The Saint of Bright Doors

May 1, 2023
Chandrasekera debuts with a lyrical but sluggish fantasy following “chosen one” Fetter, son of Mother-of-Glory and her former husband, the Perfect and Kind. Mother-of-Glory trains Fetter as a “child soldier” in her war against his father and cuts off his shadow, enabling him to float and see devils, but leaving him feeling inhuman and disconnected. This changes when he moves to the city of Luriat and puts aside his mother’s revenge quest to focus on attending a support group for “the unchosen, the almost-chosen, the chosen-proximate.” Meanwhile, he studies the “bright door” phenomenon, mystical locked doorways that appear throughout the city. Fetter discovers that the doors are not as sealed as they seem, allowing demons to stream into the world—and that this is just one aspect of a worldwide problem with the Perfect and Kind at its center. There are some nifty ideas within Chandrasekera’s worldbuilding, but the pacing is slow and more than a little odd: characters spend a lot of time talking at Fetter in the first third of the novel, and Fetter spends much of the last third imprisoned on the way to a murky climactic twist. The result is a meandering meditation on mind-body duality, fanaticism, and eschatology that will appeal only to fans of the most cerebral fantasies.