Boy was Unholy Child a let down.

Assuming I’ve posted this on time, and haven’t been distracted by some other random flight of fancy, Halloween was only a few days ago, and in the entire month leading up to it, I had this kind of vision that I might spend October working my way through a bountiful harvest of spooky reads and creeptastic delights.

I was feeling especially primed and eager after reading What Moves The Dead, and The Fall Of The House of Usher earlier in the year, and though it has been just over two years since I devoured Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home, that book is never far from mind this time of year.

Also, I’m at a point in my life where the amount of books I own exceeds the amount of shelving I have to house them (despite something like five bookcases), and so rather than purchase something new, I decided to scour my home library and see what spooky treasures I’d left unread.

Unholy Child seemed to fit the vibe perfectly. An old paperback from (I think) 1980, the cover depicts a woman wearing a traditional black habit of a nun, looking mournfully down at her exceedingly pregnant belly.

I think this is another book I swiped from my parents’ shelf somewhere amongst the various moves and clutter-cleaning which we’re all prone to as time passes. Though I don’t remember exactly when I took the book home with me, I remember thinking then — as I did now — that it must be something like a Rosemary’s Baby knock off. Or perhaps even something similar to The Omen.

Unfortunately, I was nowhere even close.

What Unholy Child turned out to be was 400 pages of mildly interesting police procedural, and about 100 pages of courtroom drama.

Where I felt the novel excelled was in its promise — a nun is rushed to the hospital after experiencing a clearly traumatic homebirth but has no memory of the baby (which is missing and eventually found dead) or even of being pregnant — which was a whole heap of wtf is going on?!

Yet after this initial question the novel does little to keep readers on the hook. And with many, many POVs, some running concurrent investigations, I didn’t feel like I was learning some new aspect of the case in each scene, but rather that I kept re-reading the same information over and over again.

Even once I reconciled with myself that I wasn’t going to get any supernatural or paranormal fiction in this book, I was still waiting for a twist . . .

I would say Unholy Child’s most interesting character is probably Meg Gavin, a reporter who becomes somewhat obsessed with the case. She likes vodka sodas, using late 70’s slang, and having meaningless sex.

She’s probably the character with the most defined arc, and probably the piece of the story that comes closest to having something resembling a theme (like you’d learn about in English class). Her plot’s tension revolves around trying to uncover the truth of what happened to the pregnant nun, and as she comes to understand the nun more — how the nun is no longer in control of her own life and really never was — she is able to understand herself better too and sympathize with her. The nun’s entrapment may come from the courts, but for Meg it’s about the patriarchy.

It turns out, the book’s author Catherine Breslin, was also a reporter, and according to her obituary from 2016 (RIP), she covered a real story about a nun accused of killing her child. With this information, its hard not to see Meg as a kind of author stand-in which I actually kind of like for this novel. I haven’t been able to track down any old copies of Ms. Magazine (the publication Breslin wrote for), but it is interesting to think that perhaps a little bit of Breslin lives on as Meg Gavin.

On it’s own, Meg’s journey may have been enough for a compelling read, which is somewhat strange considering she’s ostensibly not the main character of the book. That would be Sister Angela, the nun, who unfortunately is also not even the 2nd most interesting character of the book. I felt that trophy went to Roy Danzinger, (small spoiler) the baby’s father, who has many POV scenes and some semblance of a life outside of the case. But all of this is (IMHO) completely under utilized and ends up seeming to have little bearing on the eventual result of the story.

Then of course there are the points of view of the other nuns, police investigating the crime, psychologists evaluating Sister Angela, doctors and DA’s. The list goes on.

I won’t bog this review down with much more, lest I repeat the very sin I am accusing the book of committing, but I mentioned Sister Angela not being the most interesting character in the book despite it being her story. I’d like to explain this a little further as I think my hang ups here, are a bit of a microcosm of where the whole book struggles.

It is hinted at several times that Sister Angela has some kind of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). At face value this should be something I LOVED about this book. Some of my favorite stories incorporate this element into their characters (immediate examples which come to mind are the Marc/Jake/Knight personas in Marvel’s Moon Knight, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, and even Shallan/Veil/Radiant from Stormlight Archive).

But in Unholy Child, I really struggled to enjoy this element of Sister Angela’s character, and it took me a long while to figure out why it wasn’t working for me. The answer here is that Sister Angela is never given any opportunity to confront Gayle (her alter-ego) and take back control of her story. It’s mentioned in the story that because this behavior is a protective measure, it’s unlikely that Sister Angela will ever really even become aware of Gayle and any time spent as Gayle will either just be remembered through the eyes of Angela, or lost completely, which Angela will convince herself is completely normal.

I don’t know much about DID, so I’m not really sure, but I’m assuming the situation is presented in this way because it is more “realistic”; however, it does not make for good fiction which is what this story is. Without that showdown, there is no catharsis. No sense of closure. Nothing to indicate that anything has changed at all and that the last 501 pages weren’t just a complete waste of time.

All of Breslin’s characters felt this way. Roy’s life is really no different at the end than it was at the beginning. In some respects, neither was Meg’s though perhaps she’s made an important revelation. This is how real life works, but not how fiction is supposed to, and ultimately I think it is what made the book so hard to read despite loads of potential.

Give ‘Unholy Child‘ a Read?

Ultimately, I would say you’re not missing much if you skip this one. Not only is it misleading in what kind of story it is supposed to be, but once you understand what it is you’re reading, the novel seems to under deliver on those promises to. Considering this was based off a true story, it’s perhaps understandable that the novel’s shape and plot would resemble ‘real life’ more than a work that was wholly fiction, but I think this one read a little too much like journalism. Compound this with too many POVs, and you’ve got a big book with little impetus to struggle through.

That’s all I have for you today. Has anyone read this before? What are your thoughts? Should it have been written as True Crime instead? How should the nun have gotten pregnant? Immaculate conception? Tryst with the Devil? Leave your thoughts in the comments. Looking forward to talking about this one with everyone!

Until next time . . .