The Saint of Bright Doors is a mesmerizing plunge into the seams of a fractured reality, a world where the present is a dizzying palimpsest of rewritable pasts. While rightly praised for its kaleidoscopic worldbuilding, where elements of fantasy bleed organically into the science fictional, Vajra Chandrasekera’s unsettling novel is also a work of horror in its own right; from the gore-slick ‘devils’ that haunt the protagonist’s waking dreams, to the ever-looming specter of carceral violence for migrants surviving in the slums of the sprawling city-state of Luriat; The Saint of Bright Doors is as beautiful as it is terrifying. The novel’s shadowless lead, Fetter, is an irreverent scion who flees rather than embraces his sanctimonious destiny as the heir to a cult worshipping a chronomancer known as “the Perfect and the Kind”.  

In a story that wanes and waxes between the ordinary and the uncanny, between fantastical flights of imagination to more grounded and seemingly possible encounters between lovers or kin or therapy groups, this reader’s expectations were constantly thwarted to delightful effect. Perhaps the most compelling concept in the book are the “bright doors” alluded to in the title, bewitched portals to parallel worlds that might-have-been or no longer are, where the rude, sinuous shapes known as the “invisible laws and powers” breach into reality to terrorize the few that can perceive them. Overall, I would highly recommend this breathtaking book to readers who embrace complicated queer characters and worlds painted with a palette that ignores genre boundaries.