All Us Saints
A Novel
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All Us Saints
Narrated by:
Sena Bryer
Buy Now for £14.05
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Narrated by:
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Sena Bryer
“All Us Saints is a gorgeous puzzle-box of a book, with the pieces carved from dread, sex, and secrets. Katherine Packert Burke has inventively inverted the psycho-killer, revealing something new and, once again, shocking.” – Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition Baby
From the author of the "vibrantly, brilliantly alive" (James Frankie Thomas) Still Life, a haunted family reenacts the violent night their lives changed forever.
Exactly 19 years ago, in May of 1992, 17-year-old Roland St. Cloud fatally stabbed his twin sister Edna’s three best friends. The slaying became instant tabloid fodder leading to a bestselling true-crime book and horror movie franchise. Each year on the anniversary of her family’s undoing, Edna reenacts the murders. She is joined by her husband, Roger, the night's definitive chronicler; her younger sister Calla, a failed playwright who spends her days lost in online gaming; her younger brother James and his girlfriend Heather; and her teenage daughter Wren. Together, the St. Cloud family seals the windows and doors of the house and lights a grim candle. After their macabre theatrics there's nothing to do but wait for dawn, talk among themselves, and remember.
All Us Saints is a literary family drama packaged as a two-act play. Behind the curtain, Packert Burke unveils Roland’s childhood as a closeted trans girl in the early 90s and offers a brilliant and scathing commentary on the cisgender gaze.©2026 Katherine Packert Burke (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Burke’s is a twisted, imaginative empathy that subverts the cis gaze and flips the trans-as-monstrous trope by introducing the prurient perception of others before giving us the interiority of Roland himself...Burke insists on letting the villain speak for himself (Grace Byron)
All Us Saints is hardly the first work to critique and analyze the prolific horror trope of the transgender slasher killer, but few have done so with as much courage and creative daring as Burke... Just like the St. Clouds, All Us Saints itself is unsettled and off-kilter but entirely fascinating in its dark vulnerability. (Nic Anstett)
Rather than attempting to temper or equivocate the violence ascribed to us, Burke argues that queer and trans identity is legitimate even in the event of irredeemable harm. It’s not Roland’s transness that leads to the murders, exactly, but they are exacerbated by the crises impacted by that identity: sexual violence; grooming; being an unprotected self, as almost all children are. In this way, the murders are inseparable from the identity, because the identity leads to violences trickling down. At its most surprising moments, All Us Saints advances an argument for protecting and listening to children, especially queer and trans children. (Zefyr Lisowski)
With an inheritance of questionable origins, the St. Cloud family home is a setting haunted by big and small violences. Burke calls into question what we cling to as individuals within a family: identity, wealth, purpose, and power…Burke forefronts the power of a narrative, who gets to be the storyteller, and who has agency to speak. When people are stripped of their dignity, not believed, and not heard, they are capable of some pretty monstrous things. Does that make them a monster? (Hannah Burns)
All Us Saints is a gorgeous puzzle-box of a book, with the pieces carved from dread, sex, and secrets. Katherine Packert Burke has inventively inverted the psycho-killer, revealing something new and, once again, shocking. (Torrey Peters, author of STAG DANCE and DETRANSITION BABY)
Katherine Packert Burke is a genius. With incisive, irreverent prose and an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy, theater, and film, she banishes commonplace narratives to masterfully capture the betrayals and succor of family, the snare of self-mythology, and the temptation, the danger, of the familiar within ritual and art. Utterly unforgettable, this book is both miracle and, dare I say it, haunting. (Morgan Thomas)
Like any good chamber piece, the ambitious, intelligent, and original All Us Saints somehow squeezes entire worlds into a single locale. With its mysterious rooms, unsolvable puzzles, and lifelike video games, Burke’s haunted house is a fascinating fractalization of horror, art, and identity by an author with the daring to approach true crime as genre fiction. (Davey Davis)
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