Thanks to NetGalley for my ARC

I loved every page of this novel. The writing is rich and beautiful. It felt hypnotic. I was so sucked into this story. The mixture of genres really worked for me. I'd call this a post apocalyptic religious horror. I loved the way religious beliefs and practices are toyed with and manipulated. The pacing was perfectly done. I loved everything about it.

This author wrote an absolutely-amazing-and-I-love-it-but-it’s-definitely-not-for-everyone book about legalized cannibalism. So you can bet I jumped at the chance to read this ARC from NetGalley during Spooky Szn.

It’s got tropes I love: mysterious apocalypse situation in the outside world, weird religious-cult things happening in the inside world. It’s short, it’s good… but it’s one of those Vague Books. The kind where you have to piece together what’s happening and a lot of questions aren’t answered. It also doesn’t really go anywhere unexpected… nothing here that you wouldn’t expect to read in a book like this.

So yeah, it’s good, just not the OMGAMAZING book that first one was. Rounding up in the end because it’s not like it’s bad. It’s short and the vibes are strong. It’s just not as groundbreaking as, say, a book about institutionalized cannibalism.

Thank you Scribner and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!


Pub date: 4th of March 2025
Rating: 3.5/5


As someone who fell in love with Tender Is The Flesh, I was super excited when I received a copy of Bazterrica's latest work, The Unworthy.

I went in basically knowing it had two elements that made me foam at the mouth: religious imageries/cults and an apocalyptic setting. I was also rather intrigued by the short length of this novel(la?) and wondered if it would still pack the same punch at merely 200 pages.

Let's get one thing out of the way: this was disturbing. And I don't mean the scared disturbing, but rather the vile inducing, i-need-a-shower disturbing. The author has such a unique talent for inducing dread in readers, making them prisoners of the worlds she creates.

The reason I'm stuck between giving this a 3.5 or a 4 stars is hard to put into words. I liked the story. Perhaps it was a bit too lyrical for my personal taste, but it's hard to disregard Bazterrica's prose. Her penmanship is remarkable, just as it was in Tender Is The Flesh. And whilst I could understand the use of a dramatic prose to enhance the haze and fever this book engulfs the reader in, I found that I often had to stop myself from skimming the Baudelaire-esque descriptions of the grotesque in order to recenter myself and get a better understanding of the story. Nevertheless I was mostly okay with the prose, as I understood its purpose was setting the atmosphere.

What I did struggle with quite a bit, and that, post finishing the book, was the general vagueness of everything. Objectively, I can, again, understand that the lack of fundamental understanding, both of the apocalypse and the religious order, adds to the feelings of isolation and claustrophobia the reader might encounter. However I found myself wishing I had gotten a better understanding of what truly went down behind closed doors and of the other characters. Most of them were left too opaque for my liking and perhaps if another 50 or 100 pages were added, I'd had felt more satiated or perhaps less wary from those villains I ended up knowing so little about.

This book is not for everyone: it is gross, disturbing and not easy to read. But for those who can stomach Agustina Bazterrica's messed up worlds, get ready to immerse yourself in bleakness that could make Russian Lit seem joyous.

Well this was equally disturbing and horrifying. I enjoyed the way the author combined a dystopian hellscape and a religious cult, but unfortunately I just felt it needed more depth. I have mixed emotions. The brutality was off the charts and for that I was grateful the book was short. I wish it spent more time on different aspects of the story that could have been explored deeper.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, having read Tender is the Flesh I wanted to see how the author transitioned into a story that held religious concepts. I thought this was done wonderfully with how the timeline was crafted and the world was built. I will warn this book has no chapters which can be intimidating. For those who didn't like Tender is the Flesh I wouldn't shy away from this one, I liked this better between the two.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica is a gripping and unsettling exploration of power, violence, and societal decay. As a reader, I was both disturbed and mesmerized by the chilling dystopian world Bazterrica creates, where the lines between humanity and cruelty blur. The novel's haunting themes and stark prose left me questioning the cost of survival in a dehumanized society long after finishing it.

Perfect for fans of the books: Jawbone, I Who Have Never Known Man, The Handmaid's Tale, Boys in the Valley, The Trials of Anna Thalberg, and Carnality

I read “Tender is the Flesh” at the recommendation of a friend without knowing anything about its plot and I really enjoyed it. It was disturbing - but I liked it. I was stoked to see a new novel by Agustina Bazterrica.

This one was written with a specific point of view but still had Bazterrica's voice throughout. The crossed out passages and abrupt entries were different and fun along with the style of storytelling. Just when it needed to the story expanded and we started to learn more about our narrator. It was graphic but still emotional in a way that was unexpected.

I really liked this one.

This is just the right kind of horror for me. You are immediately dropped into this story and almost left to feel your way in the dark alongside the main character. All you know is that she has been a naughty ‘unworthy’ and may have baked cockroaches into someone’s food. And that first chapter alone cemented the tone of this novella.

In a world full of environmental disasters and technological decline a small group of young women, dress plainly and worship Him, someone they believe can save them from the disasters outside of their grounds. Surrounded by (woods) where one day our main character meets a runaway named Lucia who climbed the wall and changed everything. She begins to slowly undermine the Superior Sister and draw our Main Character into finally breaking free.

If you like the psychology of cults and brainwashing, religious settings and Sapphic romance, this book combines them all!

bazterrica is a master of the craft, a master of storytelling, and the queen of dystopia. everything she writes is like a slow descent into madness— for the readers, not the characters, who are already far gone. another gut punch of a novel from MOTHER!!!

I absolutely loved this book. I read it in a day. One of the best cult books I've ever read. Written so beautful and grotesque. A short premise without giving too much away. Therr lies a cult in the deep woods who worship a god which is not named. There are many fractions of this cult. Each experience different methods of torture and enlightment. What transpires from there you will have to read.

I LOVE AGUSTINA! Her writing is so powerful and beautiful. I ate this book up! Just like all of her others lol

This book swallows you whole. The growing promise of hope in parallel with the mounting horror of the reality of the Sisterhood is dizzying and overwhelming. The lyricism lulls you through the bleak, taking you by the hand as you stumble through this post-apocalyptic reality.

Highly recommended. Easily 5 stars.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for this ARC! Honestly not even sure what I just read but I know it was certainly five stars. The imagery was beautiful and heartbreaking. I couldn't put it down! I'll definitely be preordering a copy to have on my shelves.

This book is vicious and horrifying and teeming with violence. Our narrator lives in a somewhat distant future, as part of a religious sisterhood. The sisterhood lives together in a vacant convent of sorts, run by a sadistic Sister Superior and a messianic man referred to only as “He.” A newcomer arrives from the dreaded outside world and our narrator’s beliefs are slowly challenged. I was grateful for the short length of this novel because it is punishing, revolving largely around the torture suffered by the women of this sisterhood. I didn’t have fun reading it, but the writing was so compelling I couldn’t put it down. I loved the writing choices here - the story is written as a diary of our narrator, with words crossed out or entries ending suddenly, which I felt really added to the characterization of our narrator. The first paragraph drops you right into this hellscape and doesn’t let up until the brutal last page. If you’re down for this kind of horror, the horror of what people can do to one another, I can’t recommend it enough.

The world goes to sh*t and it results in depraved individuals creating a cult. What more could you want from this book? As those of us who read it learned from Tender is the Flesh, Bazterrica does not hold back when it comes to describing things that make your skin crawl, and The Unworthy is no different.

The description of this book had made at convent (why do so many horrible things occur in spaces that are supposed to be sacred?), dystopian/catastrophe/climate crisis. We're seeing much of the latter play out in our own lives and maybe I hope that by reading so many books about it I'll be better prepared when the world shuts down or the earth implodes. As for our narrator, following along as she digs up her memories and tries not to get caught makes for pulse-pounding page turning. You want to know more. You can't help yourself - you need to know what's going on behind the curtain. The disjointed writing style initially confused me, but I realized that this was necessary to better understand what the narrator is experiencing. The last 30 pages were a whirlwind.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Scribner for a chance to read this book!

"The Unworthy" is a story where I was constantly trying to figure out what was real and what was the lie the narrator was telling herself. This book has one of the most unreliable narrators I've ever seen, but it works to its advantage. You go into this story because brutally thrown into its world headfirst. Whatever you think the world is like, it's not. The slow reveal of how reality truly is within this story was honestly compelling. I found myself driven to finish the story just so I could understand. This story is told mostly as if you are a reader reading a journal of someone long gone, living in a very different existence than the one the reader is in. I didn't realize that the story is written in a journal style until I was about a quarter way into the book. Sometimes passages would randomly stop in the middle, and at first, I thought there was an issue with my copy of the book. Until I realized that no, that was a purposeful style choice. The story is told in stolen moments and snatches of lost memories that come back to the surface. suddenly Because of this, the stories can feel a bit disjointed at moments. Again, this appears to be a purposeful style choice rather than a side effect of bad writing. The story is fast and it was over all too soon. It felt like I only got a quick glance into a world both wholly unalike our reality while also being disturbingly close to our possible future, and I think that quick glance was all I could handle.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

As someone who loved Tender is the Flesh, I was excited to dig into Augustina Bazterrica’s latest offering. While the prose was gorgeous and unrelenting in its horror, this one fell a little short for me. I wanted to know more about the apocalypse, and the story felt a little disjointed. It was still an entertaining and horrific read, I just didn’t feel the same visceral horror that the author’s first novel gave me.

What a start to the spooky season!

Dark, violent, and brief, Bazterrica recall's Del Toro's early films. What a fun read.

This was fantastically eerie, and a great use of the epistolary form reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale.

I was first introduced to Agustina Bazterrica in 2022 when I picked up her novel Tender is the Flesh. While it was so vivid that it was often difficult to stomach, it remains one of my favorite novels and the ending was so powerful it still haunts me nearly two years later. Needless to say, I was so incredibly excited to be given the opportunity to read her latest novel, The Unworthy.

The Unworthy follows a young woman who writes in her cell in a convent in the (maybe not so distant) future where climates have soared and natural disasters have destroyed the earth as we know it. This woman, afraid of the repercussions of being caught sharing her story and the story of the treatment of these women in the convent, writes in the dark using whatever methods she can, sometimes even using her own blood.

As the story unfolds, we get small glimpses into the brutal and abusive religious cult she is part of, bits and pieces of her devastating past that led her to the convent doors, and her relationships with some of the other women.

I really enjoyed this novel. It did not hit me quite the same as Tender is the Flesh, but I absolutely love how Bazterrica looks at the most depraved, but also most inspiring, parts of humanity. I loved seeing the main character get bolder and bolder over time as a woman. This is beautiful, feminist work of literature.

The only gripe I had with the text was that I kind of went into it blind and felt the story was a little confusing at the beginning. Largely, this was because the text sometimes stops abruptly. As time passes, I learned these sections of the novel were like journal entries, which made so much more sense and made my reading experience more enjoyable. Had I read the summary of the text more closely, I would have been a lot better off.

I cannot wait to see what Bazterrica writes next. Rest assured, I will be lining up to read it!