The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Cosmic horror is definitely one of my favorite subgenres, but it is difficult for many stories to maintain the fine balance between acknowledging the rich history of the earlier foundational stories and doing something new we haven't seen before. I don't think I've read a story that strikes that balance as perfectly as Hailey Piper's The Worm and His Kings. She has invented a completely new mythology, and it feels both familiar and alien at the same time. Cults? Check. Ancient entities? Check. Monstrous alien god go-betweens? Check. But it's so much more, dealing with themes about love, loss, class, homelessness, justice, transformation, and betrayal. It's also an important addition to the canon of both queer and trans storytelling.



If you've ever read Clive Barker's first volume of Books of Blood, you will have encountered his short story "The Midnight Meat Train" (or, you might have seen the 2008 film, which is quite a good adaptation). Barker's story teased at a much deeper mythology of the things that live deep beneath the city, and the ways in which reverence for those things have wound their way into the mundane, sunlit world above. I'd always wished to get a better peek at the depth of that mythos, but Barker has never revisited that tale and it has left me with an itch I cannot scratch. Piper's The Worm and His Kings, while wildly different in theme, premise, and plot, managed to satisfy my curiosity about ancient secrets hidden in that sunless world beneath the city.

There is a bit of a learning curve with respect to both the myths and the science Piper lays out, and unlike more creature-feature cosmic horror, she does not shy away from playing with other science-fiction concepts like temporal mechanics, spacetime geometry, parallel realities, and causality. They are never overly technical, but she weaves them into her mythology in a way that provides a wholly satisfying and metaphysical conclusion.

If you enjoy cosmic horror broadly, or even dark, urban fantasy, this should definitely be added to your reading list.

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