The Starving Saints draws on conventions of fantasy, folklore, and Gothic fiction. In Celtic and broader European folklore, iron has long been considered to offer protection against fairies (or fae). Folklorist Katharine Briggs catalogued this belief in An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976), connecting iron’s repellent properties to its association with human civilization. In Caitlin Starling’s novel, the Lady and the saints are never explicitly referred to as fairies, but they share this trait of being repelled by iron. Prior to their arrival at the Castle, the Priory requisitions Aymar’s iron to forge incendiary weapons, collecting “every hinge, every pot, and even a fair number of weapons and plows” (11). When the castle lacks iron, it becomes vulnerable to invasion by the Lady and her magic. 

The novel’s treatment of enchanted food draws on equally deep folkloric roots. In Greek myth, Persephone’s consumption of pomegranate seeds bound her to the underworld. In Irish fairy tradition, as documented in W. B. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), eating food offered by the fae trapped mortals in the Otherworld. Starling transposes this motif into a siege setting where starvation renders resistance nearly impossible. Anyone who eats at the Lady’s feast becomes subject to her magical authority. Phosyne’s refusal to eat, even as her body fails, parallels the folkloric principle that accepting a supernatural being’s hospitality means surrendering one’s will. Starling also interweaves other fantasy and folklore tropes in her world-building: The Lady is unable to enter Phosyne’s chamber without an invitation, and Phosyne revealing her name puts her partially under the lady’s sway (many cultures and folklore traditions view a name as part of an individual’s personal power and autonomy). 

The Starving Saints also draws on Gothic tropes. The presence of a frightening, ominous estate or castle (often ancient, isolated, and sprawling) is an almost ubiquitous feature of the Gothic genre and can be traced back to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764). The novel centers around a crumbling, eerie castle where strange and frightening events take place. Throughout the 18th and into the 19th century, other works of Gothic fiction such as The Mysteries of Udolpho utilized a forbidding, remote castle as a setting in which a sheltered heroine often encountered danger. With its sealed towers, subterranean waterways, and secret tunnels, Aymar Castle functions as an archetypal example of the Gothic castle setting. The foreboding atmosphere and secret features of a physical structure also literalize the secrets, repression, and guilt that often haunts individual characters. Physical space mirrors psychological dissolution, with the setting crumbling alongside its inhabitants’ grip on reality. Notably, while the heroines of classic Gothic texts are typically passive, innocent, and vulnerable to male antagonists, Starling constructs a world where powerful and complex female protagonists battle with an equally formidable female adversary. 

Early Gothic novels written by English authors in the 18th and 19th century were typically set outside of Great Britain (often in Italy or Spain) and in earlier, sometimes medieval or pre-Reformation eras. These conventions meant that Gothic novels often represented the Roman Catholic faith (which had become relatively uncommon in England after Henry VIII’s 16th century establishment of the Anglican faith) and sometimes portrayed it as sinister or at least mysterious. Novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk portrayed monasteries and convents as sites of superstition, corruption, torture, and imprisonment. By exploring sinister components of religious adherence and including characters modelled after medieval Catholic traditions (such as the Priory and the Prioress Jacynde), Starling explores and updates the traditional intersection of the Gothic and religion.