A nunsploitation horror that belts out several gross notes and moments of fairly extreme cruelty but which still manages to tell an engaging story. Only for those who are ok with the harder edge of horror, but when it hits it hits.
Summary
The sisters of the Sant’Arcangel1 are trapped by winter storms. Right before the first snow flakes fell, a young girl was found by Sisters Ursula and Isabella. The girl had wounds upon her back and her mouth was full of dirt. A young doctor, Henrik, stays both to help the girl and to continue his affair with Sister Gertrude, becoming likewise trapped for the winter’s duration.
Only why is the Mother Superior so insistent that the girl can’t stay? And what’s with the strange black growths starting to appear?
A novel of gore, violence, temptation, and body horror.
Content Notes: (click the spoilered text to reveal) XWAAwUW3ws4, nqOTg6 5OW3 Vgy, Eq6p LqOOqO, Nqss qR Eq6w3p XqAJOq3, nqOTg6 vAsgOJwqA, VKwOwJ9W3 uWORWOg. In general, it’s body horror + nunsploitation and moderately extreme. If you are playing it safe, it might not be the book for you.
Review
There is a scene in David Sodergren’s The Suffering that made me glad I was not eating blueberry pie while reading it.
This scene does not involve blueberry pie. Thank God. It would have been too much, otherwise.
I like Sodergren’s books enough that I had pre-ordered this without really paying attention to any publisher summaries. When I opened it and realized it was going to be nunsploitation — and nunsploitation written by Sodergren at that — I very nearly just backed out of it and put it aside indefinitely. It had the potential to go in exactly the direction that lead me to greatly reducing my horror consumption this year: cheap, easy shots told without barely any care or construction.
Nunsploitation is a genre where a great number of folk have given into a few heavy tropes in a similar way as when you see a group of burned out soldiers in a zombie film. It’s tiring.
I kept going but kept a tally running. Too many easy cliches in too few pages, and I was ready to DNF it without regret. Then the book mostly surprised me. I read it and had a grand old, grossed out time. By around the 1/3 mark, I was pretty dedicated in figuring out where this might be going. I just had to walk off a few of the scenes.
Even though it is nunsploitation, it is fairly gentle with some of the most overused genre tropes. Sure, we have the classic giallo aspects of horny nuns and overbearing nuns and lesbian nuns, but to a degree folks are kind of chill about it. Sister Whip-Happy [no, not her actual name] is probably too much and could have been generally cut for all he used her as a character, but you want a bit of sin in your horror fiction, eh? Just keep it fresh.
The “there is no blueberry pie but my god” scene is the biggest violation of easy-bake profaning and even there Sodergren gives something of a balance.
A horrible, terrible balance because this book is really good at crafting its gross-out scenes. It’s a bit weird to go back over it in my mind and realize how relatively few there are. The ones that are there, though? Lord almighty. The book is a song in that regard. Dwell in moments of humanity for a few pages, and then switch it up to full on teeth and tummy gurgles.
Less well balanced is the character count. And this is hard to sum up. There are not many characters, it is practically a bottle episode as far as construction. There still feels like too many folks are in the book, or maybe that the folks that are present need to be more so. Henrik and Sister Gertrude feel too minor to be secondary characters but too major to be tertiary (they have plenty of scenes, but I never connected anywhere near to them as I did to Ursula/Lucia). Others are clearly just there to pad the death counter like a buffer for the mains. Half-colored drawings. Withheld and still held out to be witnessed.
I will conclude the review proper saying that the ending at first greatly irritated me but after a few hours of thinking about it, I applaud Sodergren for the pitch perfect tribute to the genre type. I think I’m still slightly annoyed at it but also deeply appreciate its sass. Which means it is a perfectly unsettlingly horror ending.
If, and only if, you like gross horror or want to see a bit more “modern” glance at nunsploitation that still manages a quite retro vibe, then yes. This one is quite good at it.
- I have no idea if that makes sense as a name. I suspect Sodergren is playing at a pun but I’m unsure. ↩︎