A collective of women ought to have a name, the way a mass of finches are a “charm,” or parrots a “pandemonium.” The struggle would be to find a term that accurately describes what an assembly of women can do together, and also how markedly different each woman—and group—is from the next. What word can possibly encapsulate the joy of women singing in harmony, the unease with which they might circle one another, the trust and distrust that can grow among their ranks?

In Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel, The Unworthy, women are quickly classified. The unnamed protagonist, who writes her story in secret from a former monastery, is one of the titular “unworthy,” a woman given shelter from the toxic, dusty, climate-ravaged outside world but granted no special honors besides, potentially, her survival. Above the monastery’s unworthy hover the “Minor Saints,” “Diaphanous Spirits,” and “Full Auras”—women who have, respectively, had their tongues sliced out, their eardrums punctured, and their eyelids sewn shut—all of whom are elevated (if you want to call it that) to a holy status. These are the “chosen”: With their mauled faces and special privileges (real meat and vegetables instead of the crickets the unworthy eat), they are simultaneously revered and loathed from the very start of the story. The “enlightened,” who hover over even the “chosen,” are locked behind a black door and never seen. Hierarchies breed a hell of a lot of sycophancy and resentment, and this one is no different.

Unlike the bunker in The Unworthy, this brand of female dystopia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All-female communities tend to be weirdly polarized in the cultural imagination. They’re either paradigms of peace and love or bastions of PMS-motivated backbiting. Particularly in genre fiction, the lines can be very stark. In Herland, the 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the author of the proto-feminist school-curriculum staple “The Yellow Wallpaper”—three male explorers discover a community in which women live and reproduce without men. They are awed by the women’s sense of harmony and fitness. Joanna Russ’s snarling 1975 novel, The Female Man, creates four societies. In one of them, women live without men—and without murder and sexual assault—and in another, the two sexes literally battle for dominance. The message of such stories is clear: On their own, women are free of the burden of violence and inequality.

The appeal of reading about female utopias has recently reached a new zenith. The novel I Who Have Never Known Men was published in 1995, but after its 2022 reissue, it has gone viral on BookTok and sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States. In the book, a group of women live in underground cages on a planet that some believe is not their own. They don’t know how they got there, but one day their guards flee for no clear reason, and they eventually establish a harmonious and cooperative society. There is sadness and death, but never real strife. Even when they must hurt one another—the narrator “know[s] what to do” with a knife to put her suffering sisters out of their misery—the bloodshed is compassionate.

Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book

This sunny side of dystopia stands at odds with a countervailing notion of women in isolation—the kind often perpetuated by novels set in boarding schools or convents—which dictates that woman’s natural enemy is woman. In the classic of the genre, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, most women trapped in a theocratic future America are forced to enslave or torture other women, but some of them actively enlist as foot soldiers in the effort. And outside the genre, girls in novels including Andrés Barba’s orphanage-set Such Small Hands and Mona Awad’s Bunny turn to cruelty when the walls close in on them.

On the surface, The Unworthy appears to fit squarely into this second canon. Yet Bazterrica’s world building and character development transcend this typology: The monastery is a hellhole masquerading as a shrine, and the women who walk its halls are both fiercely loyal and self-cannibalizing. In Bazterrica’s first novel to be translated into English, the similarly dystopian Tender Is the Flesh, human flesh is an industrialized commodity. In The Unworthy, she has similar preoccupations, focusing on how eagerly women might (proverbially) eat one another up. What stands out, though, is how readily she moves between the two opposing notions of what all-female communities can be. She shows us women pushed to extremes, who react with extreme behavior—but can they be faulted for that?

None of this is to say that The Unworthy occupies any sort of middle ground. The novel opens with malice: “Someone is screaming in the dark,” the unnamed narrator writes. “I hope it’s Lourdes. I put cockroaches in her pillow and sewed up the slip, so they struggle to get out, so they crawl under her head or over her face (and into her ears, I hope, nesting there, the nymphs damaging her brain).” Animosity is a founding principle of the story—and of the unworthy’s community. In this bunker run by the “Superior Sister” and an unseen, Wizard of Oz–like “He,” bloody punishments are so frequent that they have become the group’s currency. Women stick needles in one another’s nipples and are made to lie down on glass. They volunteer to walk on burning embers or take floggings with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Still, they are not only grateful to be there but desperate to climb the devotional ladder.

The group’s motto is “Without faith, there is no refuge,” which sounds like a standard religious tenet until you read it literally: If the women don’t commit, they will be without a home. The planet is essentially a desert. “The wars,” the narrator writes, “coincided with the disappearance of many territories, many countries, beneath the ocean.” The protagonist grew up in a world “that was degrading minute by minute. A world where water was scarce, and there was no school, no electricity. A world of floods, in which eight months of rain fell in less than an hour.” Bands of adults hunted packs of wild children. The novel’s rendering of global destruction goes beyond most climate fiction—there isn’t a drop of hope or a speck of verdure. No place can guarantee safety, but the Superior Sister implies that the holiness of the monastery’s “enlightened” inhabitants keeps it safe. It’s a tale as old as time: Pray to the right god, sacrifice in the right ways, and protection will encircle you.

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Except the horrors keep coming, despite the unworthy’s muttered prayers. The narrator’s notes, which she keeps tied to herself underneath her tunic or tucked under wooden floorboards, document her transformation from partial believer to total apostate as tension inside the community ratchets up. Lourdes, she of the cockroach pillowcase, leads a campaign of terror worthy of Robespierre. The women turn on one another more and more. The dynamic unravels even further when a stowaway—who has dragged herself through a hole in the wall—is found at the monastery and deemed clean and worthy enough to join their community. Lucía, the newcomer, possesses a gift, and a moral compass, and the hierarchy of the place begins to shift.

Bazterrica’s story—so cinematically gruesome that it could have been written as a treatment for an A24-produced horror film—comes at a strange inflection point for women in this country. (It was originally published in her native Argentina in 2023.) During recent elections, the media have sometimes treated women as a monolithic voting block; some analysts have credited or blamed them for Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s electoral victories, regardless of the clear reality that they do not universally share one another’s hopes, fears, or best interests.

The Unworthy strips away the idea, implicit in I Who Have Never Known Men and its ilk, that women are inherently good stewards, that their leadership would bring humanity into some kind of karmic balance. It does so not because it disdains women, but because it sees them. Lourdes is dastardly but pathetic. Lucía saintly but carnal. The narrator possesses a kind of bravery that can’t be activated on its own. We learn that the Superior Sister “fought in the water wars, the most violent ones, in which the millenary tribes were bombarded, and that she defended her own until the very end, that she was a prisoner, a slave, that she escaped.” Or so we are told. What we know is that she grips her power like a cane that supports her whole weight.

Depicting women in all their complicated glory isn’t especially novel or valiant, but Bazterrica’s novel tries something that most writers shy away from. She makes manifest the rot inside every human, and the tendency to portray them as sinners or saints. She does so not by eschewing extremes, but by embracing them, putting her women in an unendurable situation and then watching their moral compass whirl about in some fictional version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ugly times create ugly behavior—unless, that is, you can muster your righteous fortitude and carry on in the right direction.