Jenny Hval's Girls Against God is a haunting and visceral novel that defies conventional storytelling to craft a rebellious manifesto against societal norms, particularly those imposed on women. Hval, a Norwegian musician and writer known for her avant-garde approach to art, continues her exploration of themes like femininity, power, and the body, which have permeated her entire body of work.

The novel unfolds in a surreal, almost dystopian version of Oslo, where the protagonist—a nameless, disillusioned young woman—navigates a world of oppressive religious and patriarchal structures. Through a narrative that blends memoir, manifesto, and dream-like sequences, Hval confronts the reader with the visceral experience of rage and rejection. The protagonist and her group of friends form a witchy, anarchic collective called "Girls Against God," whose very name signals their rebellion against the Christian, male-dominated society that seeks to control and define them.

Hval's prose is as unconventional as her music, marked by fragmented, poetic sentences that often feel more like lyrics than traditional novelistic text. This style mirrors the disjointed, chaotic experience of living under oppressive systems—where identity, desire, and autonomy are constantly under siege. The novel's structure, which eschews linearity in favor of thematic exploration, allows Hval to delve deep into the psyche of her characters and the societal forces they resist.

What makes Girls Against God stand out in Hval's oeuvre is its raw, unapologetic rage. While her previous works—both in literature and music—have often embraced a softer, more introspective tone, this novel is fierce and confrontational. It refuses to offer easy answers or comfort, instead embracing the darkness and anger that comes with rejecting the status quo. This intensity is reflected in the novel's imagery, which is often graphic and disturbing, challenging the reader to confront the realities of bodily autonomy and the violence of societal norms.

Hval's earlier work, including her albums Blood Bitch and Apocalypse, Girl, also grapple with the intersection of femininity and power, but Girls Against God pushes these themes to their extremes. The novel can be seen as a natural progression from these works, taking the feminist critique present in her music and expanding it into a more expansive, literary form. In this sense, Girls Against God is not just a novel but a continuation of Hval's artistic exploration—a multi-disciplinary conversation that spans her entire career.

Yet, despite its harshness, the novel is not without moments of beauty and solidarity. The protagonist's connections with other women, their shared experiences of anger and oppression, offer a glimpse of hope—an understanding that through collective resistance, something new and powerful can emerge. This balance between rage and solidarity, darkness and light, is what makes Girls Against God a compelling and vital read.

1.5 "billie eilish sang it best" stars !!

Thanx to Netgalley, Verso books and the author and translator (who did an amazing job)!! This was originally released in Norwegian in 2018 and in English in 2020.

Ok to be clear...this little rant is for the first 40 percent as I stopped there !

This is one of the most self indulgent and pointless experiences. Reads like a precocious memoir by an entitled fifteen year old who writes instead of cutting herself.

We have this really nihilistic chick who is so world weary. She hates God. She loves the color black. She hates God. She hates her own country (norway)...sort of... but reaps all its benefits. By the way she hates God. Death metal boys used to be hot but now they are neo Nazis so now they are not. She hates God. Jesus too. Norway is not socialist enough. Yes she is a feminist. Maybe a witch too and a devil worshipper. She hates God. Mhmmmm.... Did you know she likes to dance and read about the occult and study film in the USA. Oh no she still hates God. Lets start a band with two chicks she met at an art show....she hates God and church people and she likes to wear black...yes she hates God.

Holy Moses...despite the excellent translation and some really cool observations...this was so fucking boring and pointless. Did you know this chick hates God...

This may have worked as a small book of poetry but as a piece of fiction..well not really....a one star experience but a bonus half star for some very cool sentences and observations...

I felt like at first I wasn’t going to be a fan of this book, the characters aren’t the best people however the way the author writes them makes them very realistic and perhaps that is the issue. However what happens near the end of the book and how the author plays a story out makes up for those characters actions. This is a very strange book and it’s not something like I’ve ever read before. I would say it’s a good book but it takes a minute to get into and you have to really set aside your judgment and your thoughts until the very end.

Thanks to NetGalley for an e-arc of this in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I did not like this. The core of it is: there is no story. The premise seemed so cool: witches, satanists, etc. But it felt like a piece of abstract art, and I just couldn't get into it. The story doesn't go anyway.
It follows a young immigrant girl telling the story of her life, with weird pacing and no direction. When it finally went where I expected it to go, it just didn't work. It fell flat. I have considered revisiting to this because it seems like it should be up my alley, and maybe my dislike was bc it wasn't on audio (which it is now). I'm not sure if its worth it though. Maybe.

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>After the critical praise I heard about Jenny Hval’s first book, <em>Paradise Rot,</em> and after listening to her music (released on one of my favorite labels, Sacred Bones), I picked up <em>Girls Against God</em> knowing it will probably be strange, a little difficult, and a little all over the place. <em>Girls Against God</em> is part story, part essay, part manifesto on the struggle to find identity as a female in Norweigan society. From the first lines, Hval sets us up for a journey. Though it is difficult for readers to think that this is all fictional, that the narrator is not a mirror of Hval (considering it is so easy to do sometimes when the POV is first person), there are threads through this that bring about tones of witchcraft, body horror, and surreal science fiction.&nbsp;</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>Throughout this novel, Hval keeps with a very solid theme, rebellion against power. The title itself alludes God being the ultimate power in Norwegian society, and the narrator is not going to accept that she is inferior. She tries to find things that are opposite of God to fight this power, from loving black metal and forming a band to going out into the woods to become a witch, these are negatives toward the whiteness of purity of the church and Norwegian consciousness. This was the reason for the uprising of black metal to begin with and the burning of churches in the early ,90s. Kids were against God. She is against light of any sort, even in the fact that she prefers movies to books because the end of the book is a white page, and the end of a movie is a black screen, the rebellion runs deep. The movies that she describes, “Insignificance,” “Deep Throat” “Sweet Movie”, all exist and they are all readily available. The focus on all of these, and with “Puberty” the painting by Munch that becomes a pretty major plot device, is the female discovering that the bonds that are holding them down in society are best thrown down, and girls need to rise up against God (or the power that God represents) and become the powerful ones. </p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>I had a hard time keeping my focus through reading this novel. There is so much moving around in the plot and descriptions that it is difficult to keep the threads straight sometimes. This is exactly what I expect of Jenny Hval and her writing because it makes sense to the way that her mind must work. It is a difficult book, but it has some interesting ideas and worth it.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>I received this as an ARC through NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. </p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

Here is a review from my sister (she's the best!)
every morning i wake up, wipe the sleep from my eyes and say "i am so proud of jenny hval"

I never knew that rural Greece and southern Norway had so much in common.

There was some beautiful writing in this (for example, the "silent h in white" passage and the concept's frequent reappearances) and I liked some of the concepts (especially the protagonist's, if she can be called that, raging against anything and everything because she wants to belong somewhere but can't), but after a while it became repetitive and reading it became a chore; it felt like the book was trying to one-up itself with the surrealist imagery and how many times it could include the word "hate" or "band" or "God" in one page. The only reason I didn't abandon it completely is because it's a NetGalley read, and I have to honor the publisher's decision of giving me the book for free by, at the very least, completing it.

I didn't make it far enough into the book to review it, but I initially planned to include it in a roundup on books for a fall preview piece I wrote for the Boston Globe.

When a novel begins with the narrator describing the minutiae of the supplemental material from a Darkthrone DVD, well, it can only get better from there. A deeply philosophical and seemingly auto-fictional account of a member of a post-modern coven responding to the oppressive white christian conservatism of Southern Norway. Their high-concept ritual activism manifests as both hacker-inspired installation art and post-structuralist rhetoric. Please forgive me when I say, with "Girls Against God", Jenny Hval helps put the craft back in witchcraft. Highly recommended for fans of Qiu Miaojin's "Notes of a Crocodile".

I just couldn't get into this. The premise seemed interesting, but the writing of one long rambling stream of consciousness was hard to get into.

Not a novel in the most cut and dried sense but a thoroughly fascinating one, if perhaps a bit too caught up in its own polemic (though fascinating) statements about transgressive art and the creative process. At times it reads much more like a manifesto than anything else--but that's not really a problem. Hval's authorial voice is as intriguing as her music.

Girls Against God starts as the impassioned monologue of a young woman. Our narrator is from the south of Norway, and detests its bland traditions – 'white taciturn gruel' – and Christian values. As for what she hates most, it's a toss-up between God and the 'broken', 'wet' accent of the region, 'fit only for sermons and admonitions'. She gives an account of her life, running from the early 1990s to the present day. There are ruminations on feminism and witchcraft, porn, art and music; I sometimes felt like I was reading a series of personal essays rather than a novel. That's not a bad thing – the narrator has a striking voice, her ideas about the power of hate are persuasive and interesting, and I felt I was learning something about Norwegian subcultures.

A few themes are repeatedly revisited: a film concept the narrator seems to have been formulating for years; the significance of black metal music in her life; the idea of 'girls hating together', which informs both her experiences and her theories. In the second half of the book, however, the sense that it's a memoir/manifesto is lost. Any illusion of reality breaks down, and scenes become increasingly dreamlike. When the narrator forms a band with two friends (who may or may not be characters she has invented for one of her film scenes), their 'first gig' is not a performance of music but rather inserting a 'razor-thin infected metal thread [into] the city’s main reserves', producing 'metaphysical waste' that creates a 'trash stench' over Oslo. It only gets stranger from there.

A great deal of my interest in Girls Against God was down to the blurb, which positions it as 'a time-travelling horror story and a fugue-like feminist manifesto', and I can't really say I feel the first part of that description is accurate. The manifesto parts, I enjoyed a lot. I'd have liked to keep reading about the narrator's life and ideas. The fragmented nature of the rest left me feeling like I was trying to put a smashed piece of glass back together.

This is one of the strangest books I have ever read. It is not a novel, not a story, and not a series of essays. It is more like a series of monologues written during a fever dream. I found it incredibly difficult to follow. Where I did follow it, I absolutely loved the prose and the imagery; there are some passages on witchcraft that are absolutely striking. Some folks are going to love this book, though. If you like extremely weird, along with a rejection of Christian conservative patriarchy, it might be for you.

In an early version of the film I’m writing, the girl from Puberty is the main character in the story. She’s travelling in a time machine from the 1890s, her own time, to our time. There she’s going to look for Edvard Munch, to crush him, as revenge for painting her. In the story’s opening we’re told that Munch has already travelled through that same time machine, to pursue his dream of playing in a popular black metal band. “

Translated by Marjam Idriss from Jenny Hval’s Norwegian original, Girls Against God is from Verso Books, “the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world” and this powerful novel justifies that reputation.

The first person narrator of the novel opens her story, or perhaps her manifesto may be a better term, with:

“It’s 1990 , and I’m the Gloomiest Child Queen. I hate God. It feels primitive and pitiful to say it, but I’m a primitive and pitiful person. The screen in front of me shows images from 1990: images of pine trees; the tops, grey sky. The video flickers and the camera sways across a pixelated digital universe. A boy, possibly Nocturno Culto, walks through the forest to the sound of brutal guitar riffs.
…
That year, while Nocturno Culto and his band still play thrash and haven’t really figured out black metal, I hate my way through every primary school classroom, and the teachers’ thick southern Norwegian accent. I refuse to adopt it. I hate its sombre tone, fit only for sermons and admonitions, and southern Norwegians hardly ever utter anything else.”

Nocturno Culto (real name Ted Skjellum) being one of the real-life founders of the Norwegian band Darkthrone, part of the early 1990s Norwegian death metal scene that infamously ended in 1993-4 with some musicians in jail for burning churches, two for murder (one of a rival band member) and others veering into Neo-Nazism. Darkthrone themselves largely avoided much of the controversy, although their album Transilvanian Hunger did have some unfortunate promotional material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transilvanian_Hunger), including outsourcing the lyrics to four of the songs to Varg Vikernes, one of those later convicted of murder.

The opening lyrics of the song Over Fjell Og Gjennom Torner feature in the novel in one of the imagined film sequences (see below), which in the translation read:

“Over peaks and through the thickets
Through this evil murky wood
Die like a warrior, head on a tree
Slash the flesh. Needles skin deep. “

(see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1eMYS7exIk for the original – Hval’s, who is also a singer, own music is rather different in style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXLc37lOE3o)

The narrator was too young (and the wrong gender) to be part of this scene, but “grew up in southern Norway’s white Scandinavian paradise: white walls, white fresh snow, white painted laminate and white chipboards, white flagpoles and white chalk lines on the blackboard, white cheese and white fish, milk, fish pudding, fish gratin and fish balls in white sauce, white pages in books, white pills in pill boxes, white roll-ups, platinum-blond hair, white brides and white doctors’ coats, meringue and cream cake, Christian virgins from Jesus Revolution with white wooden crosses, Christian grunge, listen, the music sounds like regular grunge, if you just forget about the lyrics, irony, nothing means anything, boys from White Revolution at summer camp, girls who think it’s fine that the boys are racists because they’re hot and because boys will be boys, boys and their Nazi punk songs, listen to this track, the lyrics are so distorted you can’t hear it anyway, listen , the melody’s great, you girls are gonna love it, it’s got acoustic guitar. Sugar and salt are the only spices. Sugar and salt look exactly the same. White revolution and Jesus Revolution, Nazi punk and evangelist grunge, swastikas and purity rings. midmorning gruel, pimple pus, egg whites, cream of wheat, semen.”

Rebelling against the social conservatism of the region she ends up in a black metal band in 1998.

The novel has her looking back on this period, and exploring ways to express herself via movies (largely planned and imagined rather than filmed), influenced by the avant-garde scene including videos of Darkthrone:

“Isn’t that why the underground , the avant-garde, the B movies and comics and fanzines and black metal originally emerged: to be free of the consequences and this relentless comparison to reality, and to open up to other structures? To the crawling and creeping and hissing and noisy structures? They were able to create space for a different kind of art, a different kind of writing. “

The narrator often addresses the imagined (and assumed female) reader, drawing us in to her world:

“Maybe writing this film has created a place to meet. Do you also recognise the desire for secret and impossible connections ? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls that hate?”

The translation deserves particular praise given how much of the novel revolved around Norwegian words and vowels, even dialect, which Idriss needs to make read naturally to the English-language reader:

“Have you thought about how good it feels to say that you hate? That deep a-sound: in Norwegian it’s the mouth’s most open vowel, the one that’s pronounced entirely by a slack jaw, the tone the doctor asks for before instruments are stuck down your throat, or the last tone from the dying and the dead. The A emerges from the underground and the downfall. Southerners say hadår or hadær, depending on how far south or west they are. It’s even more magical than the English hate, softer, saltier, more sheltered and concealed, closer to the kingdom of the dead, Hades. This softer language stretches further down into the deep, into the sea, the underground; the magical dimensions. “

And the novel, one that becomes increasingly surreal as the gap between the narrator's real life and her movie scenes seems to blur, ends literally encapsulated in aspic:

“Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth.

Aspic is the original internet. Aspic teaches me to write. Aspic is our own man-made blasphemy. “

An unusual and unsettling read, but worthwhile. The publisher's description of "a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, gender and art" encapsulates it well, albeit perhaps misses the centrality of misanthropic black metal.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC

This was a fascinating book. An ode to the riotous anger of women and girls against the patriarchy. I loved the writing (and translation) and although I did not always find myself entirely connected the main narrative (or narrator) I was hooked enough to read more by Hval in the future.

This isn't really a novel, or a story. It's more of a series of monologues or streams of consciousness. Which is very much not my usual thing, and for most of the time I was reading this I kept thinking 'okay, just give up and read something else, you're not into it'. But I kept reading, because I somehow was into it. I made 15 bookmarks while reading, and it's not a long book, so clearly there's a lot I wanted to go back to. I loved the merging of 90s angry-girl with filmmaking with black metal with the blandness of small-town Norway with early explorations of the internet. I can't say I'd wholeheartedly recommend this because it really is a weird one, even for someone who likes weird books. But it does have a strange charm.

This novel is intense. It's hardcore and should be approached with that knowledge. The novel follows the Artist. A girl consumed with HATE. Hate for the Christian evangelicals that smother her in her home in the south of Norway. Hate for the hypocrisies of society and history. Hate for the black metal movement that sought to destroy rather than build. Hate for the way she is forbidden to hate. The novel functions more like a series of musings rather than a plot. Technically the novel follows her at different points in her life from school to grad school to beyond but the focus is not so much what happens but how she feels about what happens. Still, Hval constructs a wonderfully angry little girl and who believably grows and changes while still hating with everything she has. This hate-filled girl is not the cool polished character we see in mainstream media, not the edgy effortlessly cool kid, she is rough around the edges, she is disgusting and messy and horrendous which was great fun to read and engage with. Like I said it is an intense novel. There were sections I absolutely loved. Her disavowal of God and the way the author connects the notions of God and mortal to artist and muse (and even author and character) was amazing. The way Hval used language to make her points was also fantastic to read, especially her fixation on the letter "h" which is silent in white but bold and outspoken in both Hate and Hope. The character obsesses with liberating the subject of one of Munch's paintings, waxing political about the role of women in art history and society at large. These were my favourite parts. But, as I said, this is a hardcore novel. If you enjoy the more extreme side of neo-avant-garde, think Marina Abramović's The Lips of Thomas (1975) or Valie Exports's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), then this novel will be right up your street. The over-reliance on faecal matter, blood and other "shocking" things were a bit much for me though. I also felt some of the messages were more confused than others, the section in Japan felt more like orientalism, to be honest. The strongest aspects of the novel were her discussions of patriarchy and the history of witchcraft which were insightful and artfully done, but be prepared for the lurid intensity of the rest of it.

Jenny Hval’s marvelous strangeness shines in this novel. She twists and turns and molts throughout the novel in a way that is unsurprising to listeners of her music, but still marvelous to watch and reckon with. Definitely strongly recommend for anyone who likes surreal or magical elements in their fiction.

“Hatred is my imaginary world, my pleasure dome.”

The girl in question hates the south of Norway, especially the southern accent. She hates God and has only one big like: black metal. Sounds like a charming character, right? A bright person whom you love reading about? Why read a book about someone’s hatred? Because the triangle is always expanding and the third point (whatever your fantasy comes up with) makes the others tremble. I can see your confusion…

Girls Against God is a book about bonding. The narrator feels a lot of hatred and is endowed with a very rich fantasy. She sees magic as the same alchemical reaction that transforms hatred to a new or strange form of love. She does feel hope, even though it’s through hatred. This gives you another perspective on what can give someone hope. The girl is looking for others like her – other people that hate – but concludes that she is alone in her hatred. Her loneliness makes her crave for a bond.

Jenny Hval created something that’s different. In Girls Against God she combines the magical and lively fantasies with linguistics and technology. The story is all over the place, as if the author, like the reader, was curious about the ending of the chapters she was working on. It has all the ingredients of a book I should love. The story often brings a smile to my face because I appreciate the parallels drawn.

I did enjoy thinking about some of the connections Jenny Hval presents to us through the thoughts of the girl. At the same time, I didn’t enjoy reading the book as a whole. Except maybe the last part of the book: the ‘Film’ part would have been brilliant as a short story. But before I got there I often wished that the book was finished and that I could start another one. It just was not pleasant to read from front to cover because the story is all over the place. Girls Against God is an interesting book to read, but it is not a book that I would recommend.

I jotted down some unrelated thoughts that I will share with you in the same unstructured manner as the girl does. If this piques your interest, then this book might be for you after all.

1) An illusion can be blown to bits by art’s insignificant explosions. After your reality has been ripped to shreds by this blast, there is a long echo. This is the silence that brings opportunity if you can overcome the shock.
2) Production is active, reproduction is passive.
3) The witch’s den is a breeding ground for feces, blood, and sexual fantasies. The result: an egg.
4) Maybe I didn’t enjoy the book enough because I live even further south than South Norway.
5) On a more personal note: I find the musings about the silent h rather funny as it brings back memories of my bachelor thesis about the ‘hidden’ h in the Middlewelsh subjunctive.
6) Would I rather have an imaginary search engine or a magical computer with the internet resembling the human body?

I feel SEEN.

I have never listened to Jenny Hval's music and know very little about black metal culture per-se, though I was a punk kid in the 90s so I understood viscerally what she was talking about. Don't be scared off if you don't know/care about black metal. It is not about that. It is about hating God, which is to say hating the patriarchal God, which is to say hating what men do to women in God's name.

The book itself is simultaneously a fever dream, a stream of consciousness, and a rigorously researched feminist manifesto. I have never read anything like this. The protagonist is writing a screenplay based on her friends, her band, her coven, who may or may not be real. They do magic, which may or may not be real. They revel in the forbidden without any gratuitous violence, without any sadism, without any sexualization. It is truly a feminist gem.

Now, I would NOT recommend it to most people. This book is WEIRD. It doesn't have a straight-forward narrative. The phrase "I hate God" is mentioned probably a hundred times. I would give this book to a teenage girl wearing all black (yeah-yeah-yeah, it's 18+) but not her suburban mom. It's not a "book that everyone should read." And it's okay. It's a book that I needed to read, and I book that I will go back to.

Thanks to Netgalley and VERSO, one the best publishers ever, for this fantastic novel!