This feels like a mean review to write.
A Dream of Saints is indie queer fiction with, as far as I can tell, not really much in terms of longform discussion or reviews. It isn’t like I run a particularly popular blog, so this will hardly tank the book’s burgeoning reputation, but writing a negative review of a work like this feels heartless all the same.
I’d seen the author advertise this a few times on Bluesky and thought I should pick it up – it’s inexpensive and not the kind of thing I’d normally read, so all the better to expand my horizons and support an indie author. In the end, well, at least it only took a few hours to read.
Bartholomew Barnes is unloved, trapped in a dying village, and desperate to escape. He goes on a journey with a local priest to seek a rare flower whose use in potion-making allows one to commune with the saint. They argue, and, overcome with frustration, Bartholomew murders him. He disposes of the body and escapes, winding up on a barge run by a smuggler, who sees him to a nearby town where his (the smuggler’s) family lives. From here, the story rapidly descends into a check-the-box of everything you would expect to see in online discussions spitballing what they’d like to see included in queer folk horror. Evil church! Citizens in its thrall even in the face of its naked evil! Visceral body horror transformations! Ancient conflict between the church and nature!
(Could you call this folk horror? I’m not particularly good with genre categorisation.)
The central dynamic is between Bartholomew and Boris, the smuggler’s son. There’s instant mutual attraction (though Boris takes far longer to admit this), and it doesn’t really develop beyond that until the end, when it becomes dramatic symbolic sacrifice that feels entirely unearned. Boris is oddly pure-hearted and forthcoming for the son of a smuggler, particularly considering the other members of his family have also been persecuted by the church. He comes off as an out of touch rich kid the whole time and feels strangely out of place amongst a cast of the downtrodden. Because of that, there’s no actual conflict between him and Bartholomew and the relationship feels fairly weightless. Bartholomew frets at different points about Boris hating him for being gay or for being a druid, but neither of these present an issue in the end – even Bartholomew’s wolf transformation earns brief mild wariness, at most.
This could come down to preferences – whether the conflict in a relationship should come from the parties themselves or from outside forces – but it still leaves me not particularly affected by it. Even if the outside forces are strong – the sacrifice at the end comes from Boris being used as a vessel for the saint of vengeance, and only Bartholomew’s blood will save his soul so he can die in peace – there still should be some level of conflict between them born from themselves. Without arguments or ideological conflicts or anything in that vein, nothing ever feels earned to me.
The villains – church inquisitors by way of the SS, thanks to their shiny leather outfits – also don’t feel very threatening simply because they are so threatening. It’s every villain signifier at once, an over the top amalgam. There are multiple lines or mini-speeches that simply spell out, “I’m just like this bad thing in real life.” Templar Matthias, our main villain, also feels like there’s sort of a problematic would or evil sexyman thing going on, but again, the over the top amalgam – I love a cartoonishly evil bastard too, but I don’t know… it’s signalled too much. Don’t wink at me like that! I can tell he’s the author’s problematic would, he doesn’t need to be mine, too.
(I’m barred from villain criticism at this point as a newly-formed Maleagant stan. You can’t get much more generic villain than him, right down to the name. Even so!)
Also, while most of the story takes place in the village and focuses on Bartholomew and Boris’ blossoming relationship and the awakening of Bartholomew’s powers as a druid, towards the end it all escalates very quickly with Bartholomew shipped off to the church/military academy in Veneratus as a pawn by Matthias, Boris becoming a vector for a saint, grand final fight and sacrifice, etc. I think the story would need to be substantially longer for this part to not feel rushed and messy.
(As an aside: nobody likes a pedant who points out when a word is closely tied to real-world religion, geography, etc and is therefore rendered nonsensical in fantasy, but the repeated use of “gothic” as a descriptor for the aesthetics of Veneratus felt cheap.)
Overall, everything just felt far too… on the nose? Straightfoward? Literal? The exact word I’m trying to use escapes me, which I realise hardly comes off well in a critical review! The voice of the prose is inconsistent in a way that reads as amateurish – if it were more inconsistent, it would come off as a stylistic choice (not necessarily one I would like, but it would at least feel intentional), and if it were less so then, well, it’s simply well-written and tightly edited on that front. As it is, there is a vague loftiness to it all which regularly briefly falls away for moments of Marvel-like banter, the aforementioned villain speeches, or what I would describe as supportive preaching – such as Amaneth, a druid woman, telling a young child “never let anyone pathologize your emotions.” It’s speaking more to the reader than anything – an unrestrained impulse.
I understand why works like this exist, I really do, but I think this level of overtness never will be for me. It doesn’t make me feel seen or understood, it makes me feel like a child being patronisingly reassured. The dedication makes mention that it’s “for every queer whose story was too tragic, too horrifying, too messy for mainstream consumption”, but it kind of isn’t any of those things. It’s very straightfowardly good-and-evil – everyone Bartholomew kills is cartoonishly evil, save for a few unnamed students towards the end (though being students of the empire implicates them anyway), the romance between him and Boris is quite pure, for lack of a better term, and the story ends on an alternative timeline/time loop that implies things will go better this time and a happy ending will occur. The surrounding circumstances are somewhat messy, but the queers themselves are pretty squeaky clean – good-hearted victims doling out righteous vengeance. When I hear messy queers, I think queer characters who aren’t good people even after considering mitigating circumstances. I don’t know, is this how it’s usually done? Am I out of touch?
Now, this may come in part from the story clearly leaning on the abuse of the church, and for all I am lifelong Reddit atheist I have never been subject any religiously-motivated persecution. I like JRPGs, I have no qualms about stories about the church being evil, but they are very much the realm of pure fantasy to me – there’s no personal pain of mine they connect to. Perhaps it makes it feel too far away for any of this to feel impactful, and it would fare much better with readers who have had those kinds of experiences.
It feels like every few paragraphs I’m just repeating myself at this point. Ultimately, it didn’t work for me on any front. It’s something of an unrestrained id of a book – which I can hardly condemn with my own eternally secret unrestrained id projects, but well, I guess the author’s id and mine don’t particularly mesh. Though there isn’t really anything I would praise about it, it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever read. That’s about all I can muster. Sorry.
For all my complaints, though, I do think there was a solid idea in here, just unable to be realised. I’ll check back in on the author in a few years and see how they’ve developed from here.