Jenny Hval

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

A Novel

Girls Against God

dyonisos.

“As I’ve come to understand it, God is a theoretical concept that only exists in books, while Gøud’s presence pulls southerners’ hair back into tight knots and twists their throats into nooses. It’s Gøud that records written warnings in my diary when I don’t memorise the third verse of our set psalm, ‘Moon and Sun’. ”

I identify with the feminine parts, those left scattered around Adam’s body, the trash left behind by mankind’s fusion with God.

The girls try to define exactly where the boundary is; exactly when to stop. When does God come into the picture, when does God cum, when does something become sex?

james cao

It feels primitive and pitiful to say it, but I’m a primitive and pitiful person. 

referencing the southern Norwegian accent

Subculture always flows downhill, backward. Black metal is world famous now, but it has washed itself clean of subculture, the way social democracy rinsed off socialism. 

If God is in the mouth, we can teach you to spit, or to retch, to stretch out of yourself. 

As robots are half living and half dead; they speak the words of the machine with their own voices, like mediums, or like Pentecostals speaking in tongues. 

In the witches’ den, with Terese and Venke, I type into the search bar 

How the spiritual world is like the internet. 

Girls Against God quotes

Join the club