Lies, Damn Lies

Worm

Worm is an online novel about super heroes. Set on a fictional Earth, where parallel dimensions exist, anyone has the potential to "trigger" and gain all sorts of wacky super powers. The story follows one Taylor Herbert, who is a bullied high school teenager who has the ability to control creepy crawlies, including spiders and indeed worms.

It is... massive. It is millions of words long, and took me about a month to read. Its also entirely online, and not even available in ebook form. Its clearly a first draft, and was written as the author went along. While it definitely has an overall plot its aiming for, it does tend to have an episodic feel to it. At its best, it is tense, thrilling, and fascinating, and has a great eye for character. At its worst it is nihilistic and too obsessed with meaningless fight scenes. At one point the story skips forward two years, and the comments were full of complaints. I could only be relieved that the author had finally decided not to show every detail of the story. There is some unpleasant content to the book, with some extremely horrific imagery turning up once the so called Slaughterhouse 9 turn up. Despite some very explicit violent scenes, the book is almost prudish when it comes to sex.

So this isn't the most positive review I've ever written, and theres a reason for that. I don't know if I'd recommend spending the time I did reading this, but it is compelling, and the length of the story means there is a very good plot arc for Taylor. The overarching plot also mostly makes sense, which is quite an achievement for a story of this length. The fight scenes at their best are tense, clever and inventive.

Supposedly the author is going to edit the story for publication, so perhaps it would be best to wait for an edited version of the story to appear. Still, if you haven't got anything else to read, you could give it a shot.

Labels: book, review

posted by Mr K @ 8:43 am