this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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I have this a lot, but the most it has happend was about 10 years ago with the webserial worm ( https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ ), I read it so much. I read it before work, I read it during lunch, I read it when I got home, I went to sleep late etc. etc.
When it was done I had forgotten what to do with my time, I wound up re-reading it again but slower at a few chapters a day rather than turning myself into a gremlin for maximal reading efficiency.
If you want a summary, it's a superhero story, which usually really isn't for me, but something about the tone of the writing and the way the world worked in this one made it work.
Powers are incredibly varied, but the strongest characters are the ones who know how to use their powers well, the protagonist exemplifies this, where she doesn't get a cool flashy power but she figures out how to use it so well and adapt to each situation that she becomes terrifying.
I also liked the charactersation of the heroes and the villains, where the heroes are somewhat vain and egotistical which means they do good things when the cameras are rolling rather than being "morally good". the villains are mostly just people on the edges of society for a mix of reasons which means they do what they want, but I think since then "The Boys" has also done something similar so the effect may be lessened.
Curious if anyone else on Lemmy has wound up reading it.
Worm was definitely like that for me. I was reading it at work (we monitored stuff and responded if needed, so I had a lot of free time if things weren't happening), and it really sucked me in. I didn't get into his later work, maybe because of burnout.
I think the characterizations of the superpowered folks were great, but they did suffer a little bit from flanderization. It's to be expected when the author is literally handling hundreds of different characters. The plot overall was just so good though. Maybe some individual points weren't as great, like super spoilers ahead
spoiler
the naked invulnerable chick and how they defeated her, or the existence of the three super enemies (leviathan, tyrant? and whatever the bird/smart thing was), and how once the protagonist figured out her plan for the ultimate win, it happened so quickly.Apparently this was not the first serial he tried to write in this universe, which is why so many of the side characters are so fleshed out.
I remember enjoying the interlude with battery a lot.
Did you find anything else that you enjoyed in a similar way?
Same here! I stumbled onto Worm a few years ago and read it way too quickly. I taught myself some (very basic) editing skills, corrected a few typos and paid ~300 bucks to get the whole story printed out on paper so my wife would read it as well.
I would add that despite being a story with superpowers, it is very much a story about people, and not about powers. You progressively discover the rules of a world that make perfect sense in retrospect, the stakes scale up really well and I found the ending to be a culmination unlike anything I have read.
Exactly! find it so hard to describe though, over the course of reading the thing Taylor changes so much, the world changes so much and your understanding of the world gets so much deeper.
This makes it very hard to explain the later acts or why they were good though.
Have you read anything else that hooked you in a similar way?
I don't think anything hooked me quite like Worm! I completely agree with Taylor evolving a lot throughout the story, and I feel the whole scope of the story gets so much larger, in such a satisfying way.
I read a few arcs of the Worm sequel, Ward, but it didn't really click for me. From the same author, I found Twig to be really interesting. It takes place in a very different setting and has a darker tone, but I feel some of the narrative techniques are the same as in Worm. For example, the characters know more of the world than the reader does, who gets to discover it piece by piece, and the characters themselves are the important part, not whatever magic or science powers the world. The scale and stakes do not explode like Worms' do, but the story definitely does not stay stale either.
To me very personally, Ward felt a bit like "more Worm but not quite". I didn't really want more Worm. Twig felt like a new, very different story, in a somewhat similar style. It didn't hook me like Worm did, but it scratched a similar itch of discovering an atypical world, with its rules, characters and unreliable narrators.