The Rotting Room (Hysterical Nun Violence Horror)

 

An abbey on a hill filled with nuns seems the perfect place for a young woman recently involved with Satanic forces to find God again. After all, how likely is it that the Sisters of Divine Innocence are also in servitude to Satan? Viggy Parr Hampton creates a world of mystery, death, and unholy forces in The Rotting Room that is horrifying in ways I didn’t expect. I went into the book expecting another run-of-the-mill demonic nun horror story and left reading it feeling sad, scared, and angry. The Sisters of Divine Innocence are unsettling because they seem to believe that they remain in God’s favor, that he has not abandoned them. The rotting room is pulled directly from history, which adds another layer of unease to the story. Being placed on a chair that allows fluids to drain, watched, and then prayed over by nuns is super creepy. I personally do not want that when I die. 

 

The Sisters in front of me had all bowed their heads, and the silence was deafening, broken only a few times by small coughs. With their heads lowered, I could see the man’s body a bit better. To my astonishment, and in stark contrast to Berta, his flesh appeared to already be decomposing, and at an unexpectedly rapid pace – his fingers, at least those which remained, had turned black at the tips, and his eyes were closed and sunken in his pale, withered face. A delicate drip-drop broke the silence.

 

Sister Rafaela is a character you both sympathize with and yell at for not trusting her intuition. Life has not been kind to her and misfortune seems to follow from her home, to the Rafaelites, and finally to the Sisters of Divine Innocence. I found that Parr writes Rafaela as an amalgamation of the traits that society views as “woman”. She is seen as naive, hysterical, attractive, and mentally unwell by her Sisters, family, and priests. Neither her words nor eyes can be trusted. It gets to the point where Rafaela doesn’t even trust herself, which makes the parts narrated by her an incredibly lonely experience at times. Father Bruno, the other narrator, is supposed to provide an outsider’s perspective of the abbey and Rafaela. This works well enough since he is a man and does not live on the property, putting him outside the daily life of the nuns and outside Rafaela’s mind. The Rotting Room takes many of the classic gothic traits (death, insanity, supernatural forces etc.)  and creates a story that leaves you feeling drained emotionally. The ending is bleak and feels like no resolution is met but isn’t a detriment to the story. It introduced a sense of foreboding that is hard to achieve but Hampton was able to do that within a relatively short amount of pages.

 

Viggy Par Hampton Official Instagram

Written by Caroline, Murderess of the Swine

The Rotting Room (2025)
Viggy Par Hampton (writer)
Cover Art: Mario Nevado
4.6 / 5