Reading: Worm

[cjwatson]

I feel like I haven't been reading a lot recently, but that's probably because I've been reading a single enormous thing: Worm. I've been describing it glibly as "grimdark superhero fic", but I'm not sure that's really very accurate, so let me try to do a better job.

Taylor is bullied at school, and nobody is doing anything about it. Her escape is that she's planning to be a superhero. She lives in a world where parahumans, or "capes", exist: people with a wide variety of powers, who've mostly sorted themselves into superheroes and supervillains. More to the point, a few months ago she had her "trigger event": due to trauma induced by bullying, she developed her own power of controlling spiders, insects, and other creepy-crawlies within a certain distance of her. So she does the whole Peter Parker thing, spends a couple of months making her own costume from spider silk, and heads out one night for a spot of solo crime-fighting.

Rather than ending up as a hero, though, she falls in more or less accidentally with a local group of superpowered villains, the Undersiders: between them, Grue generates darkness, Bitch temporarily turns dogs into car-sized dog-monsters, Regent controls minds, and Tattletale has a kind of super-intuition that lets its wielder ferret out almost any secret. Taylor is kind of intending to defect to the heroes eventually, but things keep getting in the way.

Aside from the day-to-day hero and villain stuff, humanity is under threat from periodic "Endbringer" attacks: three enormous and almost invincible monsters each of whom occasionally turns up and attacks a human city with devastating effect. The convention is that there's a truce between capes on those occasions, as it takes everything they've got between them to drive the Endbringers off or even just hold them to a standstill until Scion arrives. Scion was the first and strongest powered individual to appear, and is kind of the Superman archetype: flies, is invulnerable, shoots beams of golden light, and has been spending the last decade or more fighting crises literally 24/7 and not communicating with anyone else.

Along the way, Taylor (now "Skitter") encounters Dinah, a precognitive: she can determine the probability that a given event will come to pass. Soon, she says that there is an 83% chance that a particularly nasty villain they've just run into is going to cause the world to end in two years. And there's a shadowy organisation called Cauldron lurking around who seem to be giving people powers in exchange for money, whose motives are unclear.

I said it was enormous: Worm is about 1.75 million words, so about the same length as the five A Song of Ice and Fire novels to date put together. It's also in the format of a web-published serial (although the author is apparently working on getting it professionally published), so in some ways it's a first draft and there are signs of missing editing, points where it's clear that the author was trying to meet a self-imposed posting deadline, an opening that's noticeably less strong than the conclusion, and so on. For all that, though, it's remarkably compelling and tightly plotted. It's notable for having a huge cast with a prodigious variety of interesting superpowers and characters who try to find ways to combine them in useful ways. One thing that sometimes doesn't work for me in ensemble-cast stories is that I find myself skimming past sections from points of view I'm not very interested in; Worm avoids this by being structured with main arcs that are almost all from Taylor's point of view combined with interludes using other viewpoint characters. And it has lots of very careful but subtle foreshadowing of the climaxes of its various plot arcs from early on, which is always delightful when done well.

I really can't unconditionally recommend Worm, because it comes with pretty much all the content warnings. Bullying and creepy-crawlies are obvious from the start, and there's also mind control, outright torture in a few places, and very probably more. If you're sensitive to anything along those lines it's probably best to give it a miss. That said, it isn't torture porn or anything, and the author goes to considerable lengths to explore moral consequences.