God’s Vengeance by Theresa Derwin

Book Review

Pauline Morgan

One of the dilemmas any author faces is how long a work should be. Some mentors will tell them to write the story to the length naturally wants to be. While this can be sound advice, there can be any number of other factors that have to be considered. Most mainstream publishers want a three hundred page novel and, if it is a genre novel, a trilogy. Short stories, especially for anthologies or magazines, often have a word limit. Other factors that might influence the length of the work can include time constraints and the health of the author; committing to a novel can take a year’s worth of writing time. This particular novella began as a short story, but the publisher could see the merit in it being longer. Due to Derwin’s health issues, it has taken ten years for this book to reach publication.

            As the first-person narrator of God’s Vengeance is, at the start, a fifteen-year-old girl, this could be regarded as a Y/A book, but the nature of her experiences puts it into a much more adult category. Set a couple of decades into the future, the world has been ravaged by a lethal sexually transmitted disease. The result is that to survive, sex is off the menu. Ella Bassett, the narrator, sister of Jake, the first known person to succumb to the killer virus. Although she is intimately involved in the early art of this novella, it doesn’t really take off until she is forcibly recruited into the program designed to repopulate the world.

            Ella, and an unspecified number of teens, are incarcerated in an isolated facility where they are no longer regarded as people but as breeding machines. They are subjected to a myriad of indignities with the single aim of producing babies. Ella discovers that she and the other girls are regularly drugged and artificially inseminated without their knowledge. They are even paired up with the expectation that some will conceive naturally. The descriptions of what happens to the girls in the facility are harrowing, and it is not just the girls who are humiliated.

            Ella was traumatised before she ended up in the facility and had difficulty coming to terms with her brother’s death. That partly accounts for the perception that she is a passive character. It is only when she is among others in a similar situation to hers that she begins to own her situation and become a more active agent. Some of the other characters have more spark than she does, a distraction from her voice.

            Scenes within the facility, and Ella’s developing relationships with the other inmates are well handled, but this is just a snapshot of a bigger situation. There is enough potential here to make it much longer. Part of this lies in the fact that there is an issue with the time scale. As the deadly plague is sexually transmitted, presumably by direct contact and exchange of fluids, rather than airborne, its spread will not be as rapid as diseases such as Covid-19. As with AIDS, governments are likely to advocate safe sex methods, testing and abstinence to contain it before resorting to drastic measures such as breeding camps. There are likely to be some people who are immune and others who are carriers. Even accounting for Ella’s brother, Jake, as patient zero (who must have been infected by a carrier) it would take many years before it became a worldwide crisis, which makes me wonder if there is a different agenda.

            The one character who stays on the sidelines and who is ubiquitous is Dr Blanchard. He is there from the start, when Jake falls ill, he seems to be the instigator of the breeding program; he runs the facility Ella is put in. He is there wherever she turns, and his apparent delight at having all these young adults under his dominion is creepy. He might be a government medical advisor, but he would not be the one to legislate for the behaviour of the population or allocate funding. This all happens too fast.

            Derwin is a writer who has brilliant ideas. The scenario of a future where all teens are condemned to forced breeding (in a world that started out overpopulated) is seriously unsettling, especially when all their rights have been taken away, just because they are uncontaminated virgins. The novella would have benefitted from a longer exploration of the situation at the start before Ella is rounded up for the program. It would also have been good to follow the youngsters adjusting to new circumstances after the events that complete this narrative. Having said that, it is important to remember that this is a futuristic horror novel, but there are already youngsters (mostly girls) who are experiencing the same lack of personal choice that is forced on Ella and her cohort. The result here is a set of uncomfortable images that stay with the reader and should be a wake-up call for some parts of society.