My time has come.

First, warnings for what you’ll run into: gore, torture, sexual violence, child death, body horror, and suicide. It’s a heavy read.

Next, a other few things about Worm before you read it:

It was published as a serial, so, each chapter was written and published individually rather than the whole work being published all at once. This leads to some peculiarities in how it is written, because serials need to keep readers engaged between publishing dates and because the author relied on donations coming in while publishing.

This lead to a few odd editing choices that probably wouldn’t have happened if it was published as a single finished work. It’s very long, even compared to entire book series. Worm is 4 times longer than the entire Lord of the Rings series of books. It’s 3 times longer than the Bible. You get the idea. There was no editor trying to cut things out, so everything is in there.

That isn’t to say it’s bloated, but it’s a slog. Especially since our protagonist, Taylor, spends most of the story suffering and pushing her way through it and making bad decisions for the right reasons. She’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then it does, and then she has to survive it. Just when everything seems hopeless, it gets worse. It’s not light reading.

But it’s not grimdark, per se. Even as everything gets worse, they get through it. The end is ambiguous and surprisingly hopeful.

Anyone that says its a deconstruction of superheroes missed the point, though. It’s actually a reconstruction: it tries to take superhero tropes as they exist and then justify them logically in the world. Why do people dress up in costumes and punch each other? Why don’t superscientists cure cancer instead of turning everyone into dinosaurs? Why are there giant monsters, and how does society adapt to it? Where did powers come from? Are they good? Bad? Why?

All in all, it’s interesting. It could do with an editor to trim some of the excess, but maybe only 5% of it.

And then the author published a controversial sequel that retconned a bunch of things and the fandom is still mad about it.