The Worm and His Kings, despite its silly little title, starts off with a properly strong chapter. It sets a bleak, desolate tone, and gets right into the story. That is the last time good writing and good pacing will be found in this book.

For one thing, the story drags and drags and drags, even though it doesn’t have enough substance to be spread this thin. This is a short story stretched into a novella, which causes the terrible opportunity for the writer to fill it with unnecessary backstories and with too many details that take away from the obscurity that needs to cast a shadow over any cosmic horror for it to land. Too much exposition is the main issue, but the blame is also on the comically amateurish writing present both in dialogues and in the prose too . . . 

. . . which is why I can’t believe some people have compared this to Clive Barker, who is a master of prose, who writes evocatively without drenching his stories in unnecessary details that add that unmistakable tinge of Wattpad. I saw fewer comments about this being a lovecraftian story as well, and I find it equally preposterous. Listen, Lovecraft was a horrendous man, but he knew how to write cosmic horror: he purposefully omitted details because the unknown will always be scarier than silly worms, and he kept the main character’s own personal story to a minimum because that just makes the story clunky. Piper unfortunately did not realise any of these.

Instead, her story is overly clogged with unnecessary background stories, and she unfortunately over-explains the ‘lore’ which is bound to sound childish when said lore talks about Pangea being smashed by a worm (and not without having to include facts about Pangea because apparently the American education system is this much of a horror within itself that Pangea needs to be explained). Another issue is that Piper reaches for concepts that are beyond her understanding — the concepts being quantum physics and space/time. Even accomplished scientists acknowledge the complexity of quantum physics, so it’s no surprise that using it in a story without no real grasp of it will sound, sorry to say, stupid.

Oh and the “twist”? Yeah, you go into the story having already deciphered it, because though the blurb writer seemingly believes “nothing is as it seems,” both branches of the alleged twist are so over-done that they’re almost.. formulaic?

I’ve had an insupportable headache all day, so I listened to the audiobook. The narrator speaks a bit nasally, but thankfully she isn’t the sort to over-dramatise the reading so I had no issues with it. That said, the narration is very slow, to the point 1.8x sounds completely natural, and some dialogues continue to be at a regular pace even at 2.5x. The real reason I eventually sped up to 3x was not the narrator, but the story itself. One  complaint I had about the narrator is that she voiced certain creature sounds, but it sounded nothing like described in the text. And still I find this a shortcoming of the text, as it just adds another layer of silliness when you add in “sound effects” as if this is a comic book.

I think this book might have worsened my headache due to the severe annoyance it caused.