The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica: A haunting, lyrical descent into devotion and decay

From the author of Tender Is the Flesh comes another brutal yet mesmerizing vision of humanity undone. In The Unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica imagines a world consumed by climate collapse and desperation, where one woman survives inside a secretive religious order that thrives on submission and silence. From her isolated cell, she writes her story in scraps of ink, dirt, and blood—confessing, questioning, and unraveling as the walls of her faith begin to crack.

This is horror not of jump scares, but of ideology and indoctrination. The convent’s rigid hierarchy—the Enlightened and the Unworthy—mirrors the broken world beyond its gates, one where water is scarce, and mercy even scarcer. When a new woman arrives and challenges what the narrator believes to be truth, the cracks widen. What emerges is a story about power, memory, and the price of obedience in a collapsing world.

What struck me most was the novel’s voice. Bazterrica’s writing has an unmistakable cadence, both lyrical and unsettling, that feels entirely her own—though credit also belongs to Sarah Moses’s exquisite translation. There’s a rhythm to the prose that doesn’t reveal itself immediately. At first, I stumbled over its strangeness, but once I found the pulse, it became hypnotic. In an age when machine-generated writing is becoming ever more common, The Unworthy is a potent reminder of how distinctly human prose can sound—feverish, flawed, alive.

The book’s epistolary form—written as a secret confession—can make the opening chapters disorienting. We are thrust into the narrator’s consciousness midstream, piecing together who she is and what this “Sacred Sisterhood” truly represents. But this structure soon becomes one of the book’s great strengths. The interruptions in her writing, the omissions, the places where she stops just short of revealing something, create a maddening sense of tension. It’s as though she’s whispering the truth to us through the cracks in the wall, one forbidden word at a time.

Critics have called The Unworthy “brutal and beautiful,” and that’s exactly right. The novel reads like a fever dream, its horror rooted in belief, climate despair, and the fragility of memory. It recalls The Handmaid’s Tale, yes, but it’s also something darker and stranger—closer in spirit to Cormac McCarthy or even Shirley Jackson, where beauty and brutality coexist sentence by sentence.

This is not a comforting book, nor an easy one. But it’s one that rewards patience, unsettling you in ways that feel both ancient and eerily modern. Bazterrica’s vision is uncompromising, her prose unforgettable.

Have you read The Unworthy or Bazterrica’s earlier Tender Is the Flesh? I’d love to hear your thoughts—share them in the comments below.

Related Content

• Agustina Bazterrica on violence, dystopia, and the power of art (CrimeReads)
• “Apathy is also a choice”: A conversation with Agustina Bazterrica (Latin American Literature Today)
• Tender Is the parable (Jeremy Lassen)
•  Agustina Bazterrica tells us how she stays connected to her passion for literature (Audible Blog)

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