- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 264
- ISBN
- 9781951971458
- Price
- $18.95
- Publication Date
- September 1, 2026
The Patron Saint of White Menageries: Stories
Lauren T. Davila
In her debut magical-realism collection The Patron Saint of White Menageries, Pushcart-nominated author Lauren T. Davila cracks Los Angeles open to reveal a kaleidoscope of unlikely heroines, talents, and dreams.
In a sticky diner, a waitress fits wisps of cloud into coffee mugs, trying to solve her patrons' problems. A motherless girl defies her father’s rules, rubbing fish scales from her eyes and learning her mother's half-remembered Spanish. Spectral ballerinas haunt alleys and dance studios, and red bumps rise on the arms of an assistant whose employer has been alive too long. The prophet Cassandra, exhausted from reincarnating and never being believed, tries one last time to escape her fate.
For lovers of White Cat, Black Dog and whoever haunts the Pacific Coast Highway, The Patron Saint of White Menageries is a guide to magical LA by one of its native daughters.
Praise for The Patron Saint of White Menageries: Stories
“Lauren T. Davila’s debut unleashes a lyrical, feminist voice marked by intimate authenticity and fearless curiosity. Each woman’s uncanny story threads evolution and transformation through a lens of magical realism and the raw beauty of California landscapes—the Pacific salt, tumbled sea glass, and earthy aromas of mole. I left this collection with an appetite for more.” —Sadie Hartmann, Bram Stoker Awards® winning author of 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered
“The Patron Saint of White Menageries is a stunning debut from Lauren T. Davila. The prose is enchanting, the stories, breathtaking. The lyricism and magical realism will have readers feeling as though the book is a cloud cradled in their hands: unexpected and ethereal.” —Rachel Vasquez Gilliand, author of Witch of Wild Things
“Davila’s debut short story collection, The Patron Saint of White Menageries, glitters with supernatural wonders and ghost-filled landscapes. From gothic dread to themes of heritage and reclamation, each story encompasses endings and beginnings at their highest, irreverent pitch.” —E. P. Tuazon, author of A Professional Lola
“In The Patron Saint of White Menageries, women and girls choke back hard truths and scrabble at the locked doors of family secrets. Horror waits for them in the California wilderness, from dead mothers emerging from oil-black water to lost friends vanishing into ostentations of peafowl, but freedom waits there too. Davila’s heroines escape the mundane into the uncanny. An unearthly and melancholy book.” —Molly Olguín, author of The Sea Gives Up The Dead
“Filled with stories about love, loss, grief, and all the messy, deeply human moments in between, The Patron Saint of White Menageries offers a searing answer to the question of what makes life worth living, and all the choices one might take to shape the places they land in. Come for the love letter to Los Angeles and its surrounding areas, stay for the tender heart of it all.” —Samantha Chong, author of Prodigal Tiger
“A love letter to LA, The Patron Saint of White Menageries is a versatile collection of stories haunted by dancing ghosts, shiny shark teeth, a deadly flask, and the curious taste of clouds. Lauren T. Davila expertly weaves wonder, yearning, and hope with just a sting of sea salt. Davila is a writer to watch.” —L.L. Madrid, author of My Lips, Her Voice
“Infused with Southern California magic.” —Francesca Lia Block, author of Dangerous Angels and House of Hearts
“These stories read like a dizzying, dazzling tour of Los Angeles—one the average hop-on, hop-off bus won’t dare go on. You’ve got to know the right ghostly guide, the right freeway exit, the right all-night diner to gratefully stumble into. You’re in good hands with Lauren T. Davila, whose imaginative tales wind with warmth and hope through sun-bleached deserts and fog-slung forests, onto sunken piers, and into the tricky depths of celebrity, love, longing, inheritance, and ambition. The Patron Saint of White Menageries is a memorable, charming, tightly woven collection about those who see what others can’t, and are themselves not what they seem.” —Kristina Ten, author of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine
