Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher – a brilliantly creepy, skin-crawling work of southern gothic fiction

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher begins innocently enough: Sonia Wilson, an anxious young scientific illustrator, has been hired to draw the vast insect collection of the reclusive entomologist (insect expert) Dr Halder at his North Carolina manor house.

Something’s not quite right from the off. No one meets her on her arrival and she wonders whether her new employer really expects her to walk ten miles from the train station to his house? Old Halder is not one for practical details, the tight-lipped locals warn her. Harmlessly eccentric or maddeningly distracted? Intrigue surrounds the doctor.

T. Kingfisher is known for slow-burn books that offer rich rewards, and Wolf Worm is no different. The ominous signs come early. Weeds lurk in the corners of the unkempt garden and swarms of insects appear in the oddest of places throughout the house – bugs get into everything, Mrs Kent the housekeeper reveals matter of factly.

Sonia feels as though she has fallen into the kind of fairy tale where a wicked fairy demands she spins her watercolour illustrations into gold. Really, she has fallen into a creepy-crawly horror novel. Her days and nights are filled with delirious bouts of sleep, imperfect drawings, and scientific discovery. All the while, the mysterious Dr Halder works largely off the page.

When he does appear, Halder’s speeches are eerie and unsettling. “Do you know why it is called a screw-worm?” he asks his guest. Sonia provides a logical explantion: that the spiral ridge merely resembles a screw. But this induces an unpleasant leer from the doctor, who goes on to describe in grim detail the action of the burrowing ridges that anchor themselves into living flesh and are nearly impossible to remove. Dr Halder then casually taps a jar filled with hundreds of dead parasitic screw-worms, letting us know the insect horrors surrounding Sonia are far from hypothetical.

As with any other astute protagonist in a gothic novel, Sonia is consistently aware that something about her situation is “off” (a word she frequently uses). Animals behave strangely throughout. People avoid answering questions. Like Dracula’s Jonathan Harker, a late-Victorian gothic counterpart whose words she inadvertently borrows, she can barely suppress her shudders.

In a neat turn on the overly curious protagonist trope, Sonia’s knowledge of entomology develops as she works on her illustrations for her employer. As that knowledge grows, so does her discomfort.

The house and its environs steadily grow equally uncomfortable and these settings overwhelm the lead character in wholly novel ways. She habitually rationalises her experiences. For instance, if you hear a horrible sound in the woods and you don’t know what it is, she reasons, then it is probably a fox. Something is certainly making a noise in the basement: is it a disturbed prisoner? No, it’s more likely a tortured creature of some kind, she convinces herself.

It becomes harder to spin explanations, however, when she finds human remains. Like the more ghoulish doctors of 19th-century literature, such as Dr K in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher or the eponymous vivisectionist in HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, or even the real-life pioneer of anatomy studies Robert Knox, the entomologist has extended his studies to include the flesh of living subjects. And the results are truly gruesome.

Wolf Worm represents the best kind of neo-Victorian gothic: disturbing in its scope but never gratuitous, intimate and personal but always refusing to let the reader settle. For those who love historical fiction with a focus on science and artistry, and set in big creepy houses, this book will leave your skin crawling till the very end.

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Daniel Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.