There’s a TikTok trend (which will probably be over by the time you read this) which is meant to look like a first-person horror video game with captions like “POV: YOU WAKE UP DURING THE BLACK PLAGUE (1351)” and “POV you wake up as a worker in Titanic in 1912”. There are milder and sillier examples, but most have a scary, historical vibe. This is one of the few instances of “POV” being used correctly on the app, rather than used as a lazy setup for a punchline.

First-person perspective is much more common in literature, and while you can’t really do it “wrong,” you can do it badly. Brandon Taylor wrote a scathing essay about this. His beef is more broad and nuanced than mine. My bar is pretty low: if I’m reading a story told in first-person narration, I just need to understand WHY I am reading it. Like, is this character talking to me? How? Are they writing the story down? Why? When? Are they telling the story to another character? Reminiscing to themselves? It usually boils down to “WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO”?

So I’ll give The Unworthy this: we know who the unnamed first person narrator is talking to, and how, and why. She is writing in a diary. And not just any diary: a forbidden diary made of foraged materials that must be hidden every night. A diary she writes to and for herself, to “remember who [she] was,” but later imagines someone (us, I guess) might find and read.

However. The first-person point of view in The Unworthy is very limiting. Taylor notes that many such narrators are “lacking both explanatory power and the impulse toward explication itself.” This is a problem in any kind of fiction, but in speculative fiction, it’s particularly frustrating. Bazterrica has to build two worlds simultaneously: the outside world, afflicted by plague and climate disaster and war; and the cloistered world of the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, in which our narrator has found refuge. The reader needs a sense of why anyone would stick around, eating crickets and being tortured, and why the rank and file of this House, the titular Unworthy, want so badly to be elevated to the ranks of the Chosen.

The narrator’s diary has to keep the reader apprised of the present-day plot inside the House, and the backstory of how society collapsed. But our narrator is not really a main player in either. She is an observer. She relays the goings-on in the House, where young women are segregated into castes and tortured by a sexually sadistic Superior Sister and a mysterious man known only has “Him,” while through her memories, we find out what it was like to survive the collapse of society, but never get an idea of what exactly happened, or how fast, or when. And I never got a sense of how any of it felt, for the narrator or anyone else.

There are some interesting elements here. The writing is repetitive, but in a good way: it’s incantatory and reminiscent of chanting, which sets the right culty mood. I love the way He constantly warns the women against worshipping “the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother,” (though as a lapsed Catholic, it sounds a little strange to talk about a mother rather than a holy spirit) and I love the House’s unofficial motto, “without faith, there is no refuge”. 

I question the narrator’s need to transcribe that motto quite so many times though. The Unworthy leans a little too hard into the diary thing, the narrator constantly stopping mid-sentence when she’s scared of being caught, and crossing out dangerous thoughts. But it also commits the cardinal sin of epistolary novels: including shit a real person would never bother to write down. We’re almost in “Castle AUGHHHH” territory. You’d think if you were writing in ink made from scrounged materials, and sometimes your own BLOOD, you would simply not write the same words over and over again. Or, say, keep those super-subversive thoughts in your head rather than writing them down just to cross them out. At the very least, not include quite so many parenthetical asides.

Speaking of blood, given this author’s reputation for gross-out writing (her previous novel featured cannibalism), I was expecting a lot more from the violent scenes. The various castes within the monastery are disfigured to denote their status (eyes sewn shut, eardrums perforated, tongue cut out, etc.) and the Superior Sister loves a good torture sesh for anyone who gets out of line. But because nothing bad happens to our narrator -no one sews her eyes shut or sticks a needle in her nipple or whips her or hangs her (I’m leaving out the one actually kind of cool/disgusting punishment, but even it is glossed over) – we are kept at a remove. We can only access the shocking stuff through her perspective, mediated by a diary. 

Leaving aside the diary conceit and perspective, The Unworthy also suffers because none of this is new, and many have done it better. I recently read Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell, a scary-realistic account of climate change-driven societal collapse and recovery that offers real insight into a possible future. If you’re looking for violence, degradation, lesbian panic, and religious trauma, you can go all the way back to the 18th century and read The Nun by Denis Diderot or The Monk by Matthew Lewis. I promise you, there are scenes in both that will disturb you more than anything this sacred sisterhood gets up to. If you’re looking for a book about cloistered young women trying to stay safe in an uncertain world, who experience mystical shit and bully each other, try Abigail by Magda Szabó. Each of these books make the best of their genres (speculative fiction, gothic x2, and YA, respectively) and are original and insightful. The Unworthy falls right into the pitfalls of its genres (YA, dystopian) and its first-person, epistolary perspective.

Brandon Taylor likens the glut of first person novels to reality TV, calling them “casting tape fiction.” The Unworthy is even worse: it’s TikTok fiction. “POV: You Wake up in a Weird BDSM Cult after Surviving Climate Disaster.” If I wanted that, I’d go to my for you page.