After a couple of well-received zombie novels, Brian Keene turns to an apocalypse of a different kind with THE CONQUEROR WORMS. It’s been raining non-stop for more than a month in the small town of Punkin’ Center, W. Va., where elderly widower Teddy Garnett lives a lonely life and raises cattle. One morning, he sees the early bird getting attacked by a worm, and then his carport is invaded by countless numbers of the slimy, slithering things. Then he sees far bigger holes burrowed by far bigger worms, big enough to eat people and collapse houses.

Meanwhile, over in Baltimore, the city has flooded to catastrophic proportions, forcing the lucky ones left to loot for their continued existence. We follow an intrepid band of survivors, a Rainbow Coalition mishmash that includes kids, gang members and an old coot by the name of Salty. When they’re not fucking or fighting one another, they find themselves up against an underwater menace that Salty swears is “a Kraken” and another claims is H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. Eventually, this group crosses paths with Teddy and his townspeople, just in time for the us-vs.-it showdown.

In books like TERMINAL, Keene knows how to keep you turning those paperback pages. But THE CONQUEROR WORMS sounds more like an idea for a 1950s Saturday-morning matinee than a horror novel. That’s the biggest problem with the book: Worms aren’t scary. Even giant ones. The very concept carries a hint of self-parody, but Keene’s treatment is serious. His weakest point remains dialogue – I cringed at every “bro,” “dawg” and misguided, homespun analogy – but even with its faults, it remains intermittently entertaining. So while it’s not up there with his strongest works, it’s not to be automatically ignored. I stuck with it because there’s a certain novelty to a worm-invasion novel (seriously, how many of those have you read?) even if the entirety isn’t exactly satisfying. –Rod Lott

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• TERMINAL by Brian Keene