A NOTE ON WORM

The following is a review on John McCrae's web serial novel Worm, as well as a collection of thoughts on genre and style as a whole. If you're looking for a recommendation, you won't find it here, as I'm deeply conflicted about this work. You will however encounter spoilers, so take that as a warning.

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It has been a long time since a work of art has left me as profoundly conflicted as Worm has. On the surface, it seems like it should be a work made for me. I like superhero stories, especially the kind that challenges the conventions of the genre. I was pleasantly surprised by the Invincible series of comic books, which were a clever inversion on the usually very optimistic tone of classic superhero fiction a la Marvel and DC comics, and I continue to greatly enjoy not only the Invincible comics but also the in my opinion stellar Amazon adaptation of the material to cartoon form.

Specifically, I enjoy Invincible because it injects a sort of… welcome dose of sobering reality into the usually very optimistic and fantastical stories of superheroes we're familiar with. Once Invincible gets over its pretence by the seventh issue, the world we're presented with is dark, angry, and often incoherent. This works as both a weakness and a strength for the property - while many people looking for a classic superhero story might be turned off by the at times almost parodic tone and gratuitous graphic violence, this is exactly why many people - including myself - enjoy Invincible so much.

Enter John McCrae. Known better by his handle of Wildbow, McCrae is an aspiring Canadian author who stumbled into renown and success following the serial publication of the Parahumans series, of which Worm was the first book. I won't bury the lede here - Worm is daunting, at times inaccessible and deeply disturbing. It is 1.6 million words long, and has been described as the greatest piece of superhero fiction ever written. I don't believe that personally, but it does lay legitimate claim to this accolade. It opens with a notice that the author will purposefully not use trigger warnings, which in itself should be considered the most comprehensive trigger warning of all.

Worm is inspired by the superhero stories that preceded it, and inspires those that followed. It is impossible to overlook the clear inspiration McCrae took from contemporary comics of the time, but it's also clear that in writing a novel this monstrous in scale, McCrae left a lot more on the table that he ever intended to.

I will only do a cursory and laconic recap of the story for reasons that will become apparent later, but the basic premise is this: A young teen girl named Taylor Hebert gains the power to control insects and other crawlies following a traumatic event, decides to become a superhero but fails, eventually becoming a villain instead, before sort of becoming a hero again, and several novels later she kills God.

I'm being facetious here, of course. If there's anything I can explicitly and unambiguously praise about Worm, it's that the introduction to the world through the eyes of Taylor is nothing short of masterful. The first arcs are my favourite thing about Worm. Taylor is relatable. Taylor is interesting. Taylor is weird, but in a way that makes her endearing. Taylor is burnt by the world, gets bullied constantly¹, and this makes you root for her.

Taylor's decision to use her powers for good brings us to one of the strongest scenes in the introductory acts, which roughly span chapters 1 to 4². In it, she defeats a powerful supervillain that's on paper much stronger than her, but wins through sheer ingenuity and creativity in using her powers. This makes Taylor compelling, and shows off one of McCrae's greatest strengths: The superpowers.

If you don't make your superheroes have compelling powers, at least make them compelling people. Worm - for the most part, anyway - does a great job with this. There are more superpowers that are unique and "strange" than there are the genre conventions of flight, mind reading, super strength et cetera. Taylor's bug control is one thing, but other characters like Panacea or Clockblocker³ shine in the sheer creativity McCrae brings to the table when it comes to powers.

Even if a power seems mundane or utilitarian, the author manages to pull an unexpected but believable twist out of any given ability. It's delightful to read. An example - while Panacea is billed as a powerful healer, she can also use her ability to completely change the body of anyone she touches. This leads to a delightfully written incident in which she threatens to turn a white supremacist's skin dark. A compelling way to use an already compelling power, and an indication that Panacea might not be the good-faith healer she is meant to be perceived as by the citizens of the world.

Instances like these are all over Worm. There is not a single cape - Worm's in-universe name for empowered individuals - that has a boring or underdeveloped power. Even simple powers like flight and force fields are presented in a way that shows care and attention to detail, something lesser properties simply wouldn't bother with.

Much digital ink has been spilled about the themes of Worm, and most critics agree that the core theme of the serial is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Following the introductory arcs, Taylor quickly becomes unlikeable, along with the other capes on her team. An in-universe explanation for this is provided, but doesn't do much in the way of justifying her change. Taylor, as smart and as creative as she is, quickly takes glee in using her power for evil, while telling herself that she's doing what's best. I don't think that makes her compelling, and by the half-way point I couldn't help myself but actively root against her. She is a terrible person, and nothing she does in the rest of the book makes up for how much she falls as a character.

The stakes scale quickly, but also painfully slow on the face of the average chapter being 50.000 words long. Taylor wanted to be a hero, and defeating a powerful villain was how she wanted to accomplish that goal. Once that was done - and she joined a group of villains, paradoxically enough - McCrae needs to quickly scale the threats up to counter how absolutely broken Taylor's powers are. We go from a supervillain - powerful, sure, but a single flawed person nonetheless - to impossibly mighty kaiju that seem to have it out for Brockton Bay specifically. When Leviathan, the first of the three "Endbringers" attacks, it leaves the city in shambles, and Taylor's villain group quickly take over the ruins of the city along with other villain groups.

The next threat is as predictable as it is boring. Having established that even Godzilla with the serial numbers filed off isn't a match for them, McCrae has to throw a new threat into the fold, and does so by way of the Slaughterhouse Nine, a group of superpowered psychopaths that want nothing more than destruction. Jack Slash⁴, leader of the serial killers, becomes a pivot point as a precognitive cape named Dinah points out that the world will end in two years if he is not stopped.

Taylor, who violently opposes Dinah's captivity at the hands of her crime boss, eventually survives an assassination attempt and kills her boss in retaliation. Since we've waited around two books for any meaningful conflict up to this point, and Dinah isn't even a particularly compelling character apart from the fact she's a child, it's time for another climactic battle - this time against Echidna, a parahuman who is so mutated and desperate she ranks with the Endbringers in terms of danger. Brockton Bay is devastated further, but Dinah survives and returns to her family.

Since the human component of the story has taken a backseat, Taylor's secret supervillain identity gets revealed when Dinah decides to turn on her. When she reveals that she did so because Taylor being taken by the authority would raise the odds of averting the end of the world, she surrenders, joins the Chicago Wards, (begrudgingly) becomes a superhero again and battles another kaiju villain in India, which - to no surprise - she emerges victorious from⁵.

What follows is an incredibly poorly handled time skip. One wonders if this was a decision made of convenience, that even McCrae didn't much care about writing out two years of superpowered community service. Dinah's deadline comes and goes, and for some reason, Jack Slash is back. He convinces the most powerful superhero of all, Scion, to launch a devastating attack on all of earth⁶, killing billions and destroying more than humanity could conceivably ever rebuild. It's also revealed that Scion is an avatar of… well, we'll get to that.

Taylor, suffering from the ennui of being a main character and not having a big climactic battle in the last hundred-thousand-words, decides to take action and has her superpower surgically altered. She now not only controls bugs, but also other superheroes, rebrands to "Khepri" and coordinates all the superheroes to defeat Scion through sheer force of will. However, the surgery also causes Taylor to go insane, and she tries to flee into the multiverse, don't worry about it, it's not relevant.

Before she can, though, she's approached by Contessa - another powerful clairvoyant - and is shot in the head out of mercy, euthanising her for fear of what Taylor could do as Khepri. This concludes her story, although the final vignette of the story has her survive and live in a parallel universe Earth where powers never happened, settling down with her father and mother. Brockton Bay rebuilds in the world Taylor left behind, and the second novel - a much more toned down and somber story told from the perspective of Panacea's sister - begins. I've not read that one.

This is a serviceable story, I think. The characters are clear, Taylor - while she doesn't much grow as a person - is a serviceable main character and many of the action scenes are quite well written, much better than I ever could. Make no mistake: This is by no means a bad book. If it was, it wouldn't compel me in the way it did.

Having mulled over the main problems of Worm with a friend who likes the story a lot more than I do, I've identified a few reasons as to why I don't like this story as much as other readers have. It comes down to pacing, a subplot that could have been cut, the world, and one specific character that I can't deal with.

Here's number one - Worm is long. Inexcusably long. It's more than double the word count of the bible, and that one was already padded by repeating a large part of it four times. Worm's problem is that it was published in a way that encouraged it to keep going as long as possible. In parts, it's hard to ignore how padded the work is (the Slaughterhouse Nine arc comes to mind), while also clearly not paying much mind to large swaths that could have probably needed some more explanation. The time skip in specific is a large sticking point for many critics, and I tend to agree. It more or less splits the novel into two halves, with the former being focused on Taylor, and the latter being focused on all the other things in McCrae's lore bible that didn't make it in yet.

I'm on record saying that I think Worm's setting is fantastic, but its story isn't. Worm - or rather, the Parahumans universe - could have been served better by smaller instalments with clearly delineated story arcs and completed plots. Taylor's arc could have very well ended with her defeating Leviathan, or even Echidna, and I don't think it would have taken away from her character at all.

I feel quite confident in this point because as it turns out, this was how McCrae originally planned to publish the story. The reason Worm is hosted at parahumans.wordpress.net, and not worm.wordpress.net, is that in many of its drafts, Taylor's story - then called Skitter, after her supervillain name - is just one of many. Others include the plot between Panacea and her sister Victoria, the background and exploits of the Slaughterhouse Nine, and a story about a shadow corporation called Cauldron that manufactures and sells superpowers for profit. These stories have more than enough to stand on their own, but are disappointingly relegated to the sidelines in the text.

To put too fine a point on it: The more you keep a character alive, the more they begin to rot. I don't mean this in a literal sense, there are plenty of excellent stories in which no characters explicitly die, but more in a narrative way. Taylor overstays her welcome because by the time we're done reading the first Bible's worth of words, there's not much we can add. We know Taylor. We've been with Taylor, know what she thinks and what she doesn't think, in part because her story is told through the first person. So, it doesn't much surprise that eventually we can intuit the same things about her that her near-omniscient friend Tattletale can. Taylor needed room to breathe, away from the spotlight of the story. In an anthology, this would have been provided easily, but in a story as linear as Worm, that's nearly impossible.

Many of the other characters don't fare much better. None of the Undersiders, Taylor's villain group, are particularly compelling past a certain point, their most iconic and memorable moments happening in the first sixth of the work. By the time the Slaughterhouse Nine arrives, the new villains on the block are interesting purely out of novelty, but even they quickly become boring as their arc drags on much longer than it needs to.

Let's move on before I make this section longer than the novel I'm whingeing about - I also mentioned that the world leaves a lot to be desired. This might come as a surprise to readers who remember the earlier section, where I praised McCrae's creativity and the believability of his world, but the further you go along in the story that praise has to fade. McCrae likes to explain everything that happens in his story, more or less share his personal wikis through the text - an impulse I can empathise with - but this serves as a weakness for the story since it's presented without nuance or control.

The powers, for instance. They occur because an impossibly ancient alien entity stumbled upon earth, and bestowed its powers on those on the planet in order to use humanity's creativity to learn about its own abilities. Scion is the avatar of that alien, and was generally content with benefitting humanity, something Jack turns around effortlessly.

This is a serviceable explanation, isn't it? Sure, the connection between "creativity" and "humanity" doesn't immediately link, and one does wonder how a being can be sapient and lack creativity of any kind, but then still come up with that idea, but those are specifics. ⁷

No, the explanation has to go further. Powers are channeled through shards, parts of the alien god entity that reside… somewhere in or around the superhero, and in order to access that power, an exotic structure in the brains of the parahuman needs to be activated through a traumatic event, connecting to the shard and saving the person.

It's for the same reason that powers can be manufactured. A shard is explained as a cell of the god's body, so if you happen to have a dead god you can cut pieces off - something the Cauldron organisation has - you can imbue people with their powers, which causes them to spontaneously grow that part of the brain and immediately install the alien device drivers.

Powers also have quite strict rules, at least they're supposed to. The Manton Effect prevents a power from hurting the user, and there are some other rules of convenience - like how a power that lets you walk through walls won't have you fall through the floor. These are kind of neat, I suppose, but infuriate me when they sometimes simply get circumvented - a notable example being "Jack Slash doesn't lose to Parahumans". That's boring, no matter how canon it is. Similarly, no matter how flawed Taylor is as a person, all that takes a backseat when the sheer power of Skitter has her control an entire supervillain-infested city with ease.

My point here is that the story does not necessarily benefit from these explanations in a vacuum, and the places where it needs to draw on them (like how Taylor's power was able to be altered though brain surgery) could have been served with different explanations that aren't quite as crass just for the sake of it. If you want to learn about this, go ahead. The details are fascinating from a worldbuilding perspective, and there's an excellent fan wiki made, but my point is that this is where these details should have stayed to not clog up the runtime of the book even further.

Another example of this: Superhuman powers are also classified into 12 categories, and ranked based on their potency. That, and there's also a threat level system that ranks individual parahumans or kaiju by their danger. These I'm superficially fine with - after all, it makes sense that someone would categorise powers; especially if they are more common in humans than albinism is. The issue is that, again, the story spends an unnecessary amount of time explaining these concepts, and it doesn't even feel like it's explaining them to Taylor, but the reader instead. For the twelve power classifications, there's even a rhyming poem a character recites for no reason other to tell the audience.

The cuttable subplot I mentioned earlier is the one about Cauldron, because it to me just undercuts the whole idea of the story. If there is an organisation that can manufacture powers by more or less conjuring them out of thin air, using an impossibly powerful material and in the later chapters gains more or less complete control over them, there's no reason to care about the intricacies of the powers presented anymore. We've all seen Incredibles - if everyone is super, nobody is.⁸

This I think cuts especially deep because McCrae puts a lot of effort into developing his characters (or at least the ones he cares about). Like all natural parahumans, Taylor got her powers through a trigger event, a highly traumatic and pivotal event that leaves her terrified and unable to defend herself. In response, her superhuman brain tumour decides to kick it into high gear and give her some kind of boost to get herself out of the issue she's in. In Taylor's case, she's stuffed into a locker filled with used sanitary pads that's been left out so long bugs have infested it. She "triggers", and gains the ability to perceive reality through those bugs, and control them.

And once again I must say that this element is done masterfully. It's not unique, we've seen the trope before, but gosh dangit if it's not effective as all hell. Suddenly, every superhero - or villain - we meet has a built in tragic backstory, inextricably linked to the event that made them superpowered to begin with. It's brilliant. It's efficient storytelling, it's a great opportunity for visceral and painful narration, and it's plain genius. McCrae doubles down on this by allowing some characters to have "second triggers", traumatic events that unlock some even greater permutation of their existing superpower, and make no mistake, those are also done very well.

I do wish the in-universe explanation of triggers wasn't as explicit - I don't much care that the strong emotional distress the person experiences causes their superpower lobe to expand, connecting with the piece of God lodged inside them to unleash their full potential; that's not all that interesting to me and is not a question I wanted to have answered, but I can deal. It's fine. And if nothing else, it sets up that superpowers can be surgically changed.

I don't much get in the habit of suggesting fixes, but this would have worked a lot better to explain Cauldron's power manufacturing than "we're butchering a fallen god". Just imagine this instead - in order to sell a power, they have to take it from someone else, and since that means brain surgery, it's usually fatal. Cauldron captures powerful heroes and villains, by way of the story also some of the ones we care about, extracts their power and implants it into rich and powerful assholes. It's a far more compelling setup than "we have God at home".⁹

My other reason why I didn't enjoy reading this story as much as I could have is that I dread one of the characters, and it's not the one that can bite you to death using millions of spiders without even being in the same building. Whenever she's in a scene, she fills me with terror - which might be a testament to how well McCrae is at character writing, sure, but it's not pleasant to experience, at least not for me.

Panacea's arc is that she's the daughter of a villain, adopted by a superhero family. She possesses the ability to change herself and others' biologies at will to anything she desires. There's no hard limit on what she can do with this, evidenced by being able to turn Taylor into "the ultimate master" with control over any and all humans within her range, although there are some minor restrictions in place.

What causes me to be genuinely scared of her to the point it hindered my enjoyment of reading it is all the other things she does.

Somehow, and why McCrae found this was a good element to include eludes me, Panacea can control the brain chemistry of her targets permanently, to a point where it's trivial for her to induce a feeling of love towards anyone she chooses. She uses this to… make her adopted sister fall in love with her, and then mutates her horribly into an I-have-no-mouth-and-I-must-scream monster for a while before returning her to normal¹⁰. Even for a story that's as dark as Worm is, that's crossing a line for me. There's a question if you should use sexual assault as a plot device, and the overwhelming majority of authors thinks it's probably in poor taste. As far as I'm concerned, this is worse.

If you thought my last criticisms were a little mean or uncalled for, I'm sorry that I'm just going to have to be blunt here. Worm has a way of revealing the biases of the author, and the length of the piece makes them explicit and unavoidable. John McCrae was bullied in school as well, and externalises this experience as making every single villain and specifically every one of Taylor's bullies to be cartoonishly evil. Having been bullied myself, I can assure you that what Taylor goes through is so senselessly horrible that it makes it almost look like a parody. Her trigger event is one such case, but so is the abuse she has to deal with at school - because remember, arguably the most powerful cape in this story is fifteen by the time we get to know her, and eighteen¹¹ by the time she kills God.

I realise why this is. Of course the bullies have to be horrible, and of course that ante has to be raised after she triumphs over them. It also is what I think makes the Slaughterhouse Nine not very interesting - they are a parallel to the bullies Taylor had to deal with before, except now they're serial-killers and psychopaths to snuff out any ounce of nuance. Taylor is a bad person, but her opponents are worse, and to McCrae this justifies Taylor's own brutality, amorality and disingenuousness.¹²

And while we're on it, this thought is too important to be relegated to a footnote: Taylor's abilities are so incredibly powerful it makes her a Mary Sue. You can pretend she's troubled and conflicted all you want, but Taylor Hebert loses any and all pretense of being sympathetic or understandable when she put on the costume. Yes, her insane abilities are there to facilitate some truly breathtaking action scenes, but level with me here. In no particular order, Skitter has eyes on the back of her head, the wall, around the corner, and on YOUR head, was ripped in half but recovered after taking revenge within half a minute, went blind and nobody noticed, has won a land war in Asia, out-multitasks a strong AGI, can have control over more than four quadrillion living beings at the same time, and is friends with a girl who's guessing is so powerful it's mistaken for mind-reading, and she goes to Skitter for advice - she's so incredibly powerful that not having arachnophobia in Brockton Bay is considered a mental illness. No matter how conflicted or troubled she is, that makes her a Mary Sue. In fact, it makes her so much of a Mary Sue that Mary should retire so we can call that trope the Taylor Hebert instead.

And… I mean, damn, I don't want to, but I have to bring it up. What is it with the disparaging comments toward lesbians? It's apparently established by himself that McCrae didn't want to make Taylor gay to avoid the trope of the Angsty Gay, but I can't accept that. Not when your character is both so flawed and overpowered that having them be insecure about their own sexuality would simply be another domino in the wall, which would be promptly atomised in the carnage of a single Skitter fight happening a city over.

Doubly confusing is that he paints Panacea in an unkind light with the exact same trope. Taylor saves the world and gets to retire at 18, and if she did so with a girlfriend nobody would call the story out for gay angst. That's simply not the trope. The trope is having your most plot-crucial lesbian character be a self-hating incestuous mind-rapist with a broken family who never improves, never learns and destroys every relationship she touches.¹³

And I mean, while we're pulling the painful strings, let's get this out of the way. If Taylor isn't racist, then she's still pretty aware of race with everyone she meets. More than once, a character's race is handled as a surprising reveal after they take off their costume, and being white is handled as the default. I'm not going to be the one to get into detail, especially because I wasn't the one to make this observation first, but if someone out there has written about the strange racially charged undertones of Worm, please do email me.¹⁴

But given the sheer length of Worm, I can excuse this. Not every chapter will be gold, most of it isn't bronze, and a solid fifth of the dialogue is cheesier than my lactose intolerance will let McCrae get away with, but I can not stress this enough: Worm is a good story. It reaches the threshold of quality required for me to care about it, and it reaches it effortlessly. When I read the first arc, up to around the grand showdown with Leviathan, I could not think of anything else but how excellent the story was.

But it never got better than that.

Maybe this is on me. Maybe Worm just isn't the story for me, and reading through the fan forums and especially the Parahumans subreddit makes it abundantly clear that nobody actually truly likes Taylor, and that they're here for the action scenes, the convoluted worldbuilding and the gratuitous violence - something that came as a surprise to many in part because McCrae had not established his style before, and in part because Worm tries its hardest to convince you that it is, in fact, a young adult story. It does so multiple times, and it makes the statement that "you're not supposed to like Taylor" ring so incredibly hollow I wish I had just watched paint dry for a hundred hours instead. If I'm not supposed to like Taylor, why is she written like a plucky YA protag? For shock value? To pretend that this is, in fact, YA, we swear?

It's not, and it was never meant to be. Worm isn't about learning something about yourself, it's not about growing as a person, and it's not even really about the life of Taylor Hebert. It's a look into a world just a few degrees worse off than our own. And if you see it from that perspective, Worm is in fact a masterpiece. It's brutal, painful, violent, at times frightening and always trying to remind you that were superpowers to actually exist, there would be no reason to believe it wouldn't shake out exactly like this. What little joy there is to be found in Brockton Bay is snuffed out as quickly as it came, and nobody will stay your friend for long. It's… sobering, and I'm sure we can all see the worst parts of ourselves in at least one of the characters.

I'm truly disappointed that it does this while covering the story in about 70% stuff I don't care about by volume. Even more of a shame that many interesting characters - Brian in particular - are sidelined when McCrae realises they're not popular to the audience.

I opened this by saying that I won't recommend the book because I'm conflicted on it. I stand by that assertion, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. I enjoyed a lot of it, and that made the parts that I didn't enjoy sting that much harder. But that doesn't mean it's a bad novel; in fact, if you love epic fight scenes and want some of the most creative superhero powers ever written, this will become one of your favourites.

But I don't love it. I want to, but I can't. The Parahuman universe is too much for me, and the escapism of superheroes isn't enough to outweigh the pain I feel while reading how terrible everything is. Taylor starts strong, loses her morals and becomes so much worse that when she eventually has her personality erased by the unquestionably evil forces she uses to mind-rape thousands of superheroes to "save the world", that's a moral upgrade. That's not a win, that's a pyrrhic victory, no matter how well you write the final confrontation.

You can read Worm at parahumans.wordpress.com. I hope you enjoy it more than I did.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆