Girls Against God
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto for fans of Clarice Lispector and Jeanette Winterson.
Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.
Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of queer feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art.
"Strange and lyrical. Hval’s writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence." —Publishers Weekly
"The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson." —Pitchfork
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hval's incendiary genre-bending novel (after Paradise Rot) is part meditation on art, sexuality, religion, and feminist theory, and part supernatural horror. In the present, the narrator watches a documentary about a black metal band shot in 1990 and reflects on her girlhood in southern Norway in the early 1990s, when she yearned to express hatred for the fundamental Christian culture that surrounded her ("When they say I'm a pRacticing chRistian' their guttural Rs make it sound as though the consonants have gone through purgatory"). In college, she resists the oppression of academia and a male-dominated music scene. Seeing no path to becoming a performer in the male-dominated black metal scene, the narrator forms a coven in Oslo, with whom she performs and documents rituals such as sacrificing "art-babies" made on a 3-D printer and bathing in a ram's urine. Throughout, Hval, an experimental musician herself, employs a dirge-like repetition of themes (feminist rage prominent among them), which enlivens her witchy visions and sets the stage for a reincarnated Edvard Munch, on the run from the vengeful subject of his painting Puberty. Hval's fascinating exploration is not for the faint of heart, but those who like it dark will find this right up their alley.
