First impressions review: The Worm and His Kings, by Hailey Piper
This little cosmic horror novella is dense, in the best way. While I’d normally breeze through something this length (114 pages) in a day, I found myself wanting to pause and chew over each section like it was a chunk of flavorful rye bread…at least up until page 91, at which point I didn’t dare put it down! Premise: Homeless woman Monique is looking for her girlfriend Donna, who disappeared without a trace. She’s heard rumors that other women have gone missing around an old abandoned subway tunnel, so she goes back there and witnesses a person actually being snatched by something clearly not human. She follows the monster down the maw of the tunnel, and things only get weirder from there.
Monique’s back story and relationship with Donna are revealed slowly, in little snippets of her thoughts. While you can’t help but root for Monique to save the woman she loves, I started to have some niggling doubts early on. Donna, in Monique’s mind, just seems too perfect – always patient, always cheerful, no matter how much their lives unravel. Surely, I thought, she must have at least SOME flashes of resentment that people’s intolerance of their relationship tanked her legal career and landed them on the streets. Well…yes. Donna isn’t quite the paragon Monique imagines! But to talk more about that I’ll have to get into **spoilers**.
With the help of a female physicist who is looking for a vanished colleague, Monique infiltrates a subterranean cult center. The cultists worship the Worm, some kind of interdimensional being they believe can reshape the world. Supposedly it did this once before, smashing up Pangea when the civilization that inhabited it denied him a Bride, making way for humanity. Fittingly – and refreshingly different from how Lovecraft would have written a story like this! – the cultists are generally people who are doing pretty well for themselves, but still want MORE1. Monique is convinced that Donna is being kept as the potential bride and descends further into the earth to try and find her.
1. “Bouchard clapped his hands, commanding silence…authority breathed off men like him, almost a smell that Monique couldn’t name…Lighting the floors beneath the Empire Music Hall couldn’t be cheap. Some of them had to have money, or they knew others who did.”
Monique’s transness isn’t brought up directly for some time. But, especially if you know the author is a trans woman, there are clues you might pick up on fairly early, such as Monique strongly disliking the flatness of her chest, or feeling that going back to her parents would kill her slowly just as much as the streets. True, a cis lesbian could have similar feelings about unsupportive family…but the sense of having to hide who you are every minute of every day would likely be stronger if you were trans! And then there are the scars on her lower torso, which when their source is revealed…man, “back alley gender confirmation surgery” is halfway a horror story already, even before someone tries to steal your kidney! Doctor Sam ends up being an effective metaphor, though, for the kind of people who say they are going to fix the world and end up smashing it up worse.
It is heartbreaking – though, as I hinted, not entirely unexpected – that when Monique finally finds Donna it, it turns out that she has been orchestrating the whole thing! Turns out she isn’t so chill about losing her comfortable life as she appeared:
“Dead and alive, happened and never happened, the Worm sews contradictions, defies logic, and rebuilds reality into a stronger structure – his will. He willed us together, Monique…We’ll do right by him, and for that he’ll grant us the impossible. He’ll fashion a world without hate.”
But for that, Donna is willing to sacrifice other women snatched off the streets, and make Monique the Bride of the Worm whether she likes it or not.
Monique is a fighter, though, and she makes an ending that is dark but – if I understood it correctly – satisfying. Halfway accidentally, she becomes the Worm, and uses her power to fix Old Time. That means erasing the path that leads to humans…and with it Donna, and the hate the two of them faced. The last paragraph could imply that something went wrong with this fierce but, in many ways, well-intentioned action, and that all possible universes were destroyed. But I tend to think that it is only meant to be the destruction of the version of the universe we know.
