“You know, I don’t buy into the notion of conflicting emotions. When you get to be our age, you can hold three or four or five feelings about the same thing at once. They don’t contradict one another—they blend together.”
“Like mud,” said Crow.
“Or black ink, or bright light. All useful in varying contexts. Don’t denigrate mud, either. You can build houses with it.”

Sometimes it’s the adventure vs the destination and that’s the case for Carrion Saints.

This kinda gave me The Glass City & Our Infinite Fates vibes because we’re dealing with immortals that are centuries old (and planning to live centuries more if there are enough magical cores to consume ).

Maybe because the plot wasn’t rushed and the dialogue felt cunning against the cool world building – it sort of felt like this would be liked by Susanna Clarke fans as well.

This was the top pick via Team Fantasy Book Critic for SPFBO 11 semi-finals.

And for the character arc of Magnolia, I understand why they wanted others to read it as well. She’s the kinda character that sucks out the oxygen in the room. Think– the Jim Carry of antagonists- or in this case, monsters. You can’t help but to kinda love her even though most of the book, I was questioning how many red flags I’d allow for it.

This book is in six parts and each part felt like a proper short story. That being said- at 589 pages, there were some parts where it dragged in repetitive inner thoughts or rehashing of recent plot movements. I wished it was at least a 100 pages shorter. Also, there were times I felt the magic transitions were too elusive and I was unable to mentally visualize the transitions.

That being said- I was impressed by the folk-lore vibes in this book and grateful to read it.

If you love the slowest of burns and love is love is loves is love is your book mood, Hiyodori has an impressive catalog already in these categories.

Favorite Quote:

“Eventually I went from thinking Why me? to thinking Why not me? One’s as unanswerable as the other, and I like the sound of it better.”

“If you’re lucky, life is mostly made up of quiet moments. The ones you have to work to remember. The work is worthwhile, I think, especially for you.”

The world is slowly dying, and saints and monsters are here to help. Or eat everyone. Or both. Nobody is really sure, but the immortal creatures of Carrion Saints have their own opinions on it. Saints like Crow choose to feed on magical human cores by having them freely offered in exchange for service, whereas monsters like Magnolia kill humans and steal their cores. Of course they are enemies and this means that the taciturn, traumatized and human-protecting Crow and the effervescent, talkative and mind-controlling Magnolia would never end up on an adventure together across the world, right? Wrong, Crow tried to kill Magnolia and got mind controlled so now they’re hanging out against her will.

Carrion Saints is a book which takes several turns. It starts out seeming like a monster hunting story about a godlike figure who is dedicated to serving humanity, then becomes an ethical push and pull between her and a monster who doesn’t care about other people, with a series of questions about which of them will compromise their ideology first. Then it becomes an adventure to the end of the world with a really nonstandard romance. To me, these worked to different degrees and I think the romance worked the best. When it developed, it felt really natural and interesting, and I totally bought it as having grown from all the things that came before it. They had interesting chemistry and a complex relationship and it was fun to see that additional element added onto it.

I spent a lot of the book feeling like I was watching an anime. The visuals of the world with its discoloured skies filled with weird creatures called aerials, and its scattered human settlements that are all visually different, with its landscapes dripping history and covered over with years of decay, with its characters with moveable wings or who were severed heads or apparitional magi, all felt to me like they would fit really well into this medium. I felt like the six parts of the book were six different three-episode arcs, related to and leading into one another but mostly distinct, with side characters that don’t return as we follow just the two main characters on their journey. Almost every section ends with an explicit nod to the place they’re going next or the goal they’ll have, like talking casually about Crow’s hometown before going there in the next part, seeing a broken-down machina in a lake before going to see the automagi who have a functional one. It felt a bit like author Hiyadori was winking at the camera and saying “Next time on Carrion Saints…” It made for a really different narrative structure, but also made it feel more like a series of novellas than a novel to me, because though themes and ideas obviously recur throughout, the early scenes especially felt pretty disconnected from a sense of a broader narrative for me.

The other thing that felt disconnecting for me was Crow’s PoV, which was very distant. Of course that’s a stylistic choice that I assume was made intentionally and so your mileage may vary, but it often didn’t totally work for me because I felt like even though she was the main character, I regularly didn’t know what Crow was thinking or feeling. There were a few points where she hides information about her intentions from the audience, which doesn’t bother me because I do love an unreliable narrator, but there were a few other parts where she hides information about her past and her relationships that didn’t hit as totally authentic because I couldn’t see why she wouldn’t have been thinking of them at all. The explanation that Magnolia can sometimes read her mind is strong enough to let some of her thoughts go unreported, but there were some pieces of information concealed until quite late in the book that I think would have really helped me connect with the story better if they had appeared in the first quarter rather than the last. Part of this is also that the first half of the book is longer than I would like and spends a lot of time on conversations where similar information and ideas are repeated several times. Pacing-wise, each section/arc of the book has a really long denouement as well, and speaking as someone who isn’t into that much action to begin with, for me I felt the tension deflating every time something dramatic happened and then there were three or four chapters of Crow and Magnolia talking about what the consequences were.

I’m sure that a lot of readers will really appreciate the slower paced, more thoughtful and introspective approach to narrative, but for me I felt like the book really didn’t start to pick up speed until the last two sections. That was where I started to get interested in the characters’ relationships and motivations because it was where, for me, it started to be clear what those were. I will say that a lot of things from earlier in the book do pay off in the last quarter, so from that perspective it’s set up very well, and I don’t think that Carrion Saints is too long so much as I think that it takes too long to find its focus. Something that I found myself wishing throughout was that there were just a few more characters; especially if there could have been another saint character to parallel Crow with, since we’re told a lot about saints but we don’t meet any except for the one we’re told throughout the book is atypical.

I really do like a lot of things about Carrion Saints; I think the world is really original and interesting, and I love it when immortal characters are written as having emotional responses and reasoning that doesn’t match our own, because of course they do. The romance worked really well for me because of that, and though characters so long-lived are not prone to change, the way they do both change over the course of the book feels very satisfying. Parts of it feel a bit like Jeff VanderMeer and parts of it feel a bit some of the anime I watched in the late 2000s, and so who is also somewhere in that intersection and wants to see something that sits down and thinks about its themes very thoroughly is really going to vibe with this one.

I finished reading right after Noel and when I sat down to write my review, I was tempted to just make “What Noel said” my whole review because we had very similar reading experiences. I also struggled with the first half of the book, but I was glad I kept reading for the second half. And like Noel, once I began envisioning the book as an anime, I felt like I liked it much better.

Carrion Saints is very episodic. Immortal monster-hunter Crow ends up trapped in a relationship with immortal monster Magnolia, who as a severed head with the ability to grow tree-like roots has been stuck in the same place for eternity and wants somebody to take her to see the world. I will admit that I never got over being a little squicked by the roots growing out of Magnolia’s neck. But then, she’s a monster, so I feel like I was probably supposed to feel a little ick about her.

I honestly wish a lot more of this “see the world” point had been made early on, because I feel like the romance marketing set up unreasonable expectations as far as what the focus of the plot would be, and this took me a while to get over. It’s not that the focus isn’t on Magnolia and Crow and their developing relationship (which I’m still not sure can be called a romance, really, more a “companionship”), but as a romance reader, I expected more plot points that hinged on the characters’ changing emotions. (And considering their beginning as actual enemies, I thought that bringing a romance out of that would be a big job. I read dark romance, but the way Magnolia manipulates and controls Crow is a very large hurdle to jump, IMO.)

My biggest problem was with Crow, and I think this problem could have been cleared up if at the beginning, we were given some of the information and context revealed only at the end. This information makes everything make a lot more sense. Crow doesn’t know it herself until the ending, but with only the most subtle of reader clues provided along the way, most of Crow’s early behavior feels like the author is pulling punches for no reason, or for purely plot reasons. I know there’s an argument that goes around about why it’s ok for protagonists to be passive, but Crow is supposed to be a super-powerful immortal monster hunter. By about halfway through the book, whenever Crow would say how much she hated Magnolia and what violence she wanted to do to her, I just kind of stopped believing her. Not because I felt like Crow was hiding her real motives or because she had changed, but because I felt like I had been hoping for something to happen–expecting it, based on what Crow was telling us–and had the rug pulled out from under my feet too many times. This made the first half of the book feel too long.

Happily, this turned around in the second half, which felt like it had more of a connecting throughline and a more enjoyable (to me) philosophical tone. The slowly dying world Crow and Magnolia travel through is eerie and beautiful, my favorite part of the book. And as I said, once I began to see these scenes spooling out in my mind like an anime, everything made a lot more sense. Also, Hiyodori has a real talent for dialogue, and I found myself chuckling about some of Crow and Magnolia’s interactions—somewhat guiltily, since the power dynamic didn’t stop making me uneasy. (To be clear, I think I was supposed to be uneasy about it, and that’s not a criticism.) Many times, I also found myself reading for the excellence of the writing alone.

I think if I had been able to understand Crow a little more, emotionally speaking, in the first half of the book, I would have liked the book more. As it stands, I’m glad I kept reading. It’s a book I’ll think about for a longer time, because it raised disturbing and probably unanswerable questions about power in relationships and what makes a monster and what makes a hero. But for me, it was just missing that piece of emotional connection I needed to really invest in the characters and their relationship.

Legends are much more delightful with distance.

Carrion Saints is unlike most books I’ve read, but it did put me in mind of lore-rich videogames like Elden Ring, with a truly vast world that feels thought-out and interconnected. By no means cozy in the traditional sense, its nonetheless a book with a stable, steady pace that’s uninterested in conforming to a traditional three-act structure and that rarely prioritizes tension. As my fellow judges have noted, it’s episodic, and I’d most recommend it to readers who enjoy episodic storytelling. In a rare anti-recommendation, I would suggest that, despite the marketing, category Romance readers are unlikely to find what they expect or look for from a Romance in Carrion Saints. However, if you’re a fan of the TV show Hannibal, you may enjoy the dynamic of the two leads.

Hiyodori’s Carrion Saints is the story of two immortals wandering a dying world as they contemplate the difference between good and evil, as well as the very personal internal forces that bind us to our paths. The protagonist, Crow, is a saint–a variety of being popularly associated with Good. When the story opens, Crow is on a mission to destroy the last Great Adversary of mankind–a monster who takes the form of a disembodied head and who is trapped on a hillside above a village. The monster–Magnolia–proves more powerful than Crow expected. When Magnolia defeats Crow, she not only breaks free from the hillside, but takes control of her, forcing the saint to journey with her and do her bidding. As Crow is forced to work for Magnolia, their conversations reveal key worldbuilding elements. The most significant of these elements is the difference between saints and monsters. Each type of entity feeds on magical “cores” that exist within certain humans (as well as other monsters and saints). While monsters violently and non-consensually extract cores, saints consensually remove cores from sworn companions. Crow herself is, perhaps, one of the most rigidly moral saints that Magnolia has met. Crow travels the world protecting humans from monsters and hasn’t taken a sworn companion since the tragic death of her last one many years prior. Although saints do feed off cores, they are also bound by magical logic to honour a sworn companion’s choice to voluntarily tie themselves to a saint. While there is a loose, overarching plot, each of the novel’s parts tends to focus on the particular village or location in which Magnolia and Crow find themselves. Over the course of their travels, Crow expresses a desire to free herself from Magnolia’s spiteful and often abusive control, but rarely acts on this desire when presented with the opportunity.

Prose is incredibly important to me–especially in the context of a writing competition–and Carrion Saints has gorgeous and evocative prose. The sweeping yet specific descriptions of the natural environment really bring Hiyodori’s world to life, and her reflections on landscape impressed me. In dialogue, both Crow and Magnolia also have very distinct voices–Magnolia bratty and modern, and Crow more ethereal. There are banger lines (and banter) throughout, and I was spoiled for choice when selecting a quotation to include in my review. Mood and tone are also critical to how Carrion Saints unspools, and I’d argue with anyone that Hiyodori has absolute command over both. There’s a melancholic, elegiac quality to the atmosphere that looms over and characterizes each of the varied environments and locations that Crow and Magnolia travel to. In Carrion Saints the world is ending, and the reader feels it. There’s a distinct vision behind the novel–this is a book that, despite its episodic structure, is much more than a series of pre-selected tropes slapped together. At a line level, it’s clear Hiyodori is a skilled, intentional writer–something I expect from a SPFBO finalist.

Structurally, I did have issues with Carrion Saints. Throughout, I couldn’t help but feel it was much longer and more repetitive than it needed to be, and unfortunately this impacts many of the book’s other aspects (character, theme, etc). In many ways, the philosophical underpinnings of the book are its Achilles heel, since they often suggest depth without ultimately being as profound as the exquisiteness of the world feels, and because until the end, those underpinnings are revisited at about the same level of depth again and again. Aside from enchanting descriptions of the physical world, the focus of Carrion Saints is really on using the conversations between Crow and Magnolia to explore both worldbuilding and the book’s own internal philosophical problems. First and foremost of these is the question of the differences and similarities between saints and monsters. In fiction, these kinds of questions tend to be powerful for the reader insofar as they reflect or relate to real-world questions and problems. Certainly, the differences between heroes and monsters (or villains)–and who gets to be called what–is a meaningful field of study (my own in fact!). Yet in Carrion Saints the parameters that help define “monster” and “hero” largely answer the question themselves–saints consensually feed and monsters don’t (with some rare counter examples that we’re told about late in the novel, but which we don’t see on page). The labels of “monster” and “saint” seem to be either chosen or innate–they aren’t externally imposed–removing the possible relevance to questions of how humans brutalize one another through the reduction of individuals (or marginalized groups) to monsters and heroes. Given that fact, the question becomes more of an analysis of predation–is predation ever morally just, even when it’s necessary? Since immortals don’t exist in the real world, it seems to apply most to whether it’s ever morally just to eat animals, but I’m unsure that was the intention, and if it was, the answers provided are opaque. Key information that might change our perspective–or Crow’s–is also withheld for longer than seems ideal, so that it often feels like the book is spinning its wheels, waiting to get past its filler episodes to juicier character moments. It’s not that every book about an immortal preying on humans needs to engage with these questions to work–some of my favourites really don’t–but Carrion Saints directly presents itself as a book that is interested in a more philosophical treatment of the topic.

In terms of character, I had a very solid feel for Magnolia, who leaps off the page. She’s unquestionably irritating, petty, small-minded, and manipulative–an exceptionally unlikable person who’s nonetheless well-drawn and realistic (she even reminds me of people I’ve known). To be clear, despite disliking Magnolia on a personal level, I say all of this in praise of her construction as a character. It’s naturally very easy for me to root for an abuse victim, especially when the abuser is someone like Magnolia. There’s also a lot of nuance to Hiyodori’s depiction of someone who’s experienced her own trauma, later participating in abuse herself–a cycle of violence all too common and familiar. Crow, in contrast, is retiring and secretive–even from the reader. I never disliked Crow, but I did feel that she came across much less powerfully than Magnolia, and much of that is to do with Hiyodori’s choice to withhold Crow’s emotional motivations until the conclusion of the novel. I couldn’t help but feel as though this was to the book’s detriment, since it kept me at an emotional distance from her, without much of a payoff in terms of a twist or reveal. On the surface, the text is more interested in the debate over monstrosity and sainthood (in terms of their in-world meanings, at least), than it is in Crow or Magnolia’s personal journeys. This wouldn’t be an issue, except that my impression is that beneath the surface, the book is intended to be about how the characters’ visions of themselves conform to reality. Since we lack critical pieces of worldbuilding information to do with saints, as well as Crow’s backstory, it’s challenging to invest emotionally for most of the book and I did find myself lacking much motivation to pick the book back up, even if a previous section had wowed me with its visual acumen. That said, when those hooks do at last sink in, they sink in deep. The last of Carrion Saints’ six parts is powerful, compelling, and does a lot to enrich Crow as a character.

I find stories about immortals hit or miss. At their best, they communicate something about grief and our relationship to our own mortality. I think Carrion Saints does a fantastic job of capturing the right mood in terms of these themes, and there’s a layer of solastalgia to the work that I found especially moving, yet I did want more from it at the same time. I’m very grateful that SPFBO gave me the kick up the pants I needed to finally read some of Hiyodori’s work, which has been on my TBR since SPFBO9! Although I had some qualms, I want to emphasize that I was impressed by Hiyodori’s skill overall and that there’s much here that really works. If Carrion Saints were broken up into novellas, short stories, or were tightened up as a novel, I feel it would be even stronger. If you’re a fan of episodic storytelling, Elden Ring, or the relationship between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter (by way of The Last Unicorn), I recommend checking out Carrion Saints.