Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy emerges as a worthy successor to her internationally acclaimed novel Tender Is the Flesh. Where her previous work explored cannibalism as a response to global crisis, her latest offering delves into the murky waters of religious extremism in a world ravaged by environmental collapse. This harrowing tale unfolds through fragments written in blood, ink, and dirt by an unnamed narrator confined within the walls of a mysterious convent known as the House of the Sacred Sisterhood.
Narrative Architecture: Building Horror Through Fragmentation
Bazterrica constructs her narrative like a fractured mosaic, each piece revealing something more disturbing than the last. The narrator’s secret journal—her “book of the night”—serves as both confession and testimony, written on stolen paper and hidden from the watchful eyes of the Superior Sister. This fragmented storytelling mirrors the narrator’s broken memory and the shattered world outside the convent walls:
“I write beneath a blanket, close to the subtle warmth of a candle flame. I write with my blood, which is still hot, is flowing. My fingers hurt from the cold…
I write while I wait for the bells to ring and announce the beginning of the ceremony.”
The prose is visceral, immediate, and often horrifyingly beautiful. Short, staccato sentences punctuate longer, more lyrical passages, creating a rhythm that pulls the reader through the narrator’s increasingly disturbing revelations. Bazterrica excels at crafting sensory details that make the horrors of this world feel tangibly present—the chirping of crickets that drives inmates to madness, the smell of decay in the Tower of Silence, the blue paradise of LucÃa’s scent.
Hierarchy of Horror: The Sacred Sisterhood’s Power Structure
One of the novel’s most compelling aspects is its meticulous attention to the power structure within the Sacred Sisterhood. The hierarchy is both rigid and horrifying:
- The Enlightened – The highest rank, hidden behind a carved black door, supposedly communicating directly with God
- The Chosen – Physically mutilated women divided into three orders:
- Minor Saints (eyes sewn shut)
- Full Auras (perforated eardrums)
- Diaphanous Spirits (tongues cut out)
- The Unworthy – Regular members, including the narrator, who aspire to ascend
- The Servants – The lowest rank, bearing marks of “contamination” from the outside world
This carefully constructed hierarchy serves as a powerful metaphor for religious extremism and cult dynamics. The ritualistic aspects—the punishments, the ceremonies, the dogma of “Without faith, there is no refuge”—feel both archaic and disturbingly plausible. Bazterrica demonstrates a keen understanding of how power operates through bodily control and ritualized violence.
The Unmaking of Memory
The narrator’s gradual recovery of her pre-convent memories forms one of the novel’s most poignant threads. Her fragmented recollections of life before—her mother, the “tarantula kids” she survived with, her beloved cat Circe—emerge like islands of truth in a sea of indoctrination. These flashbacks provide crucial context for understanding both the outside world’s collapse and the narrator’s psychological state:
“I ached with hunger, it struck at me, like when I’d first met my family of crazy kids and didn’t want to hunt abandoned pets… Hunger was consuming my thoughts, clouding my vision.”
Through these memories, we learn of climate catastrophe, social collapse, and horrific violence—realities that make the Sacred Sisterhood’s strict protection almost understandable, despite its cruelty. This juxtaposition creates a moral ambiguity that haunts the narrative. Is safety worth submission? Is certainty worth blindness?
The Transformative Power of Desire
The arrival of LucÃa catalyzes the narrative’s central transformation. Their forbidden relationship becomes both rebellion and revelation:
“We were surrounded by thousands of fireflies, tiny golden lights pulsing in the night, dancing in the dark. LucÃa grabbed me by the hair and brought her whole body to mine, all of her skin, all of her mouth. We closed our eyes to cry out in unison, to disappear into one another.”
Their nocturnal meetings in the woods reveal more than just forbidden desire—they expose cracks in the convent’s ideology. LucÃa’s mysterious abilities (surviving fire, controlling wasps) challenge the established order, while their intimate connection helps the narrator recover her pre-convent identity. This relationship serves as a powerful counterpoint to the patriarchal control embodied by “Him” and the Superior Sister.
Unflinching Examination of Violence
Like Tender Is the Flesh, The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica is uncompromising in its portrayal of violence—particularly violence against women. Bazterrica never flinches from depicting the brutality that maintains the Sacred Sisterhood’s order:
“Three: open wounds, vivid red.
Six: Mariel’s cries stunned us, but under them, we could hear a subtle change in the Superior Sister’s breathing, the rhythm accelerating, turning into something else. A moan.”
The ritualized punishments, the sexual violence behind the carved black door, the buried memories of rape—all are rendered with a clinical precision that makes them all the more horrifying. This unflinching gaze serves the novel’s broader critique of how power operates through bodily control and enables a devastating revelation: the Enlightened women are not communicating with God but are being sexually abused by “Him.”
Climate Apocalypse as Setting and Warning
While religious extremism forms the novel’s foreground, environmental collapse provides its essential backdrop. References to acid rain, contamination, extinction, and resource scarcity create a haunting portrait of climate apocalypse:
“Mom said there’d never been a good year while she was alive. Her great-grandparents had been the last to experience a sense of well-being. She had always lived with ecological disasters, which worsened day by day.”
The environmental aspects of the novel feel especially pertinent in our current moment of climate crisis. Bazterrica extrapolates current trends to their logical, terrifying conclusion—a world of “ravaged lands” where humanity clings to existence in isolated pockets. This backdrop gives urgency to the narrative’s exploration of control and resistance.
Areas for Improvement
Despite its considerable strengths, The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica is not without flaws:
- Pacing issues: The middle section sometimes feels repetitive, with multiple scenes of punishment and ritual that could have been condensed for greater impact.
- Symbolic overload: Some symbolic elements (particularly the recurring cricket motif) feel overly emphasized to the point of diminishing returns.
- Character development: While the narrator and LucÃa are richly developed, other characters (particularly the male leader “He”) sometimes feel more like symbolic figures than fully realized individuals.
- Uneven revelations: Some mysteries are unveiled with masterful timing, while others feel either too predictable or insufficiently prepared.
Comparison to Contemporary Dystopian Fiction
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica shares DNA with other notable works of feminist dystopian fiction, particularly Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in its examination of reproductive control and religious extremism. Yet it carves its own distinct territory through its focus on environmental collapse and its unflinching depiction of violence.
Unlike some contemporary dystopian fiction that shies away from the visceral realities of bodily suffering, Bazterrica embraces horror’s capacity to confront readers with uncomfortable truths. In this sense, her work more closely resembles Ottessa Moshfegh’s body-focused examinations of alienation or Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in its unflinching approach to bodily autonomy.
Final Assessment: A Haunting Achievement
The Unworthy consolidates Agustina Bazterrica’s reputation as a fearless explorer of humanity’s darkest potentials. While it may not have quite the same shocking impact as Tender Is the Flesh—partly because readers now approach her work with certain expectations—it demonstrates significant growth in narrative complexity and thematic depth.
The novel’s greatest achievement lies in its exploration of how extremism arises from legitimate fears. The Sacred Sisterhood offers protection from a collapsing world at the cost of freedom and bodily autonomy—a bargain that feels disturbingly relevant in our age of increasing authoritarianism and environmental anxiety.
By the time we reach the narrator’s final stand—wounded, hiding in the hollow tree, committing her story to paper before she dies—we understand that her act of writing is itself a form of resistance. In a world where truth is controlled by those in power, documentation becomes revolution:
“These words contain my pulse.
My breath.
The music that radiates from the blood flowing through my veins.”
For readers willing to confront its darkness, The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica offers a powerful meditation on survival, resistance, and the human capacity to find connection even in the most desolate circumstances. It’s a challenging read, but one whose haunting imagery and unflinching moral questions will linger long after the final page.
Recommended for: Fans of feminist dystopian fiction, readers who appreciated the unflinching nature of Tender Is the Flesh, and anyone interested in explorations of religious extremism and environmental collapse.
Similar works: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure.