Agustina Bazterrica‘s 2023 horror novel The Unworthy, translated into English by Sarah Moses in 2025, is set at the end of the world.
The apocalypse is nigh: the environment is collapsing, society is in ruins, and every living being’s survival demands a brutal daily negotiation.
In the wasteland, a man has built a religion, with entirely female followers—the House of the Sacred Sisterhood. He insists it’s a refuge, a garden of Eden remade despite the ecological catastrophe surrounding it. He has enlisted his sister to manage them, to teach them how to make themselves worthy to be chosen by Him for Ascension. To finally see Him.
The story follows an unnamed member of the Unworthy who is secretly recording her life in a secret journal using whatever writing tools she can – ink, mud, her own blood if necessary. Everyday life in the Sacred Sisterhood is a daily grind of thinking of ways to be cruel so as not to become a victim of others’ cruelty, while thinking of ways to prove oneself as “worthy” enough to become “Chosen” and eventually ascending to the level of the coveted “Enlightened” rank.
When an outsider named Lucía arrives, the power dynamics within the convent shift, and the narrator begins to question the cult’s rules and remember her life before she came to belong to the Sisterhood.
As if that all wasn’t bad enough, the cult is unmistakably patterned after the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, in so many disturbing ways.
The WrITING In The UnWorthy
The prose of The Unworthy earns its brutality. Bazterrica’s writing is eerie, precise, and occasionally devastating, sentences that made me put the book down and stare into space for a bit. She built a world that feels grimy and real, with a protagonist whose desperate desire to be anywhere else is so compelling it becomes almost physical. The backdrop of climate disaster is not decoration, and it hits pretty hard. It reminds us that this story is not a metaphor set safely in the past. It is a projection forward from the world we are already living in, and we might be closer than we want to admit.
The novel is 175 pages. It does not waste a single one.
Be Wary of People Who Tell You That Your Suffering IS Sacred
I love that Bazterrica, who has a gift for deftly crafted, unhinged plots, is refusing to be subtle here. The parallel she’s drawing is damning in its precision, explicitly invoking Catholic hagiographic tradition. Specifically, Bazterrica is exploring the concept that the saints do not merely suffer but that their suffering is aspirational, integrated into the Church’s communications plan through strategic retellings, curations, and canonizations. The suffering is the point. It’s part of the recruitment and retention strategy.
St. Agatha’s horrific, gendered violence for rejecting a Roman official. Catherine of Siena’s extreme fasting. Saint Apollonia’s teeth being yanked out for refusing to renounce Christ.
Teresa of Ávila’s transverberation, which she described as “excessive pain” from an angel stabbing her in the chest and gut with a golden spear, and yet is depicted in art as orgasmic. Take the piece pictured below, which the Church commissioned: Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
What distinguishes this from how other religious traditions treat suffering is not that Catholics invented the idea of hardship as spiritual growth, since most traditions recognize how transformative suffering can be. The difference is, again, the aspiration towards suffering. Other traditions tend to treat suffering as something you move through toward transformation. Catholicism, particularly in its hagiographic tradition and particularly around female saints, treats the suffering female body itself as the sacred object. Again, the pain is the point. The suffering makes you worthy.
Bazterrica’s cult is doing the same thing in real time. It is producing its own hagiography with living women as the text.
The Unworthy are at the bottom of the sisterhood. These are the young women the reader spends the most time with and the “class” to which the unnamed narrator belongs. When they aren’t dreaming of ascension, they perform a tedious, never-ending array of chores and rituals. They engage in vicious bullying, testing each other until they find a girl (in the story, poor Mariel) weak enough to show her pain, which invites the other girls to pile on, until the scapegoated girl meets a terrible end.
The Chosen are above the sisterhood, all ritualistically mutilated, and assured that their mutilation is holiness for the good of the whole community. There are three kinds: the Minor Saints, whose tongues have been cut out so they can speak the “celestial” language; the Diaphanous Spirits, whose eardrums have been punctured so they can better discern “signals” around them; and the Full Auras, whose eyelids have been sewn shut because the physical world “blinds them” to the “real” signals directly from the heavens.
Oh, sure, whatever you say!
The Enlightened occupy the top of the hierarchy. Not many girls make it that far, the implication being that they’re not good enough, of course, not pure enough, not having suffered enough, or something. No one knows what happens to them, because once the rare Enlightened ascends, she disappears behind a black door that only He controls.
Still, the book’s most interesting part is not the critique of suffering as worthiness; it’s a series of questions the reader is left contemplating:
Who benefits from a woman’s suffering?
And what exactly makes her suffering useful in such a hierarchy?
And why would the man at the top suddenly make an exception, allowing one woman to skip the mandatory suffering and jump from Unworthy to Enlightened?
You Can’t Engineer Your Escape From the Hierarchy
The Unworthy also shows us the woman, Lourdes, who has already figured out that suffering is a scam. She’s examined the system more clearly than most and decided that being useful is the answer. That her utility is the cheat code. That if suffering won’t make her chosen, then making herself indispensable will. She becomes cruel. She makes others suffer so she doesn’t have to. She becomes Sister Superior’s most trusted enforcer.
She is also wrong.
Utility, Bazterrica argues, renders you useful. It doesn’t make you indispensable, and it certainly doesn’t get you chosen. The cruelty of the patriarchal promise is that it offers multiple entry points: suffer your way to worthiness or work your way to worthiness. Both are dead ends. The rules aren’t there to guide you. This was never actually about you at all.
The only thing that makes the man at the top “choose” a woman, in Bazterrica’s rendering, is whether he wants her body. Simple as that. The hierarchy, mutilation, and cruelty serve his desire, on his timeline, for his purposes. Being chosen does not equate to spiritual elevation. It is to become the object of an action. Passive. Receptive. Expected to absorb the cost of his decision without complaint.
But in this apocalyptic wasteland, who is there to complain to? The unnamed narrator knows all too well the horrors that lurk outside the convent walls. At least, within the Sisterhood, she has a degree of physical protection, access to a more stable supply of food and water than anywhere else in the wasteland, and, critically, a position in a hierarchy that allows to punch down when the opportunity presents itself. But with the ugly truth of Enlightenment laid bare, what is the point?
There is no winning in The Unworthy. Not through suffering. Not through being cruel. Not through consciously disengaging from the system entirely and becoming a target for everyone still inside it who is trying to claw their way up. Not through being chosen and discovering what that actually costs. The only genuine exit is death — and Bazterrica frames it, quietly, as a mercy.
It’s not a new argument to say that the promises of patriarchal systems are empty. But I have rarely seen this argument made so elegantly and so viscerally. And I’ve never seen someone interrogate the intentions behind hagiography and depictions of female suffering as efficiently and poignantly in a mere 175 pages as The Unworthy does.
The protagonist dies at the end. I was relieved for her.
(Check out my Cabinet of Curiousities for more book recommendations.)