The Unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica
Feminist horror has long served as a vessel for confronting the depths of systemic and cultural violence against women. From the existential dread of The Yellow Wallpaper to the visceral brutality of modern femgore fiction like Monika Kim’s The Eyes are the Best Part, the genre has laid bare the grotesque mechanics of patriarchal control. Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy is no different. Clocking in at under 200 pages, The Unworthy delivers a harrowing vision of institutionalised misogyny, exposing the structural forces that brutalise, silence, and consume women. The Unworthy is designed to be unsettling, nauseating, and claustrophobic, reminding us of how close fiction comes to touching on truth.
The Unworthy has big shoes to fill. Following the viral success of Tender is the Flesh, a novel that turned cannibalism into a grim metaphor for capitalist consumption, Bazterrica turns her gaze toward a different kind of horror, one rooted in religious extremism and the psychological warfare of captivity. Bazterrica is a writer who is not content with simply exploring extreme themes. She has a penchant - and a clear enjoyment - for crafting narratives, although slight in form, that carry the weight of a novel twice in size. Consider this: If Tender Is the Flesh dissects the dehumanisation of bodies, The Unworthy obliterates the soul.
Set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic climate disaster known as “the wars”, we enter the House of the Sacred Sisterhood. In this cloistered, authoritarian institution masquerading as a sanctuary, it is ruled by the faceless but omnipotent figure of “Him,” a spectral patriarch who enforces his ideology through the brutal stratification of women into cruel hierarchies. At the bottom sits our unnamed narrator, an “unworthy”, given shelter but granted no special honours. Above her sit the “Minor Saints”, “Diaphanous Spirits”, and “Full Auras” - women who have respectively had their tongues cut out, eardrums destroyed, and eyelids sewn shut, sanctified through mutilation. At the pinnacle are the “enlightened”, unseen, locked behind a black door, their screams the only proof of their continued existence.
There is no solidarity here. Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale or I Who Have Never Known Men, this institution is not a community nor a utopia of peace and love. We know hierarchies breed resentment, and this is no different. The desire to be “enlightened” demands payment, an ugly currency that promises safety. However, suffering is consecrated. Faith is used as a weapon. And the women are only too happy to dish out the most emetic acts to rise to this coveted status. Bazterrica dismantles the modern concept of ‘girl code’ and reconstructs it into something far more Machiavellian - an economy of barbarism in which survival depends on complete complicity, total obedience and absolute servility.
It would be foolish to ignore the intentional placement of a male figure at the helm of this rotten institution. Bazterrica has constructed him to curate a nightmarish community - one of his making - brandishing the motto “Without faith, there is no refuge” without prejudice - a nod to a tale as old as time: obey or accept exile. Insidious in its simplicity, this searing critique of patriarchal rule is all too familiar. It lends a hand to the quiet echo of real-world religious dogma that has historically been used to subjugate women. Bazterrica deftly weaponises the language of devotion and purity to interrogate how violence becomes sacred under patriarchy. For example, women here are not just victims but also willing enforcers of immense savagery, proving how oppression can be internalised and re-enacted. Unsurprisingly, it’s all in His name.
Told through the narrator’s clandestine diary, The Unworthy fragments itself into splintered entries - some are short, decorated with unfinished sentences, while other passages are more detailed - mimicking the disintegrated world outside and the broken psyche of those trapped behind stoney walls. Bazterricas’s decision to formulate the narrative as a diary is significant. Our narrator is given a chance to reclaim a whisper of agency with a small - but bold - act of rebellion in a dictatorial system. Writing, here, is both salvation and defiance, a reclamation of self in the face of mass dehumanisation.
When Lucía, another “unworthy”, finds her way to the Sisterhood, she quickly disrupts its fragile equilibrium. Lucía is different from the others, not just in her presence but in what she represents. An emblem of resistance, she reawakens our narrator, and a bond between the two women, one that doesn’t bloom into a romantic cliché or revolutionary fervour, unfurls slowly and subtly. But kinship and hope are dangerous. Bazterrica reliably reminds us of this as the story unfolds.
What distinguishes The Unworthy from other dystopias is its refusal to indulge in grand rebellion. There is no triumphant overthrow of tyranny, ‘Mockingjay heroines’, or final uprising. Just the slow, grinding, almost mechanical mundaneness of power and the people forced to live - or break - within it. Bazterrica asks: When tyranny is total, is resistance even possible, or is survival itself a kind of surrender? I’ll leave that with you.
The narrow worldview we are offered is intentional, marrying the confinement of the Sisterhood’s residents with the suffocating walls of the monastery. This may frustrate readers who crave expansive lore, but the sense of unbearable claustrophobia is precisely the point. The House of the Sacred Sisterhood is not just a setting but a system; we are meant to feel as trapped as its inhabitants.
Bazterrica does not write horror for catharsis. Her work is an endurance test. There are no flickers of hope, no gallows, humour, or tidy resolution. The cruelty is relentless, not for shock value but because anything less would feel dishonest. The Unworthy forces us to bear witness. It asks us not to observe suffering from a safe distance but to feel it. It does not flinch, and it does not let us look away, either.
Feminist horror has always interrogated the brutal mechanics of power, particularly in women’s lives. International voices like Bazterrica’s continue to push the genre into darker, more unrelenting territory. The Unworthy is essentially a marathon, despite its sprint-like size. A grim endurance test stripped of satire and without reprieve. Bazterrica immerses us in a universe where mercilessness is systemic rather than sensational, and the notion of resistance provides no comfort. Bazterrica does an excellent (terrifyingly so) job at depicting oppression to force us to inhabit it. The horror lies in how disturbingly familiar it feels to current real-world events.
The Unworthy is undoubtedly horror in its rawest form. In this reality, horror resides not in farcical monsters, ghosts, or ghouls but in power structures so vast and indoctrinated they become invisible and naturally fade into the background of everyday life. Bazterrica doesn’t give us the comfort of an insurrection or a dramatic gung-ho mutiny. Instead, The Unworthy is a mirror, reflecting a world disturbingly close to our own.
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