Little Sisters of the Apocalypse

Little Sisters of the Apocalypse is a 1994 novel by Kit Reed.

In Little Sisters, Kit Reed tells two stories: one an allegory, really, of capitalism, sexism, and anger, and the other a sparsely narrated, presumably autobiographical, story of her mother. The two stories are interwoven throughout -- several pages of the allegory/plot, a couple of lines of the autobiography. In the one, a gated community of women waits the homecoming of their men, back from war. Meanwhile, the poor & downtrodden that the men evicted to create the gated community stew in their own anger and plan a bloody revenge. And an order of computer-programming, motorcycle-riding, leather-wearing nuns is drawn to the gated community, perhaps to help the women. Various characters are played out: a capable competent woman, the leader of the community, who doesn't want to give up power and live under sexism when the men come back, but who likes men; a woman addicted to sex & romance who in the absence of men begins to hate them and want to kill them; another woman whose father and husband both went to war but who misses her father more; the leader of the disenfranchised (named "Queenie," for welfare queen, perhaps?), who is angry because of class differences but also because she is ugly; the leader of the nuns; and a sleazy handyman in the women's community who is the distillation of sexism.