I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump the last few months. Multiple books are stacked in piles around my house, each one somewhere on the spectrum from “not read” to “finished.” Not much is holding my attention or keeping my interest for very long. Books are going back to the library overdue and untouched. I hate it! I am a reader, dammit; most of my free time should be spent with my face in a book by my very nature. Luckily, I just devoured (hehe) a book that I now must recommend to you all: Wolf Worm, by T. Kingfisher.
Uncomfortable confession from someone who writes for a site like Dirge: I don’t watch horror movies/TV shows because I am easily squeamish/startled about a few very specific things. However, I can read horror books with almost no issue.1 I share this vulnerability with you to let you know that it’s okay if this book isn’t for you, because it is absolutely not going to be for everyone. If bugs freak you out, for example, don’t read this book, though you likely could have assumed that based on the cover and description alone.
I fell in love with Kingfisher’s work in the last year or so because of their Sworn Soldier novella series. If you’ve also read those, you will love Wolf Worm. If you aren’t sure if you’ll like this book, at least read the very first novella in the Sworn Soldier series, What Moves the Dead. It’s an excellent retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. If you like that, you’ll probably like her other works, including this one. She has an incredible talent for weaving together local folklore, classic horror motifs, Gothic setting, and a wry sense of humor into an authorial voice that is extremely human inside of increasingly unreal situations.
The heroine of Wolf Worm is Sonia Wilson, a thirty-year-old woman and gifted painter who lost her father a few years prior. As she is unmarried and it’s 1899 in rural North Carolina, she needs to work to earn her living. Her father was a well-known scientist and naturalist, and she was brought up painting the illustrations for his books. Sonia finds herself abandoned by the scientific community after her father’s death, and she ends up working and living at a terrible school for girls for several years. Her fortunes seem to have changed, however, with a job offer from the reclusive Dr. Halder, an entomologist who needs a new illustrator for his gigantic book about insects.
The book opens with Sonia arriving at the local train station only to discover that nobody is waiting for her. She is immediately beset with panic, as walking would mean she’d be wandering the woods well into the night, and irritated that her new employer apparently forgot about her before she even started work. She’s also anxious that it means Dr. Halder has decided he doesn’t need her anyway, and her chance of doing the work she loves and escaping the terrible school is gone. All very logical, human reactions, which contrast starkly with the local man who gives her a ride to Dr. Halder’s estate.
Asa Phelps, a local super-Christian, agrees to drive her to the doctor’s house in his horse-and-buggy. The ride is uncomfortable for multiple reasons. When Sonia tries to thank him, he answers with, “It is my Christian duty.” As Sonia astutely notes to the reader, “It is extremely difficult to make conversation with someone who uses the phrase ‘Christian duty’ with utter sincerity.” But the fun doesn’t stop there. Phelps tells Sonia that he has seen “the Devil” in the woods around Dr. Halder’s house, and cautions Sonia to be careful, and no, he’s not speaking metaphorically. He literally saw the Devil (who he claims is a she; progressive!) in the woods, apparently. And that’s just the opening chapter!
Once Sonia arrives at the estate, things do not get much better. While she befriends the household staff, Dr. Halder is a fucking nightmare. He’s critical, condescending, demanding, and just generally a dick to everyone. His one good quality is that he employs Mr. and Mrs. Kent, an interracial couple in the North Carolina woods in 1899, and he could not care less that they are married/together. So he’s not a racist! Exactly one point to Halder! (Phelps is, though. Shocking.)
As Sonia begins her work, she finds out that Halder recently had an illustrator who was even more talented than she is. She’s living in her old rooms, using her old paints, wearing her old clothes. What happened to her? Why are all the local animals acting strange, like they’re possessed? And why does she catch Dr. Halder sneaking out at midnight to a cabin in the middle of his woods? And why is the door of that cabin locked from the outside?!
Clearly, I am not going to tell you what happens, but if you’re not squeamish about the following things, I’d say you should read this and find out what’s happening in the dark of the night in the Carolina woods, because this book has everything: insects of so many types; a missing woman; a presumed murdered man; local gossip; Carolina folklore; painting techniques; possessed(?) animals; stolen chickens; the Devil herself; “blood thiefs”; and so much more I can’t even vaguely reference without spoiling things for you! It’s a rather short book as well, with my copy only having 277 pages including all other front/back matter, and I flew through it quickly. Please, please, please read this weird little book and tell me what you think!2
- Almost. There are a handful of horror books I’ve started and subsequently stopped, the most recent being I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones, because of the extreme amount of horrible projectile vomiting mentioned (over and over again) in the first chapter. I tapped out shortly thereafter. That was enough for me! ↩︎
- Unless you hate it. You’re allowed to be wrong, but don’t be loud and wrong at me, thank you. ↩︎
