from that not really a lot happens. This is very character forward. Every interaction that happens is more reinforcement of those ideas. There’s very minimal world building and plot. The vampire part of the story does really shine and there’s some mild body horror to accompany it so I do feel it’s worth a read.
Thank you to Netgalley and SMP for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
This is has a great concept and the theme is spot on; being a woman and a mother is a hard and thankless job. And it’s a cool twist that the wet nurse is feeding little vampires. But aside from that not really a lot happens. This is very character forward. Every interaction that happens is more reinforcement of those ideas. There’s very minimal world building and plot. The vampire part of the story does really shine and there’s some mild body horror to accompany it so I do feel it’s worth a read.
Thank you to Netgalley and SMP for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
April 4, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!
If you’re looking for new and interesting vampires, look no further. Gory and addicting, this new novel has some of weird twisty feelings from The Starving Saints while also being completely fresh and new. None of the characters are completely innocent, and are all compelling as they deal with the changes innate to their lives. 11/10, will be recommending to everyone.
If you’re looking for new and interesting vampires, look no further. Gory and addicting, this new novel has some of weird twisty feelings from The Starving Saints while also being completely fresh and new. None of the characters are completely innocent, and are all compelling as they deal with the changes innate to their lives. 11/10, will be recommending to everyone.
April 14, 2026
Let me start this review with the dedication:
‘𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝—𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐭.’
So who is going to psychoanalyze me for always gravitating towards books that are just one long allegory on the world depending way too much on mothers/women and not giving them everything that they deserve? or will I just continue reading weird girl lit?
‘𝐀 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐬. 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦.’
One of the biggest feat of Caitlin Starling is the fact that she wrote a vampire book in 2026 that is completely new and fresh. In this world vampires cannot feed on human blood during their years-long transition or they run the risk of becoming unwanted monsters that do not fit in the world. Instead they have to feed on vampire blood, but most vampires cannot sustain to feed their ‘fledglings.’ And not only did they not feed on human blood during their transition, but they regressed into being almost like ‘babies’ they couldn’t really take care of themselves and didn’t remember much of anything. But Beatrice not only can sustain this, but she can feed multiple fledglings at once, as she is a broodmother. Vampires trust her with their sired and will come collect them when they can finally feed on humans. And here comes the never ending metaphors/allegories. Women for 100s of years now have been made to feel shameful if they could not breastfeed their children. As if formula is something that would somehow make kids grow up to be this unwanted, not normal, functional human being in society. It’s such a silly thing that society deemed to put shame onto. And before formula existed, and even when women could breastfeed, it was deemed ‘poor’ to breastfeed their own babies. Families would get wet nurses instead, and make these women form bonds, put way too much pressure on them and not give them nearly enough of the right resources to feed babies that were not their own.
‘𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐝, 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬? 𝐇𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐞. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞, 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐬𝐨 𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐝.’
Beatrice did the best she could in her situation. She never felt like she could truly love the fledglings, but she cared for them fiercely. She was not in charge of the situation in which fledglings came to her nor the environment that they had to live in together. I think that it was difficult for her to reconcile this intimacy that she formed while feeding with the fact that they would grow up and move on from her. They would go into the world and see how other people might live (people, who were their family, were much richer and could give them way more). The fledglings would always have that memory of being fed, taken care of, safe, but what else really?
‘𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐲𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐝𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞. 𝐈 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐲 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐝. 𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐚, 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐥𝐥. 𝐈𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦.’
As much as this story was focused on feeding someone else’s ‘baby’ this story read to me as how difficult it is to be not only be a mother, but a woman. How in this world we are ignored, not heard and even when we complain loudly we get pushed to the side. Oh it’s just ‘anxiety’ ‘are you sure you’re not on your period?’ ‘did you drink enough water?’ Or worse yet, we just keep it to ourselves because we couldn’t dare let anyone know we failed. Beatrice always knew something felt wrong, but she didn’t want anyone to know. She didn’t want to admit that maybe she couldn’t do her job anymore, or she took too much on at once or even have anyone else know what she felt. She was afraid of someone and coming to pick her apart and make it her problem instead of helping. I think today women, and especially mothers, are afraid to ask for help because we think we won’t get it and even worse we will get criticized for failing.
‘“𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐣𝐨𝐛 𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫, 𝐢𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐢𝐭? 𝐓𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐧𝐨. 𝐓𝐨 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐮𝐬 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐮𝐬 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞. 𝐍𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐮𝐬.”’
We put way too much pressure on new mothers. If anything were to happen, society immediately says ‘well what did the mother do?’ If we see a new mother out enjoying herself, society asks ‘who is home with the baby?’ It’s always, always on the mother. And if you have someone who even just a ‘mother figure’ like Beatrice who is these fledglings’ broodmother they still look at her at fault if anything were to happen. Not to their sire who left them in this dirty, unknown environment. Women of the world are always placed as guardians of the new generation, but are never coveted as such treasures. Men truly have the power, but if anything were to happen why aren’t they blamed?
‘“𝐈 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝—𝐈 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞,”…𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐞𝐫. 𝐓𝐫𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐭, 𝐦𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞: 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞, 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐰𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫. 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐲, 𝐧𝐨, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝. 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝.’
Again, even when women/mothers are spread way too thin, tired, tied down by other people’s responsibility, and can’t even have time to themselves we look to them for the answers. After reading the author’s notes at the end of this book and her saying she thought of this idea from the history of wet nurses, truly nothing could make more sense. This was so well written, I couldn’t stop reading it. Caitlin Starling does speculative fiction like no one else. She knows how to write in such a way where you’re always on the cusp of ‘oh I know what this means’ or ‘I know where she is going with this’ and you never are right until all of the sudden you read one single line and it hits you like a rock. The prose was beautiful and weird, and one of my favorite ways of reading a story- it was a personal love letter, a personal retelling.
‘𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐥, 𝐭𝐨 𝐧𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲. 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰 𝐮𝐩, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐮𝐭. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐞 . . . 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥.’
Thank you so much NetGalley and St. Martin Press for this ARC, I’m so unbelievably happy to have received this book🖤
‘𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝—𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐭.’
So who is going to psychoanalyze me for always gravitating towards books that are just one long allegory on the world depending way too much on mothers/women and not giving them everything that they deserve? or will I just continue reading weird girl lit?
‘𝐀 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐬. 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦.’
One of the biggest feat of Caitlin Starling is the fact that she wrote a vampire book in 2026 that is completely new and fresh. In this world vampires cannot feed on human blood during their years-long transition or they run the risk of becoming unwanted monsters that do not fit in the world. Instead they have to feed on vampire blood, but most vampires cannot sustain to feed their ‘fledglings.’ And not only did they not feed on human blood during their transition, but they regressed into being almost like ‘babies’ they couldn’t really take care of themselves and didn’t remember much of anything. But Beatrice not only can sustain this, but she can feed multiple fledglings at once, as she is a broodmother. Vampires trust her with their sired and will come collect them when they can finally feed on humans. And here comes the never ending metaphors/allegories. Women for 100s of years now have been made to feel shameful if they could not breastfeed their children. As if formula is something that would somehow make kids grow up to be this unwanted, not normal, functional human being in society. It’s such a silly thing that society deemed to put shame onto. And before formula existed, and even when women could breastfeed, it was deemed ‘poor’ to breastfeed their own babies. Families would get wet nurses instead, and make these women form bonds, put way too much pressure on them and not give them nearly enough of the right resources to feed babies that were not their own.
‘𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐝, 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬? 𝐇𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐞. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞, 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐬𝐨 𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐝.’
Beatrice did the best she could in her situation. She never felt like she could truly love the fledglings, but she cared for them fiercely. She was not in charge of the situation in which fledglings came to her nor the environment that they had to live in together. I think that it was difficult for her to reconcile this intimacy that she formed while feeding with the fact that they would grow up and move on from her. They would go into the world and see how other people might live (people, who were their family, were much richer and could give them way more). The fledglings would always have that memory of being fed, taken care of, safe, but what else really?
‘𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐲𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐝𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞. 𝐈 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐲 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐝. 𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐚, 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐥𝐥. 𝐈𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦.’
As much as this story was focused on feeding someone else’s ‘baby’ this story read to me as how difficult it is to be not only be a mother, but a woman. How in this world we are ignored, not heard and even when we complain loudly we get pushed to the side. Oh it’s just ‘anxiety’ ‘are you sure you’re not on your period?’ ‘did you drink enough water?’ Or worse yet, we just keep it to ourselves because we couldn’t dare let anyone know we failed. Beatrice always knew something felt wrong, but she didn’t want anyone to know. She didn’t want to admit that maybe she couldn’t do her job anymore, or she took too much on at once or even have anyone else know what she felt. She was afraid of someone and coming to pick her apart and make it her problem instead of helping. I think today women, and especially mothers, are afraid to ask for help because we think we won’t get it and even worse we will get criticized for failing.
‘“𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐣𝐨𝐛 𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫, 𝐢𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐢𝐭? 𝐓𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐧𝐨. 𝐓𝐨 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐮𝐬 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐮𝐬 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞. 𝐍𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐮𝐬.”’
We put way too much pressure on new mothers. If anything were to happen, society immediately says ‘well what did the mother do?’ If we see a new mother out enjoying herself, society asks ‘who is home with the baby?’ It’s always, always on the mother. And if you have someone who even just a ‘mother figure’ like Beatrice who is these fledglings’ broodmother they still look at her at fault if anything were to happen. Not to their sire who left them in this dirty, unknown environment. Women of the world are always placed as guardians of the new generation, but are never coveted as such treasures. Men truly have the power, but if anything were to happen why aren’t they blamed?
‘“𝐈 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝—𝐈 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞,”…𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐞𝐫. 𝐓𝐫𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐭, 𝐦𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞: 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞, 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐰𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫. 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐲, 𝐧𝐨, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝. 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝.’
Again, even when women/mothers are spread way too thin, tired, tied down by other people’s responsibility, and can’t even have time to themselves we look to them for the answers. After reading the author’s notes at the end of this book and her saying she thought of this idea from the history of wet nurses, truly nothing could make more sense. This was so well written, I couldn’t stop reading it. Caitlin Starling does speculative fiction like no one else. She knows how to write in such a way where you’re always on the cusp of ‘oh I know what this means’ or ‘I know where she is going with this’ and you never are right until all of the sudden you read one single line and it hits you like a rock. The prose was beautiful and weird, and one of my favorite ways of reading a story- it was a personal love letter, a personal retelling.
‘𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐥, 𝐭𝐨 𝐧𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲. 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰 𝐮𝐩, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐮𝐭. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐞 . . . 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥.’
Thank you so much NetGalley and St. Martin Press for this ARC, I’m so unbelievably happy to have received this book🖤
June 16, 2026
Thank you NetGalley for the eARC!
4.25 ⭐️
Caitlin Starling, I love your brain.
There was zero chance I was waiting to read this closer to the publish date in October.
I absolutely devoured this book (pun intended). I highly recommend this for those that love vampires, female rage, exploring themes of motherhood (both good and bad), and are down to read a lot of gore.
***Please check trigger warning if you are squeamish!
I always love when a book takes existing, long-standing lore for something like vampires and flips it on its head. I've truly never seen vampires done like this!
While yes, this is a gross, bloody book about vampires, at its core this is about what it means to be a woman, a mother, and to have a body that exists to sustain the lives of others (even if those lives aren't of your making). The balance between the love and resentment you can feel while caring for others that heavily depend on you is depicted so well, that even I, someone who is and never will be a mother, could deeply empathized with Beatrice. This book really digs down into the rawness and anger that is being a woman and is not apologetic about it in the slightest.
4.25 ⭐️
Caitlin Starling, I love your brain.
There was zero chance I was waiting to read this closer to the publish date in October.
I absolutely devoured this book (pun intended). I highly recommend this for those that love vampires, female rage, exploring themes of motherhood (both good and bad), and are down to read a lot of gore.
***Please check trigger warning if you are squeamish!
I always love when a book takes existing, long-standing lore for something like vampires and flips it on its head. I've truly never seen vampires done like this!
While yes, this is a gross, bloody book about vampires, at its core this is about what it means to be a woman, a mother, and to have a body that exists to sustain the lives of others (even if those lives aren't of your making). The balance between the love and resentment you can feel while caring for others that heavily depend on you is depicted so well, that even I, someone who is and never will be a mother, could deeply empathized with Beatrice. This book really digs down into the rawness and anger that is being a woman and is not apologetic about it in the slightest.
Read
February 27, 2026After The Starving Saints and now this, Starling is becoming one of my faves
I'm very impressed that someone can still make the vampire genre feel this fresh
I'm very impressed that someone can still make the vampire genre feel this fresh
April 12, 2026
Grabbed this on read now on netgalley, I was so excited by the premise it sounded amazing. Unfortunately this one did not work for me. This was my first time reading from this author after hearing so many good things about their other novels. This book follows a vampire who is almost like a “wet nurse” to freshly turned vampire’s. They drink from her until they are ready to start feeding on their own. I just did not enjoy this; the pacing was extremely slow and I never felt invested in the characters enough to care about them. I was bored to death for the last 50% of this book and would have DNF’d, but I was still curious enough to want to see how it ends. I can see why a lot of people will enjoy this book, as it has a lot of commentary on breastfeeding and motherhood, even some dracula references. I would still recommend this for people who enjoy slow, vampire character focused books.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
✨✨Finally a truly unique new vampire story!! ✨✨
Milkteeth is such a unique take on vampires. As soon as I saw this was about a vampire broodmother, I was like SAY LESS!!!!!
I really enjoyed Beatrice’s character and it’s great how as a mother there is actually some things I can relate to in this story. There is some body horror in this one so just FYI if you’re squeamish. The world building left a lot unknown, but also at the same time it was done really well! This story has a lot to say about motherhood and how it’s perceived as well. Love that!
THE ENDING!!! 👩🍳 😘 So good!!! A new favorite read for me!
I LOVED The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling when I read it last year (it became a new favorite for me) and I see that she has written some other books. I need to check those out also!!
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free ebook copy in exchange for an honest review. This book is expected to be released October 20, 2026 .
Milkteeth is such a unique take on vampires. As soon as I saw this was about a vampire broodmother, I was like SAY LESS!!!!!
I really enjoyed Beatrice’s character and it’s great how as a mother there is actually some things I can relate to in this story. There is some body horror in this one so just FYI if you’re squeamish. The world building left a lot unknown, but also at the same time it was done really well! This story has a lot to say about motherhood and how it’s perceived as well. Love that!
THE ENDING!!! 👩🍳 😘 So good!!! A new favorite read for me!
I LOVED The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling when I read it last year (it became a new favorite for me) and I see that she has written some other books. I need to check those out also!!
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free ebook copy in exchange for an honest review. This book is expected to be released October 20, 2026 .
Currently Reading
June 10, 2026i have been in such a reading slump but i got approved for the arc! this is so exciting, and caitlin starling is one of my favourite authors ❤️
May 22, 2026
4.75/5
this book was a big WOW. what a unique interpretation on vampirism, and one i certainly have never seen done before. it was so refreshing to see the gruesome and grisly viewpoint of the broodmother, the one who nurtures and feeds the young freshly turned vampires in their first couple years. it was so interesting how similarly it mirrored the emotional bond formed raising young from the womb and how the care of a mother (verging on the line of obsession in this case) can so deeply impact the development of the young in both the good and the bad. i loved the constant parallels being made in that regard, and how our fmc beatrice actually goes out of her way to turn to medical professionals to see how she can enhance her nurturing even knowing it was a massive risk. this book was told in what felt like an out loud storytelling/conversational format really doubling down on the infatuation beatrise had with her charges and the fine line between that and the intimacy of lovers. and especially so with the repetitive terms of endearment and obsessive love bombing, you really get the fixation at full force. not only that, but i loved the theme highlighting the lengths a woman/mother will go through to ensure their loved ones are cared for, including bodily mutilation and putting themselves in high risk/higher reward situations. it just so perfectly encapsulates womanhood.
most of the vampire books i’ve read in the past have felt so sexy and seductive, really riding on the fantastical side of things. in true horror fashion, we got the stripped down raw and gritty version, in what i could imagine would be how vampires would function in actuality. it gets you to stop thinking about the beautiful twilight-esque immortals and start seeing them as the blood and flesh devouring revenants that they are. really well done, i have high hopes this one will be a massive release later this year, especially coming out around halloween!
this book was a big WOW. what a unique interpretation on vampirism, and one i certainly have never seen done before. it was so refreshing to see the gruesome and grisly viewpoint of the broodmother, the one who nurtures and feeds the young freshly turned vampires in their first couple years. it was so interesting how similarly it mirrored the emotional bond formed raising young from the womb and how the care of a mother (verging on the line of obsession in this case) can so deeply impact the development of the young in both the good and the bad. i loved the constant parallels being made in that regard, and how our fmc beatrice actually goes out of her way to turn to medical professionals to see how she can enhance her nurturing even knowing it was a massive risk. this book was told in what felt like an out loud storytelling/conversational format really doubling down on the infatuation beatrise had with her charges and the fine line between that and the intimacy of lovers. and especially so with the repetitive terms of endearment and obsessive love bombing, you really get the fixation at full force. not only that, but i loved the theme highlighting the lengths a woman/mother will go through to ensure their loved ones are cared for, including bodily mutilation and putting themselves in high risk/higher reward situations. it just so perfectly encapsulates womanhood.
most of the vampire books i’ve read in the past have felt so sexy and seductive, really riding on the fantastical side of things. in true horror fashion, we got the stripped down raw and gritty version, in what i could imagine would be how vampires would function in actuality. it gets you to stop thinking about the beautiful twilight-esque immortals and start seeing them as the blood and flesh devouring revenants that they are. really well done, i have high hopes this one will be a massive release later this year, especially coming out around halloween!
May 8, 2026
Thanks to Netgalley and Caitlin Starling for the ARC!! I read this in one sitting, I was immersed from the very beginning. Obviously this is commentary on motherhood, but I found things regarding gender and class as well. The concept of vampire nursing was so fascinating, and I really enjoyed the character study of Beatrice as well. If you’re looking for an action packed and adventurous plot, I would keep moving. However, if you want a look into the sacrifices of motherhood and how it can turn someone monstrous if pushed far enough through the lens of vampirism, look no further! I rounded down from 4.5 for the pacing, but this was fantastic <3
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I saw this on NetGalley on a whim and decided to branch out of my normal genres, and I am so glad that I did! however, I am also absolutely horrified, and I'm still processing what I just finished.
This was the sort of book that you can't put down, I finished it in about 2 hours! Horrific and graphic with so many twists and turns, I know I'm going to have nightmares tonight but it was absolutely worth it because the plot was so unique! I mean, most vampire books are very derivative and follow the same few lines, and I was very happy that this was different. Also, I totally saw the twist that was on the last page coming, and it was very well executed.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC in exchange for an unbiased review! 4.75 stars.
This was the sort of book that you can't put down, I finished it in about 2 hours! Horrific and graphic with so many twists and turns, I know I'm going to have nightmares tonight but it was absolutely worth it because the plot was so unique! I mean, most vampire books are very derivative and follow the same few lines, and I was very happy that this was different. Also, I totally saw the twist that was on the last page coming, and it was very well executed.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC in exchange for an unbiased review! 4.75 stars.
April 28, 2026
ARC copy from St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
This book was very character centric. Beatrice is a vampiric wet nurse who slowly transitions into a monster as her taste and hunger for flesh increases. Her development from a soft spoken creature into a powerful being was intriguing. If you are looking for an action filled plot, this is not for you.
If you like a psychological look into the main character, definitely pick this up. Beatrice tells her story to her love from when she picks up a third fledgling. Who is her love? It remains a mystery and keeps you guessing until the very end.
June 14, 2026
| rating: 4.5 ★
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.
✎ᝰ.ᐟ review
Milkteeth is what happens when you mix Hannibal with Interview with a Vampire.
Full review to be posted on the day of publishing: October 20, 2026.
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the e-ARC!
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.
Start Date: June 13, 2026
Finish Date: June 13, 2026
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.
✎ᝰ.ᐟ review
Milkteeth is what happens when you mix Hannibal with Interview with a Vampire.
Full review to be posted on the day of publishing: October 20, 2026.
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the e-ARC!
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.
Start Date: June 13, 2026
Finish Date: June 13, 2026
May 11, 2026
Netgalley ARC 2.5 ⭐
This is my first book from Caitlin Starling. I went into the book completely blind & although I don’t feel like I’m the target audience for this type of read, I am glad I applied for this ARC. It was definitely interesting.
It was a completely unique take on vampires.
It was very character driven with limited plot. But it definitely hooks you, her writing is undeniably creative.
I loved the balance of horror & gore in this.
I’m very confused by the ending though, not sure who the narrative is aimed at? 🫣 and the read did feel quite repetitive at times. But this is why I love reading and trying new genres.
This is my first book from Caitlin Starling. I went into the book completely blind & although I don’t feel like I’m the target audience for this type of read, I am glad I applied for this ARC. It was definitely interesting.
It was a completely unique take on vampires.
It was very character driven with limited plot. But it definitely hooks you, her writing is undeniably creative.
I loved the balance of horror & gore in this.
I’m very confused by the ending though, not sure who the narrative is aimed at? 🫣 and the read did feel quite repetitive at times. But this is why I love reading and trying new genres.
Want to Read
April 2, 2026more vampires pls
Read
May 20, 2026I hurtled through this book at breakneck speed, hungering for the next chapter, the next bit of narration, the next storyline. I was so impressed by Starling's approach to vampirism. Vampires are a fundamental part of the cultural zeitgeist and we have seen so many iterations of their myth and legend that it is difficult to put a new spin on them. Yet, Starling's inventive approach was like nothing I've read before - and I am an avid vampire media consumer. The lore and history that Starling drew on for Milkteeth was so ingenious and I was so enthralled by it.
The writing was gritty yet grounded in reality. Starling did not shy away from gore and violence and it added to the overall messy, violent, and disgusting atmosphere. The narrative was a little circuitous and repetitive but to me that just added to the claustrophobia and otherwordly nature of the story. We were allowed full access to the protagonist - Beatrice's mind and it built on the consuming nature of her ailment. Beatrice also provided a strong front to examine ideas of monstrous motherhood and the inner conflicts of the mantle of being a wetnurse - be it for vampires or for humans. I was very drawn to this discussion around motherhood and how it linked to femininity, consumption, and hunger.
I was pleasantly surprised by how immersed I found myself in the atmosphere of this book. Starling depicted the true nastiness, rot and deterioration of a well-known fantastical figure.
This is a real weird girl, rot girl book and I would advise readers to consider trigger warnings before embarking on this truly horrific but satisfying journey.
The writing was gritty yet grounded in reality. Starling did not shy away from gore and violence and it added to the overall messy, violent, and disgusting atmosphere. The narrative was a little circuitous and repetitive but to me that just added to the claustrophobia and otherwordly nature of the story. We were allowed full access to the protagonist - Beatrice's mind and it built on the consuming nature of her ailment. Beatrice also provided a strong front to examine ideas of monstrous motherhood and the inner conflicts of the mantle of being a wetnurse - be it for vampires or for humans. I was very drawn to this discussion around motherhood and how it linked to femininity, consumption, and hunger.
I was pleasantly surprised by how immersed I found myself in the atmosphere of this book. Starling depicted the true nastiness, rot and deterioration of a well-known fantastical figure.
This is a real weird girl, rot girl book and I would advise readers to consider trigger warnings before embarking on this truly horrific but satisfying journey.
May 12, 2026
4.25⭐️
i don’t know what it is about Caitlin Starling’s works, but whatever type of horror she writes, i loveee. she finds ways to bring in psyche of people and takes it to the extreme. This book for me was of toxic motherly bonds, but also of the heavy weight society puts onto women (specifically mothers). (though a HUGE part of this is of nursing, which I have 0 experience of so cannot speak to it)
‘Milkteeth’ had a fascinating new take on vampires. a more brutal, less glorious version; where being turned isn’t all fun and games to be with the one who turned you. 3+ years of having to be carefully watched over to not ingest human blood (so you don’t turn into a ghoul), losing all memory, losing your faculties, essentially being born anew— then when you finally mature again and into a whole knew “person”, the vampire who turned you most of the time wants nothing to do with the new you. crazy!
(it almost felt like commentary on how easy we’ve seen characters in vampire media be turned and how the vampire still loves the new them— because this felt (sadly) realistic, that the obsession with a human disappears while they’re apart)
this book does has sapphic undertones, as it’s heavily implied, there’s not a technical romance/relationship in this book. it’s definitely focused on bodily horror (teeth, “feeding” from different areas of the body, medical terms/scene, etc). however, it’s written as if the narrator is penning a letter telling her lover of everything that happened, which is why i undoubtedly can label this as sapphic
i also felt there was further commentary on how our main character, the narrator, is a Broodmother. she is doing her best to care for newly turned vampires, but is curious how it’ll biologically affect her the more she takes on. Cue, where our story takes off as she seeks out a doctor. a Broodmother a very rare kind of vampire who is the one to primarily feed and take care of newly turned vampires, and she is treated HORRIBLY. like she is the backbone of their society in the sense of helping new vampires grow again…. where does that seem familiar? oh! real life! where woman are praised for their wombs and abilities to give birth, use their bodies to give life, yet are predominantly are treated like second hand citizens, controlled. the ending bit to this book was SUFFOCATING, crazy, and done so well
*ARC courtesy of netgalley*
i don’t know what it is about Caitlin Starling’s works, but whatever type of horror she writes, i loveee. she finds ways to bring in psyche of people and takes it to the extreme. This book for me was of toxic motherly bonds, but also of the heavy weight society puts onto women (specifically mothers). (though a HUGE part of this is of nursing, which I have 0 experience of so cannot speak to it)
‘Milkteeth’ had a fascinating new take on vampires. a more brutal, less glorious version; where being turned isn’t all fun and games to be with the one who turned you. 3+ years of having to be carefully watched over to not ingest human blood (so you don’t turn into a ghoul), losing all memory, losing your faculties, essentially being born anew— then when you finally mature again and into a whole knew “person”, the vampire who turned you most of the time wants nothing to do with the new you. crazy!
(it almost felt like commentary on how easy we’ve seen characters in vampire media be turned and how the vampire still loves the new them— because this felt (sadly) realistic, that the obsession with a human disappears while they’re apart)
this book does has sapphic undertones, as it’s heavily implied, there’s not a technical romance/relationship in this book. it’s definitely focused on bodily horror (teeth, “feeding” from different areas of the body, medical terms/scene, etc). however, it’s written as if the narrator is penning a letter telling her lover of everything that happened, which is why i undoubtedly can label this as sapphic
i also felt there was further commentary on how our main character, the narrator, is a Broodmother. she is doing her best to care for newly turned vampires, but is curious how it’ll biologically affect her the more she takes on. Cue, where our story takes off as she seeks out a doctor. a Broodmother a very rare kind of vampire who is the one to primarily feed and take care of newly turned vampires, and she is treated HORRIBLY. like she is the backbone of their society in the sense of helping new vampires grow again…. where does that seem familiar? oh! real life! where woman are praised for their wombs and abilities to give birth, use their bodies to give life, yet are predominantly are treated like second hand citizens, controlled. the ending bit to this book was SUFFOCATING, crazy, and done so well
*ARC courtesy of netgalley*
April 10, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for a copy of this ARC to read and review.
Milkteeth by Caitlin Starling is more than a vampire story. It's a story about the struggles of motherhood, and how the system set in place for mothers and their children lets them down over and over again.
Beatrice is a broodmother, or a vampire who feeds their blood to newly-turned vampires so they can properly grow into a fully-formed vampire. She has been a broodmother for a long time, and takes great pride in it and her nurslings. Her brood contains Gorgeous, who's strong-willed and melodramatic, and Fortunata, who's systematic and inquisitive. When Beatrice is presented with a third nursling who is on the verge of turning into a ghoul - a former vampire who feeds on human flesh and has no coherent thoughts - she is pushed to her limits. She must juggle caring for three hungry vampire nurslings, while also embark on a journey of her own self-discovery.
Beatrice is kept in place in a dirty labyrinth below the all-powerful Manon's corporate building. Manon exerts her power over Beatrice, trying to control her every move, but Beatrice is at a breaking point...
This story captures how motherhood is perceived in the real world. How systems of power tell women they are nothing more than breeding machines, and that they should be ashamed if they ever needed help because that is what they're made for. It's powerful and gut-wrenching while satiating the vampiric thirst we all crave 🧛
Milkteeth by Caitlin Starling is more than a vampire story. It's a story about the struggles of motherhood, and how the system set in place for mothers and their children lets them down over and over again.
Beatrice is a broodmother, or a vampire who feeds their blood to newly-turned vampires so they can properly grow into a fully-formed vampire. She has been a broodmother for a long time, and takes great pride in it and her nurslings. Her brood contains Gorgeous, who's strong-willed and melodramatic, and Fortunata, who's systematic and inquisitive. When Beatrice is presented with a third nursling who is on the verge of turning into a ghoul - a former vampire who feeds on human flesh and has no coherent thoughts - she is pushed to her limits. She must juggle caring for three hungry vampire nurslings, while also embark on a journey of her own self-discovery.
Beatrice is kept in place in a dirty labyrinth below the all-powerful Manon's corporate building. Manon exerts her power over Beatrice, trying to control her every move, but Beatrice is at a breaking point...
This story captures how motherhood is perceived in the real world. How systems of power tell women they are nothing more than breeding machines, and that they should be ashamed if they ever needed help because that is what they're made for. It's powerful and gut-wrenching while satiating the vampiric thirst we all crave 🧛
June 3, 2026
Milkteeth by Caitlin Starling, when the book starts we meet Beatrice, who is at a self-help group for mother’s nursing their babies the only thing is she’s not nursing babies but halfling vampires one is from her lover and the other desperately wants to be with his lover and then she gets a third. I don’t know how to give a brief summary of this book because they’re so much of it I do want to say Caitlin Starling has a way of writing that’s like a fever dream but in this book it’s more like a waking nightmare and when most reviewers would say if you like vampires you may like this book but wait there’s more because if you like Gore… Lots and lots of gore then you’re in for a treat. That isn’t something that bothers me so I was so down to read this book and I do believe either you love her books or hate them and I absolutely love them and can’t get enough. As you move from modern day to Beatrice‘s childhood to her almost adulthood you start to get the picture of Beatrice and learn what makes her the way she is. It is a really great book I thought the author did a great job, she has such an original voice and that definitely makes all her books a treat to read. this is just an awesome book what more can I say I absolutely recommend it! #netGalley,#TheBlindReviewer, #MyHonestReview,
April 12, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for this arc in return for an honest review. Caitlin Starling is one of my favorite authors because of the utter hallucinatory effect of all of her books I’ve read. The Starving Saints and The Graceview Patient and Now Milkteeth all have this aura of WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON??? Did I really just read that???? How did this come from your brain?????? I am in love and also horribly disgusted by you. Starling’s death scenes are amongst my favorite because she gives incredibly anatomically correct descriptions of what’s occurring and that makes my little autopsy tech brain scream in pleasure. Starling produces such vivid illustrative scenes that compose beautifully into a cinematic masterpiece. I can absolutely devour anything Starling writes because it is just perfectly out of pocket and bonkers enough yet still grounded in reality that provides a glimmer of reality and possibility. I can’t even think of anything this is possibly close to because it is truly unique!
June 5, 2026
I’m going to rate this 3.5 stars for now but could be prone to change.
The amount of body horror in this was perfect. The descriptions of swelling and oozing blood after feeding created some crazy but great imagery. I thought this was a great concept of a book from your usual vampire books and having to wean newly born vampires before they can go off and hunt.
I would say this was a lot more of a character analysis and less plot driven as there’s a lot of discussions on the working of the bodies and how things work.
For me this was a slower paced book however when we get to the last act, things move really quickly and it doesn’t feel like you get a lot of time to take it in before it ends. I had to do a kind of double take when it ended because it feels like there was still more to come but it was just a little abrupt.
I kindly received an arc copy from NetGalley and Michael Joseph publishers.
The amount of body horror in this was perfect. The descriptions of swelling and oozing blood after feeding created some crazy but great imagery. I thought this was a great concept of a book from your usual vampire books and having to wean newly born vampires before they can go off and hunt.
I would say this was a lot more of a character analysis and less plot driven as there’s a lot of discussions on the working of the bodies and how things work.
For me this was a slower paced book however when we get to the last act, things move really quickly and it doesn’t feel like you get a lot of time to take it in before it ends. I had to do a kind of double take when it ended because it feels like there was still more to come but it was just a little abrupt.
I kindly received an arc copy from NetGalley and Michael Joseph publishers.
June 14, 2026
This is what I needed from the vampire genre and it was given to me in a way I least expected. Maternal things and me walk a fine line but this is bubbling need and gore slicked love. A drive so intense that you’d evolve to provide what a fledgling vampire needs. A pinnacle of nourishment.
Starling always nails it with the atmosphere for me. It’s claustrophobic and dirty. Crusted fingernails and economy carpet. A perfect nest to raise a fledgling for up to three years. It’s practical and somehow no one can see that but Beatrice.
The body horror is beautiful and again, practical. Horrifying ways of changing one’s body and also disassembling a victim. There’s care in the carnage too.
The relationships built throughout this make sense; a link forever there, a deep down bond that’s different from siring, akin to a wet nurse seeing that child leave her side forever.
I just loved this. The feral need is immaculate and to me this is what the genre needed.
Starling always nails it with the atmosphere for me. It’s claustrophobic and dirty. Crusted fingernails and economy carpet. A perfect nest to raise a fledgling for up to three years. It’s practical and somehow no one can see that but Beatrice.
The body horror is beautiful and again, practical. Horrifying ways of changing one’s body and also disassembling a victim. There’s care in the carnage too.
The relationships built throughout this make sense; a link forever there, a deep down bond that’s different from siring, akin to a wet nurse seeing that child leave her side forever.
I just loved this. The feral need is immaculate and to me this is what the genre needed.
May 2, 2026
3.25 - A vampire that is a wetnurse to newborn vampires?! FANTASTIC idea. I loved the gothic vibes in a contemporary setting, and the unapologetic gore and sexuality that naturally comes with vampiric lore. Some very nicely written prose too! I thought the relationship between Beatrice and Dr B, and actually would’ve liked to see it developed a bit further before the big event. I also struggled a bit with the names of characters, but need to accept that’s just how the vampire subgenre rolls. It was a little bit all over the place near to the end, but I still mostly enjoyed the book. My main complaints are pacing issues and repetitiveness, but these are things that could be fixed fairly easily. Will be recommending to the horror girlies, but will be emphasising that I think was dragged out quite a bit.
June 18, 2026
Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press!
“For a mortal to nurse is ultimately temporary. Eventually, the hormones recalibrate, the young grow up, and the phase closes out. But for me… for me, it is definitional.”
Turns out, newly transformed vampires can’t immediately start sucking people’s necks. Human blood needs to be filtered through a broodmother’s veins before it can be ingested by the fledgling. That’s the premise of this gore-soaked novel.
From the opening chapter, the blood flows and the plot thrills as it unfolds. Starling adds fascinating depth and detail to the folklore of vampires, staying true while expanding it and making it more nuanced.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys a strange and unique (and fairly graphic) horror story.
“For a mortal to nurse is ultimately temporary. Eventually, the hormones recalibrate, the young grow up, and the phase closes out. But for me… for me, it is definitional.”
Turns out, newly transformed vampires can’t immediately start sucking people’s necks. Human blood needs to be filtered through a broodmother’s veins before it can be ingested by the fledgling. That’s the premise of this gore-soaked novel.
From the opening chapter, the blood flows and the plot thrills as it unfolds. Starling adds fascinating depth and detail to the folklore of vampires, staying true while expanding it and making it more nuanced.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys a strange and unique (and fairly graphic) horror story.
May 23, 2026
I have no strong feelings towards this. It felt very dull and uninspired
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Are we all in agreement with Johanna van Veen (in the blurb) that 'a truly unique vampire tale' seems impossible? Well, for those unfamiliar with her writing, permit me a drumroll: introducing, Caitlin Starling (who, we're told, was paid in a previous life to invent body parts, so we’ve got an idea of her flavour).
The opening scene of ‘Milkteeth’ has been seen before; it’s Louis sucking at Lestat’s wrist. But with Starling, it’s more desperate, dirtier, darker. There’re no frills: ‘[She bares] her teeth, and oh, yes, she does have teeth. They are sharp little syringes in her mouth. They have pierced through her gums and shredded her lips.’ It’s Bella hunting her first human and being stopped by her sire, Edward. But there’s no romanticism, only dynamism: ‘She eats and eats and is halfway into his ribcage [...] And through it all, the begging, sobbing voice: “Luisa, Lu, stop, fuck, fuck, you can’t eat him! You need to eat me!”’ Yep – Starling’s vampires have to drink vampire blood in their infanthood and Starling’s vampire babies run the risk of ghoulification if they don’t follow the foremost rule: ‘a vampire drinks, a ghoul devours.’
Starling says she had to ask herself, ‘just how directly did I want to yell about historical wetnursing?’ And while spiralling about the social and physical implications during the worldbuilding for this novel, she asked herself, ‘What if breastfeeding vampires?’ Hence, a totally new entry on a fresh page in the canon of vampire lore: broodmothers. Broodmothers like Beatrice, our protagonist, who calls herself ‘grotesque’ and ‘self-pitying’, a ‘frustrated beast’.
What can I say about her? Beatrice made me feel physically sick. There’s only a handful of books that have given me that genuine reflex (Rachel Harrison and Elliott Gish, I’m looking at you), and because Starling speaks as Beatrice in first-person POV using second-person direct address, the intellectual (and physical) impact of her speaking to you in the position of one of her beloved infant brood, is much more immediate and affecting.
Broodmothers are rare and unique. Beatrice wonders if her broodmother blood is like Christ’s blood, who had ‘suckled and nursed’ mortals from the spear wound in his side, which ‘might as well have been an oozing nipple.’ She says ‘[raising] my brood was what I did because I was made for it.’ Yet we jump in at the point with her where ‘[it] was not enough to simply bleed for them.’ No. Because Caitlin Starling’s preoccupation writing this one was ‘just what would happen if your vampire situationship ate your kidneys.’
And – typical Starling – beyond eating kidneys, there’s also surgery-whilst-conscious, homeschooling anatomy lessons with actual pieces of anatomy, and a kind of flaying: ‘Together, we have learned so much about anatomy. All my formal understanding of the body has come from you.’ Now! As we know, Starling writes minutely detailed, accurate descriptions of gore, so I’d strongly recommend not eating whilst reading!
Centrally, the plot revolves around Medicine with a capital M. Thematically, there’s wetnursing, yes, but it’s eclipsed by Beatrice’s desperate need to discover what it is that’s happening to her body as it transforms under her craving for not blood but flesh, something no ‘ordinary’ vampire should feel. Through Medicine, Beatrice meets Dr Bajracharya just as (she tell us) she's 'teetering on the edge', then she lurches self-destructively into a severe case of Positive Transference. Something like the doctor-as-god complex gets funnelled into the mix as the two women search for the means to ease Beatrice's distress over the changes in her body apparently triggered by the addition of a third nursling to her brood, and one - at that - who is perilously close to ghoulism.
Medical distress is a note often struck in Caitlin Starling’s writing. From fraught Margaret at the cloistered hospital in The Graceview Patient to Beatrice’s acute ‘health’ concerns within her suffocating basement lair, we see that Starling almost always places the protagonist’s anguish over their body within a confined, claustrophobic environment. Last year, we had all the bodily distress within the fortifications of besieged Aymar Castle in The Starving Saints, where everybody along with Phosyne seemed to undergo some type of monstrous metamorphosis, and sense-of-self was as much under siege as was the city. The first Caitlin Starling novel I read was The Luminous Dead, and you couldn’t get more medically smothering than Gyre wearing her total-life-support underwater suit whilst caving, and her surface controller blithely dosing her with drugs through its mechanisms.
It's pivotal to note that, in Beatrice and Bajracharya’s Medical coupling, both patient and doctor are female. And I think it's more than the reliable Sapphic element that we expect from Starling. (There's a wormhole here about the current gender health gap when women who seek medical answers about their own bodies come up against the Male-by-Default system, but I’ve already gone there in my review of Gentle Things: The Chilling Historical Fiction Novel Full of Secrets and Suspense by Danielle Giles). There's a whole web of female-to-female relationships that radiate out from Beatrice at its nucleus, which bear fruitful contemplation. I found that almost all of them can be slotted into a template of mothering. So, 'Milkteeth', as I read it, is a speculation upon the psychology of mothering. Is mothering about nurture or is it about predation? Is mothering’s expectation of care also the expectation of sacrifice (as is literal for the humans in this case)?
Manon symbolises a mother figure who passes her daughter off to a wetnurse, whilst still furnishing them with the necessities of life: clothing, food, a roof over their heads. Beatrice is the wetnurse herself, but she was also a mortal mother (‘I had gone fifty years without thinking about [my mortal son], and now he haunted me’). Bajracharya is the pseudo-mother, with the wisdom and capabilities to aid new mothers in post-partem particulars like lactation. Fortunata might be the precocious daughter, but as she matures, we see that she carries in her the rare physiological genealogy of the broodmother (Fortunata's 'milk-sibling' Lu is the newest of the newborns and seems to awaken this phenomenon in her). Manon can also fit the mother template with Beatrice as her daughter, because she controls when and what Beatrice eats, and when and where Beatrice goes out. Or rather, she thinks she does.
Which leads me on to the next avenue of enquiry: Starling's women as subverters. Beatrice breaks all the rules for broodmothers: she takes a third suckling (never before heard of); she sneaks out of her lair; she (forbiddenly) hunts her own food; she reveals her own kind to humans; she subjects herself to medical examination; she chews instead of sucks... The list goes on! Manon rebels by allowing Beatrice her third dependent; Bajracharya commits more than one act that would see her struck off the Medical Register; and I'll leave it to readers to discover how Fortunata's relationship to another woman (her sire) and Lu's relationship to another woman (her sire) play their subversive parts in Beatrice’s dénouement.
Hence, these women can all be read as mothers and they can all be read as subverters. Consequently, is mothering a subversive act? 'Milkteeth' definitely contextualises its commentary within the dissolution of the family unit - any and all permutations of the family unit are in degeneration. Where is the retribution for the mothers in this scenario? In what position does this degeneration leave Beatrice as the mater? She’s forced to fight her own matriarch Manon to remain caregiver to an expanded brood, she’s forced to fight her own body up to and then beyond its limits to provide for them; she fights for her place as a mother in deteriorating familial conditions. Beatrice is the Ultimate Fighting Mother. In fact, Starling shows her fighting the entire regime of her secret kind to become Mother Champion. In what way? One word. Clytemnestra. (What follows is only my excitable interpretation of the text).
As of writing this, the cover I want to discuss hasn’t been added to Goodreads yet. It’s this one in the UK: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/48534... . Caitlin Starling says she ‘screamed with delight’ when she saw ‘Bat Lady’ (‘La Femme Chauve-Souris’) by Albert Joseph Pénot on the UK cover for ‘Milkteeth’, courtesy of Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House. I did too, and not just because I’m true-blue for Starling, but because this cover calls to me from Greek and Roman Classical myth and literature, and it set my little classicist heart palpitating. Let me explain. It’s all about the Erinyes for me. They were the ancient goddesses of retribution (also called the Eumenides, and perhaps most familiar to Western culture as the Furies), whose specific purpose was inflicting their wrath upon perpetrators of matricide and patricide, birthed as they were from drops of Ouranos’s (the sky's) blood spilled by his son Cronos.
Classical writers like Virgil give them snakes in their hair and wings. One of their most recognisable manifestations is in the dramatist Aeschylus’s trilogy of Greek tragedies featuring the murder of Clytemnestra by her son. The final play, Aeschylus - The Eumenides, sees the Furies relentlessly hunting down the son Orestes to punish him for spilling his mother's blood. I guarantee you’ll have seen – somewhere in the collective consciousness – images of it. Search for paintings depicting this moment from Aeschylus, and you’ll see why I screamed with delight upon seeing the ‘Milkteeth’ cover.
In an image search for ‘Orestes pursued by the Furies’, you’ll see umpteen artists' renderings; I would like to suggest that all of these are visible/readable in the ‘Milkteeth’ cover. The absolute epitome of the Erinyes full-frenzy is the best-known painting by Bouguereau from 1862: https://artsandculture.google.com/ass... . Looking at Tisiphone – the Erinys on the right of the image (I'd suggest that she's the active figure in the framing), I see her as a direct progenitor of Pénot's Bat Lady, whom the book cover presents to us as manifestation of Beatrice. (Bouguereau and Pénot were both fin-de-siècle French Academic painters, Bouguereau thirty years' antecedent to Pénot.) Why am I spending my time discussing paintings? Because the impact the book had upon me was radically influenced by the line directly drawn from ‘La Femme Chauve-Souris’ back to a retributive Bouguereau Tisiphone.
There’s a fundamental visual throwback in the bare breast and upturned arms, the nigh-translucent skin tone, the marvellously accentuated abdomen with its cinched waist and linea alba and obliques. Look longer and it's in the delineated pectorals and biceps, the articulated wrists, knuckles and fingers; look at Tisiphone's hair full of snakes and how it's inherited in La Femme's snake-like furls of hair. It's Tisiphone's robe slung over her shoulder in the approximation of wings, the line outflowing from her elbow echoed in the line of La Femme's wings and elbows. Finally, it's the shaded convex of the left hip and thigh, caused by the principal replication of pose: the highlighted raised right knee cocked forwards, and what this symbolises: this is the female form in flight (clock Tisiphone's left foot in the air behind her, and the second toe of her right foot just glancing upon the ground – she’s flying, not standing). And this isn’t Cupid’s-wings romantic flight, this is flight towards the fight, for Tisiphone, for La Femme, and for Beatrice.
At the forefront of my mind is the fact that Clytemnestra is right there in Bouguereau's quintessential portrayal: the dagger's between the breasts from which she suckled Orestes, bloodstain spreading, and her figure exaggeratedly shrouded in earnestly flamboyant scarlet fabric. She’s clutched in the arms of the Furies, floating behind her son. All three Erinyes point at Clytemnestra. The light source is aimed at her bare throat, body collapsed against the Erinys Alecto in a dead weight. Here is the dead mother. Here is the Fury taking retribution for her death. Here is Beatrice, dead but not dead. By the end of the novel, she is her own Fury, taking retribution on behalf of all mothering. Remember I said how all the main female characters fulfil the role of mother and fulfil the role of subverter? This is where those roles, fighting against the decaying family unit, are vindicated. Mothering is subversive, but it is worthful. Beatrice on the Michael Joseph cover embodies Mother Retribution.
Sadly, my reading of the text is entirely absent from the American Macmillan cover, which features a High Renaissance mother and child painting, covered in bloodspill (is the original image a version of the Madonna della Seggiola by Raphael?): https://us.macmillan.com/books/978125... . That cover has more in common with Owen Corrigan’s cover design for the hallucinatory ‘The Starving Saints’, which directly precedes ‘Milkteeth’ and which was my top book of last year. It exemplifies how Starling deals in elements. For her, they are, inexhaustively: air, water, honey, blood. ‘Milkteeth’ is a novel about women bleeding (Alice Cooper, this is where you come in); blood, blood, and more blood… What better symbolism for motherhood, for the uterus, for the placenta, for birthing, than all the blood on naked skin, clotting on hands and mouths and faces, gushing from necks, from embracing arms, from nipples (despite the fact that Beatrice tell us, ‘They were tender creatures, my brood’).
‘The Starving Saints’ and ‘Milkteeth’ make a phenomenal duo. For those who haven’t read 'The Starving Saints', I'll not spoil anything, but it's there in the two titles - 'starving' and 'milking' (‘Her hunger swells beyond control’). Thinking about what the characters in each book hunger for/eat, highlights the way in which the two can be read as a pair. We can also ask, is Beatrice consumed by motherhood?
Furthermore, this is a novel about how women’s bodies change: ‘her body alters, betraying its purpose. And the careful boundaries of her existence begin to dissolve.’ This taps into another of Starling’s recurrent themes, loss of self. It’s central to all her novels (distinctly, 'The Starving Saints'). Here, Starling explicitly affirms that motherhood is the cause of loss-of-self. When Beatrice faces her mortal son, her reaction is: ‘I did not appreciate the reminder of my previous mortality. I did not want to think about the life before the transformation. I was not the same creature, did not think the same way, did not experience existence in anything like what I had before’. At the end of the novel, Beatrice does not inhabit the same body she did at its opening. Her mortal body also changed during human pregnancy and childbirth; then during the transformational years of being a fledgeling vampire, to her incarnation as a broodmother, and finally, the form she assumes by the novel’s close.
Medical distress, mothering, subversion, hunger, retribution, and transformation of self. All of this in one story, Beatrice’s story. And that title! An invitation to consider the fact that there is no infant milk in this reality. Only blood. Now, as Beatrice says at the novel’s close: ‘So here. My story. All of it, complete. All of it for you. Are you afraid?’
My wild thanks to Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House for an eARC through NetGalley.
The opening scene of ‘Milkteeth’ has been seen before; it’s Louis sucking at Lestat’s wrist. But with Starling, it’s more desperate, dirtier, darker. There’re no frills: ‘[She bares] her teeth, and oh, yes, she does have teeth. They are sharp little syringes in her mouth. They have pierced through her gums and shredded her lips.’ It’s Bella hunting her first human and being stopped by her sire, Edward. But there’s no romanticism, only dynamism: ‘She eats and eats and is halfway into his ribcage [...] And through it all, the begging, sobbing voice: “Luisa, Lu, stop, fuck, fuck, you can’t eat him! You need to eat me!”’ Yep – Starling’s vampires have to drink vampire blood in their infanthood and Starling’s vampire babies run the risk of ghoulification if they don’t follow the foremost rule: ‘a vampire drinks, a ghoul devours.’
Starling says she had to ask herself, ‘just how directly did I want to yell about historical wetnursing?’ And while spiralling about the social and physical implications during the worldbuilding for this novel, she asked herself, ‘What if breastfeeding vampires?’ Hence, a totally new entry on a fresh page in the canon of vampire lore: broodmothers. Broodmothers like Beatrice, our protagonist, who calls herself ‘grotesque’ and ‘self-pitying’, a ‘frustrated beast’.
What can I say about her? Beatrice made me feel physically sick. There’s only a handful of books that have given me that genuine reflex (Rachel Harrison and Elliott Gish, I’m looking at you), and because Starling speaks as Beatrice in first-person POV using second-person direct address, the intellectual (and physical) impact of her speaking to you in the position of one of her beloved infant brood, is much more immediate and affecting.
Broodmothers are rare and unique. Beatrice wonders if her broodmother blood is like Christ’s blood, who had ‘suckled and nursed’ mortals from the spear wound in his side, which ‘might as well have been an oozing nipple.’ She says ‘[raising] my brood was what I did because I was made for it.’ Yet we jump in at the point with her where ‘[it] was not enough to simply bleed for them.’ No. Because Caitlin Starling’s preoccupation writing this one was ‘just what would happen if your vampire situationship ate your kidneys.’
And – typical Starling – beyond eating kidneys, there’s also surgery-whilst-conscious, homeschooling anatomy lessons with actual pieces of anatomy, and a kind of flaying: ‘Together, we have learned so much about anatomy. All my formal understanding of the body has come from you.’ Now! As we know, Starling writes minutely detailed, accurate descriptions of gore, so I’d strongly recommend not eating whilst reading!
Centrally, the plot revolves around Medicine with a capital M. Thematically, there’s wetnursing, yes, but it’s eclipsed by Beatrice’s desperate need to discover what it is that’s happening to her body as it transforms under her craving for not blood but flesh, something no ‘ordinary’ vampire should feel. Through Medicine, Beatrice meets Dr Bajracharya just as (she tell us) she's 'teetering on the edge', then she lurches self-destructively into a severe case of Positive Transference. Something like the doctor-as-god complex gets funnelled into the mix as the two women search for the means to ease Beatrice's distress over the changes in her body apparently triggered by the addition of a third nursling to her brood, and one - at that - who is perilously close to ghoulism.
Medical distress is a note often struck in Caitlin Starling’s writing. From fraught Margaret at the cloistered hospital in The Graceview Patient to Beatrice’s acute ‘health’ concerns within her suffocating basement lair, we see that Starling almost always places the protagonist’s anguish over their body within a confined, claustrophobic environment. Last year, we had all the bodily distress within the fortifications of besieged Aymar Castle in The Starving Saints, where everybody along with Phosyne seemed to undergo some type of monstrous metamorphosis, and sense-of-self was as much under siege as was the city. The first Caitlin Starling novel I read was The Luminous Dead, and you couldn’t get more medically smothering than Gyre wearing her total-life-support underwater suit whilst caving, and her surface controller blithely dosing her with drugs through its mechanisms.
It's pivotal to note that, in Beatrice and Bajracharya’s Medical coupling, both patient and doctor are female. And I think it's more than the reliable Sapphic element that we expect from Starling. (There's a wormhole here about the current gender health gap when women who seek medical answers about their own bodies come up against the Male-by-Default system, but I’ve already gone there in my review of Gentle Things: The Chilling Historical Fiction Novel Full of Secrets and Suspense by Danielle Giles). There's a whole web of female-to-female relationships that radiate out from Beatrice at its nucleus, which bear fruitful contemplation. I found that almost all of them can be slotted into a template of mothering. So, 'Milkteeth', as I read it, is a speculation upon the psychology of mothering. Is mothering about nurture or is it about predation? Is mothering’s expectation of care also the expectation of sacrifice (as is literal for the humans in this case)?
Manon symbolises a mother figure who passes her daughter off to a wetnurse, whilst still furnishing them with the necessities of life: clothing, food, a roof over their heads. Beatrice is the wetnurse herself, but she was also a mortal mother (‘I had gone fifty years without thinking about [my mortal son], and now he haunted me’). Bajracharya is the pseudo-mother, with the wisdom and capabilities to aid new mothers in post-partem particulars like lactation. Fortunata might be the precocious daughter, but as she matures, we see that she carries in her the rare physiological genealogy of the broodmother (Fortunata's 'milk-sibling' Lu is the newest of the newborns and seems to awaken this phenomenon in her). Manon can also fit the mother template with Beatrice as her daughter, because she controls when and what Beatrice eats, and when and where Beatrice goes out. Or rather, she thinks she does.
Which leads me on to the next avenue of enquiry: Starling's women as subverters. Beatrice breaks all the rules for broodmothers: she takes a third suckling (never before heard of); she sneaks out of her lair; she (forbiddenly) hunts her own food; she reveals her own kind to humans; she subjects herself to medical examination; she chews instead of sucks... The list goes on! Manon rebels by allowing Beatrice her third dependent; Bajracharya commits more than one act that would see her struck off the Medical Register; and I'll leave it to readers to discover how Fortunata's relationship to another woman (her sire) and Lu's relationship to another woman (her sire) play their subversive parts in Beatrice’s dénouement.
Hence, these women can all be read as mothers and they can all be read as subverters. Consequently, is mothering a subversive act? 'Milkteeth' definitely contextualises its commentary within the dissolution of the family unit - any and all permutations of the family unit are in degeneration. Where is the retribution for the mothers in this scenario? In what position does this degeneration leave Beatrice as the mater? She’s forced to fight her own matriarch Manon to remain caregiver to an expanded brood, she’s forced to fight her own body up to and then beyond its limits to provide for them; she fights for her place as a mother in deteriorating familial conditions. Beatrice is the Ultimate Fighting Mother. In fact, Starling shows her fighting the entire regime of her secret kind to become Mother Champion. In what way? One word. Clytemnestra. (What follows is only my excitable interpretation of the text).
As of writing this, the cover I want to discuss hasn’t been added to Goodreads yet. It’s this one in the UK: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/48534... . Caitlin Starling says she ‘screamed with delight’ when she saw ‘Bat Lady’ (‘La Femme Chauve-Souris’) by Albert Joseph Pénot on the UK cover for ‘Milkteeth’, courtesy of Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House. I did too, and not just because I’m true-blue for Starling, but because this cover calls to me from Greek and Roman Classical myth and literature, and it set my little classicist heart palpitating. Let me explain. It’s all about the Erinyes for me. They were the ancient goddesses of retribution (also called the Eumenides, and perhaps most familiar to Western culture as the Furies), whose specific purpose was inflicting their wrath upon perpetrators of matricide and patricide, birthed as they were from drops of Ouranos’s (the sky's) blood spilled by his son Cronos.
Classical writers like Virgil give them snakes in their hair and wings. One of their most recognisable manifestations is in the dramatist Aeschylus’s trilogy of Greek tragedies featuring the murder of Clytemnestra by her son. The final play, Aeschylus - The Eumenides, sees the Furies relentlessly hunting down the son Orestes to punish him for spilling his mother's blood. I guarantee you’ll have seen – somewhere in the collective consciousness – images of it. Search for paintings depicting this moment from Aeschylus, and you’ll see why I screamed with delight upon seeing the ‘Milkteeth’ cover.
In an image search for ‘Orestes pursued by the Furies’, you’ll see umpteen artists' renderings; I would like to suggest that all of these are visible/readable in the ‘Milkteeth’ cover. The absolute epitome of the Erinyes full-frenzy is the best-known painting by Bouguereau from 1862: https://artsandculture.google.com/ass... . Looking at Tisiphone – the Erinys on the right of the image (I'd suggest that she's the active figure in the framing), I see her as a direct progenitor of Pénot's Bat Lady, whom the book cover presents to us as manifestation of Beatrice. (Bouguereau and Pénot were both fin-de-siècle French Academic painters, Bouguereau thirty years' antecedent to Pénot.) Why am I spending my time discussing paintings? Because the impact the book had upon me was radically influenced by the line directly drawn from ‘La Femme Chauve-Souris’ back to a retributive Bouguereau Tisiphone.
There’s a fundamental visual throwback in the bare breast and upturned arms, the nigh-translucent skin tone, the marvellously accentuated abdomen with its cinched waist and linea alba and obliques. Look longer and it's in the delineated pectorals and biceps, the articulated wrists, knuckles and fingers; look at Tisiphone's hair full of snakes and how it's inherited in La Femme's snake-like furls of hair. It's Tisiphone's robe slung over her shoulder in the approximation of wings, the line outflowing from her elbow echoed in the line of La Femme's wings and elbows. Finally, it's the shaded convex of the left hip and thigh, caused by the principal replication of pose: the highlighted raised right knee cocked forwards, and what this symbolises: this is the female form in flight (clock Tisiphone's left foot in the air behind her, and the second toe of her right foot just glancing upon the ground – she’s flying, not standing). And this isn’t Cupid’s-wings romantic flight, this is flight towards the fight, for Tisiphone, for La Femme, and for Beatrice.
At the forefront of my mind is the fact that Clytemnestra is right there in Bouguereau's quintessential portrayal: the dagger's between the breasts from which she suckled Orestes, bloodstain spreading, and her figure exaggeratedly shrouded in earnestly flamboyant scarlet fabric. She’s clutched in the arms of the Furies, floating behind her son. All three Erinyes point at Clytemnestra. The light source is aimed at her bare throat, body collapsed against the Erinys Alecto in a dead weight. Here is the dead mother. Here is the Fury taking retribution for her death. Here is Beatrice, dead but not dead. By the end of the novel, she is her own Fury, taking retribution on behalf of all mothering. Remember I said how all the main female characters fulfil the role of mother and fulfil the role of subverter? This is where those roles, fighting against the decaying family unit, are vindicated. Mothering is subversive, but it is worthful. Beatrice on the Michael Joseph cover embodies Mother Retribution.
Sadly, my reading of the text is entirely absent from the American Macmillan cover, which features a High Renaissance mother and child painting, covered in bloodspill (is the original image a version of the Madonna della Seggiola by Raphael?): https://us.macmillan.com/books/978125... . That cover has more in common with Owen Corrigan’s cover design for the hallucinatory ‘The Starving Saints’, which directly precedes ‘Milkteeth’ and which was my top book of last year. It exemplifies how Starling deals in elements. For her, they are, inexhaustively: air, water, honey, blood. ‘Milkteeth’ is a novel about women bleeding (Alice Cooper, this is where you come in); blood, blood, and more blood… What better symbolism for motherhood, for the uterus, for the placenta, for birthing, than all the blood on naked skin, clotting on hands and mouths and faces, gushing from necks, from embracing arms, from nipples (despite the fact that Beatrice tell us, ‘They were tender creatures, my brood’).
‘The Starving Saints’ and ‘Milkteeth’ make a phenomenal duo. For those who haven’t read 'The Starving Saints', I'll not spoil anything, but it's there in the two titles - 'starving' and 'milking' (‘Her hunger swells beyond control’). Thinking about what the characters in each book hunger for/eat, highlights the way in which the two can be read as a pair. We can also ask, is Beatrice consumed by motherhood?
Furthermore, this is a novel about how women’s bodies change: ‘her body alters, betraying its purpose. And the careful boundaries of her existence begin to dissolve.’ This taps into another of Starling’s recurrent themes, loss of self. It’s central to all her novels (distinctly, 'The Starving Saints'). Here, Starling explicitly affirms that motherhood is the cause of loss-of-self. When Beatrice faces her mortal son, her reaction is: ‘I did not appreciate the reminder of my previous mortality. I did not want to think about the life before the transformation. I was not the same creature, did not think the same way, did not experience existence in anything like what I had before’. At the end of the novel, Beatrice does not inhabit the same body she did at its opening. Her mortal body also changed during human pregnancy and childbirth; then during the transformational years of being a fledgeling vampire, to her incarnation as a broodmother, and finally, the form she assumes by the novel’s close.
Medical distress, mothering, subversion, hunger, retribution, and transformation of self. All of this in one story, Beatrice’s story. And that title! An invitation to consider the fact that there is no infant milk in this reality. Only blood. Now, as Beatrice says at the novel’s close: ‘So here. My story. All of it, complete. All of it for you. Are you afraid?’
My wild thanks to Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House for an eARC through NetGalley.
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