Thank you to the author and NetGalley for allowing me to read this ARC of “The Unworthy”. I was so excited to read this follow up stand alone from the author of “Tender is the Flesh”. I have to say this didn’t grip me quite as much as Tender did, but I liked it all the same. This one hit harder having been raised Catholic my entire life. I do wish the novel didn’t start out so slowly.

What a strange little book. As another reviewer says, "This book makes me want to become Catholic again."

Thank you, Bazterrica, for your brilliant mind.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

*Thank you to NetGalley for gifting this E-ARC*

I absolutely loved Tender is the Flesh and it's definitely in my top horror books of all time. Having said that, I was super excited when I saw that Augustina wrote another horror book. I think my issue with this was the journal style of writing. It didn't flow the way it should've and it was pretty repetitive. It didn't have enough context to keep me intrigued or even slightly surprised at the ending. While the thought behind the plot is good, a religious cult set in a post apocalyptic world, it fell flat for me.

Welcome back to Climbing Mount TBR where I, your humble Book Kaiju, struggle to climb to the top of my “to read” pile one book at a time. This time we’re looking at The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica with Sarah Moses as the translator. I want to give a shout out to the publisher who graciously gave an eARC to Kaiju & Gnome for an honest review… And boy, am I going to be honest.

So, what is The Unworthy?

After some cataclysm the world is dying. There’s poison in the air, water causes insanity, food is scarce, disease is rampant, and let’s not forget all the people. People are the worst!

We are reading the diary of an unnamed woman who is a member of the Sacred Sisterhood. What’s that? Think S&M nuns, but not in the fun way. More in the “torture and mutilate ourselves to become more pure” way. How do they mutilate themselves? Examples include: Blinding themselves so they can hear ants. Cutting out their tongues for… reasons. Deafening themselves so they can see things that aren’t there.

Our narrator wants to become one of these select holy women, except maybe she doesn’t. It’s complicated. But since she’s got nowhere else to go, the rest of the world is a devastated hellscape (maybe), she’s stuck with the nuns. It’s not all bad though, she gets all the crickets she can eat, can bully and torture the servants, and when there’s a funeral, they get to drink coffee!

Life kind of sucks, but then a mysterious lady shows up who will change everything. And by that, I mean, show them that maybe being tortured and torturing others in turn isn’t the best way to live your life. Perhaps, instead, they could use the greatest power of all… Love Getting the heck out of there and running away.

What did I think?

I wanted so badly to like this book. It’s religious horror! That’s my horror genre of choice! It’s feminist horror with a message! I agree with everything that it has to say. There’s nothing it has to say about toxic masculinity, environmentalism, societal mistreatment of women, and the role of religion in all of it that I disagree with. I’m fully on board with the message. Preach it from the mountain tops!

So why didn’t I like it? Why do I just find myself slamming my head like a Monty Pythonian Monk with every page I read?

Maybe it’s because of the writing style. This is written as a diary of a woman in an oppressive convent that tortures anyone that steps out of line. She was orphaned at a young age, lived as a borderline feral child for a while, and now must strap her loose diary pages to her chest to hide them. So why does she write like she’s an accomplished modernist? Why does her prose use tricks and styles that are poetic to the point of being pretentious?

It just doesn’t make sense. The language of the story doesn’t match the substance. All I can think of when I’m reading it is the disconnect between what’s on the page and what is supposed to be in the page. The appeal of a story told via letters and diaries is you get a feel for the characters. You get to see the world as they see or, more importantly, as they remember it. The Unworthy’s prose instead feels like you’re just reading what the author wrote. There’s not a character to inhabit, just an author telling you vaguely what’s happening.

Plus, this book does nothing new. At first glance the world feels interesting. Butterflies cause burns where they land? Water causes madness when it’s drunk straight from the stream? The vague hints at the world outside the wall? What the heck is an “artificial tree?” The mystery is intriguing and fascinating, but as the story unfolds the answers are just the normal dystopia causing catastrophes.

The climate crisis has reached a point that the world was devastated in the water wars, just like in Mad Max. Then the polar ice caps melted and caused flooding ala Water World. Then there’s disease like in The Stand. The main character gets with a group of feral kids ala Beyond Thunderdome. Then she joins a religious order that hearkens to The Handmaid’s Tale while its isolation harkens to every single dystopian novel that involves some bunker like Wool.

It's a rather paint-by-numbers dystopian. It’s so cliché that the big reveals that are supposed to make the reader go “OMG!” were easily figured out around a quarter of the way through the book. I didn’t realize what was supposed to be the “Big Reveal” until I finished the novel and looked back over my notes. Not because the reveal was overly subtle, but because I thought it was so obvious that it couldn’t be the big mystery.

Plus, I was not expecting a character like Lucia. I can’t help but think of Lucia as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Do you know what a MPDG is? It’s a character archetype found in a lot of nerdy movies from the late 90s through the 2010s. A MPDG is a character that comes in and disrupts the main character's normal life because they are so wacky and have an “I do what I want” attitude.

And that’s what Lucia does. She comes in, has a relationship with the lead, and throws the lead’s life askew. She uses some tricks to subvert the authority of the theocracy. She becomes super popular, while still being the mysterious/dangerous outsider. She inspires the lead to do the right thing.

I’m not going to dwell on this book much longer. It wasn’t for me. Like I said, I wanted to like this book. I liked the themes and the message. I loved the premise. This book should have been my jam, but it wasn’t. Maybe it will be yours, but honestly just go read The Handmaid’s Tale instead.

But hey, that’s just my opinion. Let us know what you think over on Bluesky @kaijuandgnome.bsky.social‬!

3.25✨

“The Unworthy” follows an unnamed woman recording her experiences in a post-apocalyptic world as she navigates the cult where she’s ended up.

What I liked about this book was the narrator’s skewed point of view—how she was unreliable and morally grey because it’s what she had to become to survive. I thought the Sisterhood in a dystopian perspective was an intriguing setting. Despite this, I found the story sort of meandering. The narrator’s journal entries didn’t tell her story chronologically, there wasn’t much of a plot, and by the end of the story, three wasn’t much of a takeaway. Still, I enjoyed the narrator’s perspective even though I would’ve liked more of a message/point/plot to the story.

I've got to be for real... I didn't understand this book. Like, at all. Things that you were waiting for answers to .... just didn't come.
A lot of things were more subtly alluded to as opposed to getting fleshed out.
I just didn't get it.
But that could be a me problem.

I'm interested to hear others thoughts.

2.25/ 5

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica is a novel about a woman in a religious order. It is extremely dark and explores topics like the climate crisis, religion, and human instinct. I found the author's previous novel Tender Is the Flesh to be more interesting and haunting. I just didn't quite understand where the author was going with this book. Thanks to NetGalley for the free digital review copy. All opinions are my own.

The writing in this was off putting. Very little dialog and mostly stream of conscious. I did not care for the end. There were still so many unanswered questions.

So, I requested this book because I enjoyed "Tender Is the Flesh" and was excited to read something more by its author. Unfortunately, this one didn't give me the same enjoyment.

It was.... very hard to read.

We start the book in the middle of a weird, dystopian world into which we've been thrown smack in the middle without context or background info. We quickly realize the narrator is living in some kind of religious institution (convent maybe?) but it's a dark place full of whippings, torture, rape, and more.

But that's really it. There's no build. There's no plot. I mean, yes, eventually there is a plot. But the book moves so slowly and is so disjointed that it isn't immediately evident.

And the writing style itself doesn't help. The book itself is the MC's hidden diary, with random starts and stops and words marked out. It's slow and repetitive. And while I think both of those things were deliberate choices made by the author; they didn't land as well as I imagine she'd hoped they would.

The characterization and character arcs aren't strong, and the plot is murky and hard to untangle from one scene of torture to the next. It's like the book is trying waaaaaay too hard to be dark and mysterious -- so hard, in fact, that you don't really have any idea what's supposed to be going on until the last 20 pages or so.

I read a review of the book that said, "If it was intended to provoke thought about women and religion, it missed the mark for me." This is PRECISELY how I feel. After finishing the book, I could finally see the author's vision, but... the book itself didn't get there.

I just couldn't get into it.

To sum it up, it was an under-200-page book that took me a whole month to read. I think that says all that needs said.

I’d already read some books by this author and enjoyed them but this was probably my favorite so far. It was dark, scary and really made you think! I’ll have to recommend to friends who like the same types of books!

This book was an early DNF for me. It may sound silly, but I stoped with the central character abusing cockroaches. I would probably step on a cockroach with no qualms if I encountered one—but that's different than taking pleasure from causing pain. I just have to stop reading when I hit violence again animals. <y apology for being unable to give this title a full review.

Wow... what a read! The atmosphere of this novel!!! I just am left speechless. I love the way in which the story unfolded. The snippets our main character give us are equal parts horrifying and devastating. But Bazterrica manages to keep a darkly humorous voice which compelled me to keep reading, even during some of the gory parts. The world building in this novel !!! There is just not enough good things to say. The commentary on society through this dystopian horror lens really worked for me. I devoured this.

i’m not sure if this is a case of “i’m not the right reader for this book” or if it’s actually just… not great?

in a world ravaged by climate disaster, war, and disease, an unnamed woman secretly documents her life cloistered in what was once a monastery and is now home to the house of the sacred sisterhood, a cruel religious cult composed of women who found their way to (or through) the walls of the compound.

i didn’t mind the vague writing style; i was left with a lot of unanswered questions, but it felt appropriate to the fragmented world the narrator exists in and the horrors she experienced. (if a defined setting and elaborate world-building are important to you, you may not enjoy this.) however, the story did feel repetitive by the halfway point and even more so by the end. i think it either could have been shorter while achieving the same impact, or longer and more fleshed out. i found this length unsatisfying and i was underwhelmed overall after reading so many positive reviews for agustina bazterrica’s previous novel, tender is the flesh.

while the unworthy raises some interesting questions about cults and religion as tools of power and oppression, what we will accept and conform to and ultimately cling to in order to survive, and the price of maintaining humanity in a society that demands complicity and cruelty, it ultimately felt like more style than substance? it falls into well-trodden dystopian/cli-fi territory interspersed with progressively more brutal violence and torture. predictability in a story isn’t inherently bad at all, but that combined with an author whose style unfortunately didn’t really appeal to me made for a disappointing read. i do think this book might appeal more to readers who enjoy female-centered environmental weirdlit.

This book had all the compelling details to be a great short story. The covenant, the brutality, and the dystopian “what is going on “ vibes. Unfortunately, we were left in the dark about a lot of things that made me get lost. Also, the whole book felt rushed, i understand this was written as the main character is rushing to tell the story in anything she could find but i just didn’t vibe with that part. Although the writing is poetic it got to be repetitive. And the ending was a let down for me.

This one was a miss for me. I devoured (ha) Tender is the Flesh but the book of short stories that followed was a letdown, and so is this one. It takes place in an ill-defined post-apocalyptic future (intentional, but something we've seen before) where our MC is caught up in a religious cult of torture. The questions that are posed in the description of the book (" How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?") are a bit misleading, because I don't think we're given anytime to ponder these things. Lucia comes into our MC's life about halfway through the book, so even that feels like a spoiler to include in the description. The description ends with "A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror." But I would pose that none of these topics are covered at all, or if they are, it's very surface-level. Reading a description of this book really sets you up for failure. I think it would've been best to go in blind but even then, the story just doesn't cut it.

The Unworthy from Agustina Bazterrica is a mysterious dystopian novel that takes you inside a convent and makes you question what’s happening inside its walls and what’s happened beyond them. This book is moving, haunting, and strange all in one.

Bazterrica is one of my favorite modern horror writers and this did not disappoint! It was a bit surreal and fever dreamy - wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be real or in the narrator’s head, but some gorgeous allegories about religion and sexuality.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.
This is a story about a woman's experience during a global disaster. She is found and brought back to life in a religious cult. This novel is a bit out of the realm of my normal read. I'm glad I read it. I could see this novel being turned into an awesome show or movie.

I wanted to joke that this book was unworthy of my time. But I don’t think that’s particularly fair. I did like a lot about it- the writing is beautiful. But the plot just got very boring and repetitive. It wasn’t until the last 20% that it finally picked up. I’m not sure how I felt about the ending either. But I suppose it kind of fit with the book (it would have been weird if there was a happy ending.) Overall, it was just okay.

2.5/5 rounded up

This book was haunting and excellent. The clifi, religious, and otherwise dystopian points hit. It scared me. I hated it. But the journal entries made me love the MC and her poor cat.