{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review:
Three Black Lantern Publishing Novels by Caitlin Starling
by Karen S. Wiesner
Beware spoilers!
In the past, I've reviewed several other offerings from Caitlin Starling on this blog. Do a search of her name to find them, if you're interested. My reviews of this author's work tend to run the gamut in terms of whether I enjoy the material or not. This particular review of three separate books highlights the same situation.
Starling's last big release was The Graceview Patient in late 2025, so I went looking for anything new from her. I discovered she has a brand new horror coming out from St. Martin's Press in October 2026 called Milkteeth about a vampire broodmother, which should be interesting. This upcoming book is touted on the author's website, as well as the publisher's, and it's already available for preorder in multiple formats on distributor websites. In the process of discovering this welcome news, I stumbled upon several "new" books with Starling's name on them that are all published by Black Lantern Publishing instead of the big publisher(s) most of her other publicized books are released by.
I spent far too much time trying to find out more about Black Lantern Publishing (not to be confused with Black Lantern Books, which is a completely different thing) and Starling's association with them. All I could dig up was that Black Lantern Publishing is/was(?) an online art and literary journal which publishes macabre offerings--a perfect fit for Starling. In any case, they're listed as the publisher for three Starling books I came upon that I'd never heard of before and that are only published as ebooks (that I've been able to ascertain anyway) and not reliably available. For instance, one of them isn't for sale at all from Amazon, for a reason I couldn't locate. I guess the background behind these three books will remain a mystery because the author hasn't put any of them on her personal website (as of this writing in June 2026). Maybe they're old books that her current, big publisher has allowed to be published or reissued by a small press as long as she doesn't put or promote them with her other sanctioned work released by them. I don't know. But it's frustrating not to be able to find more about the origin of these particular stories. Anyway, given that, in general, I'm a fan of this author, I bought all three at once.
The first one I read, Beneath Winter Lake, was purchased from Apple Media Services. In this horror novel released December 2025, a climatologist is studying Winter Lake in Hawthorn's Rest when the lake suddenly freezes solid and the settlement that drowned more than a century ago rises to the surface. The dead from the village start taking the current townsfolk that share its ancestry. Apparently, this situation reoccurs every 40 years.
There was nothing particularly wrong with this book--technically it was decently written yet somehow everything about it felt generic to me. Nothing resonated with me, not characters, plot, nor setting. I also didn't find it scary.
The second, The Deadlight Motel, is an "eldritch horror" novel and was also published in December 2025 by Black Lantern Publishing. I got it from Amazon as a Kindle ebook (I don't think print or audio editions are available for it). In this (again, not at all frightening) story, a motel that's treated almost like it's human appears only to those who hide guilty secrets and it feeds on them.
I had the same problem with this story as the first. I call these "eh" books--not badly written but essentially generic. As with Beneath Winter Lake, my emotional involvement in the story never really kicked in.
Both Beneath Winter Lake and The Deadlight Motel did have what could be considered a mutual saving grace (that didn't actually make them easier to read for me, but hey) that is a Caitlin Starling trademark: Both stories were told with a unique twist. However, the problem for me is that every story I read by this author has a unique twist, and I went into reading both of these expecting that right from the beginning so, in truth, I guessed what each twist would be almost exactly from the very first chapters. Readers who haven't read Starling's work before probably wouldn't have guessed the endings right from the start so there's a potential for more enjoyment than I experienced with either of them.
The third, The Uncrowned, was a political fantasy novel and was published in April 2026 by Black Lantern Publishing. I got it from Amazon as a Kindle ebook (again, I couldn't find a print or audio edition anywhere). This story had an intriguing premise: On the day of his coronation, the crown prince refuses the throne because he's discovered that, within the empire, an entire group of people and their way of life have essentially been erased from history. He intends to right that wrong. But he quickly learns that there's much, much more that he doesn't know and the betrayal and deception go deeper than he originally believed--and when the truth resurfaces, the empire will never again be the same.
I was anticipating the worst, based on my previous two experiences. However, I was gratefully rewarded with the promise of intrigue and the seeds of compelling settings, plot, and characters that could have been a little better drawn. For instance, instead of three-dimensional, Prince Aldric Vane and his aunt were both two-dimensional and, weirdly, in exactly the same way. (I think anyone who reads this story will understand what I mean by that, since the two characters are like gender-opposite reflections of each other.) The secondary characters were, at best, one-dimensional.
As for setting and plot, both were oddly two-dimensional in that readers were given the starkest bare bones of the land the tale is set in, and the conflict that prompted the story had no more and no less than what was required to convey the story. At no point were readers allowed to discover what incited the empire's actions in essentially wiping out the Telvari community the way it did. The characters themselves didn't show the slightest curiosity about that either, which struck me as wrong and unrealistic. It seemed as if they accepted the situation, like it was a done deal, yet here they were single-mindedly involved in a legal battle to correct something that couldn't really ever be made right. Readers were never given the reasons behind all this, nor were the characters' motivations adequately portrayed. They had a goal and those actions took the place of their feelings entirely. Again, this gave them a flat quality that could have instead been heart-rending if only they'd been developed to the fullest.
My biggest problem with the story was that the author wrote it so leanly that every aspect became ravenous for fleshing out. Why would Starling do it this way? I can't fathom. Every single path was a thin, straight line with just a little detail pointing behind to the past, scant focus ahead to consequences, and the present story hogging the whole of the focus. As a result, countless opportunities for richness and depth were squandered. As a reader, I would have given anything for more information and to have gotten the entire tale developed three-dimensionally. It might have been a saga that couldn't be put down. It might have spanned ages in a world so vibrant, readers could see, taste, and smell it all as if they were really there. The plots might have carried much more weight and complexity that would have given them the gravitas they deserved. Fully-fleshed out characters could easily have vied for wider attention from the audience, allowing readers to truly root for them and share every tear shed and every bit of joy in comingled triumph. All of these elements hung there, strangled, just waiting for the breath of life to fulfill them. Instead, we got razor-sharp, cardboard quality. I longed for so much more. Yet the author could still expand into sequels in so many different directions--if she and her publisher were willing.
As is, The Uncrowned is compelling, but I'm ultimately saddened by the loss of something that was so close to moving and capturing me wholly. That said, the ending was nevertheless satisfying for me (despite that I wanted loads more) and I enjoyed the unusual take. It was almost like an early John Grisham novel, only in a fantasy world setting. Every aspect of this story was written as if it was a lawyerly account, with all the behind-the-scenes and courtroom drama you could ever want. In other words, it was cold-blooded and logical, with no room for human frailty or fragility. That worked well here, even given the wasted opportunities for growth beyond the immediate scenario. Maybe some readers would have been put off by that, but I found the moral of the story was told perfectly from that unique, distanced perspective. I also think it was brilliant of the author to remove almost completely the "real life" that you and I know from the setting so the account could be less about comparing it to our world events and history and instead about seeing it on its own, with all the texture, ramifications and consequences that the subject material demanded. I would actually love to revisit these characters and the world they're set in, but I suspect that's not an option--directly due to the "mystery" I mentioned in the third paragraph of this review.
You might want to give the first two books reviewed here a pass unless you're new to the author. Honestly, though, all of them were $3, so under $10 for three ebooks is worthwhile. The Uncrowned was a steal at that price, lack of true depth notwithstanding.
Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of 156 titles and 16 series.
Visit Karen here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/
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