Hello and welcome to another booooooktacular episode of Is This Just Fantasy?
The podcast where every other week two nerds get together to rate, read and review a fantasy novel.
I'm your host, Geordie Bailey, and I just remembered right before we start recording
that I can use my special Halloween intro because it's October!
Congratulations Geordie, I am your other host, the version of Duncan Nicoll that turned left.
I wonder if the version of Duncan Nicoll that turned right would have a radically different opinion of this book
despite only having been separated from the Duncan who turned left by a couple of days.
And that is an intro that will make no sense if you haven't read this week's book, Even the Worm Will Turn
by the fantastic author Hailey Piper.
We read the first book in this series, The Worm and His Kings, last year.
Do listen to our episode on it.
And we got to do an actual interview with the author which is always amazing.
Hailey was an incredible person to talk to.
Go and listen to our interview with her from last year.
Great episode. Absolute blast.
But Geordie, before we jump into this week's book, have you read anything else?
We recorded the last episode of this podcast like three days ago.
So no, I finished The Heroes and I immediately started reading this
because we are able to record on one day in October and that is it.
Yes, sorry. I am out for the end of this month.
I've got a wedding and a holiday.
Back to back. I'm so sorry Geordie.
But what a great short book to read.
And yes, if not obvious because it's only been three days, I have only read this book as well.
But yes, much like The Worm and His King, this is a novella.
Hailey Piper is a writer of short stories mostly.
And I believe that these series of books are amongst the small number of novels or novellas she's written
as opposed to a lot of short stories.
What was it she gets like a hundred or something?
Near that number. I think when she speaks about it in the interview, it's incredible the amount of works that she's put out.
This is one of her longer stories as far as I'm aware and that only is coming in at about 150 pages, if even that.
Yeah, seriously, it's like a great epic of, you know, The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, like that sort of length.
But as I've often been told, size isn't everything.
Duncan, let's talk about the content of this book.
Very well. So as I said, this is the sequel to The Worm and His King's.
You must read that book to get this book.
This is a piece of cosmic horror fiction in the sort of Lovecraftian tradition.
Lovecraft by way of like Doctor Who?
That's an interesting one, definitely darker and more mature than any episode Doctor Who I have seen.
I don't know, man. There's some really sad episodes of Doctor Who.
To be fair, now I'm thinking, you say sad, I'm thinking terrifying and I still to this day have not gotten over the Angels episode.
The Stone Angels, the Blink, I think it's called Blink.
Yes, Blink is a scary one.
I think my scariest episode was probably, oh gosh,
maybe The Slitheen? Really? I was quite small back then.
I started when we still had Christopher Ecclestone for his one season of Doctor Who.
And there's an episode in that with the Gas Masked Children who are terrifying.
Oh God, you're right.
Yes, they are so scary. Definitely one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever though.
And I also did, I want to say, start watching Christopher Ecclestone.
My first ever episode of Doctor Who was The Last Dalek.
I remember my dad being really excited because he had watched Doctor Who when he was a kid.
It's like, oh my God, there's Dalek's back.
Honestly, Doctor Who is just, I mean, I'm a fan.
I think it's incredibly solid, but I know it gets a bit of the piss taken out of it, I think, for its effects and some of its writing.
But it's such an episodic adventure, like those golden episodes like The Last Dalek, which deals with our main character.
But basically, he's the nice guy.
He's here to help people and he just has this one enemy who he's like, no, no mercy.
I will destroy them all.
And it's such a great episode to explore that kind of relationship.
It is. It's not relevant to this book, though, because when I say this is, here's Doctor Who elements,
I mean, because the fantastical elements are all about timey-wimey stuff, you know,
it's all about time being fluid and cyclical and stuff.
And in this book, especially, Hailey Piper really takes the money and runs.
Definitely. So just kind of shoot through the plots and got a framework to kind of put our discussion off.
This book picks up after the last book, which people who listened to that last episode might be a bit confused about
because The Last Book ended with all of humankind being undone by a time travelling protagonist going back
and setting the world on a different course to its original Pangean roots.
It's quite out there, whereas this book can...
It is. It's out there and it's one of the boldest and most striking endings to any book we've read on the podcast.
I'm not going to say that this is like, you know, comparable to some of the best stuff we've done,
but that ending is incredible.
Like, it really just makes your jaw drop and it takes you to an emotional place that you really don't expect to go.
It's not often that you feel yourself cheering for human extinction.
And the complexity of that extends into this book because the sort of big question is,
is the anti-hero of this book, Donner, who was the bad guy of the previous one,
but also like the damsel of the previous story, is she going to undo Monique's great act
and like restore time to that which the worm corrupted in the first place?
Is she going to save humanity?
And you have to decide for yourself, whose side am I on here?
It's a really interesting moral dilemma.
We have our protagonist from the first book who does not make an appearance in the sequel,
who is actively traveling back in time to create a better world.
And when you read the first book, you do really get into her headspace and why she's going to make these decisions.
What this book exists in timewise, timeline wise, actually,
is the idea that that journey back to the past takes time.
So the people in our timeline are still experiencing time moving forward while she's on the journey back.
It's like, yes, because if you remember precisely the end of the previous book,
what's kind of happening is the worm, you know, the thing which is both Monique and the worm,
before they circle back in the end all of time, they actually go to the end of the universe.
Like they wait out all of existence.
And then when all the stars have died out, that's when she goes back.
That's when she restores time.
And this is the classic like time loop conundrum,
where you're like the time that exists within the loop kind of doesn't really matter.
If it's all being erased, surely like they should just wipe out instantly.
They never existed, so they don't have time in which to exist, to experience the changing of time.
So Donna seems to be sort of under the impression that like she's in a hurry,
like she needs to rush to save humanity.
I don't think she does.
I think she has literally all of the time left in her universe in which to save the day.
That's certainly a point of interpretation.
I completely lost track.
I like the agency it brought to the story, but I was like, it's so nebulous.
I think it's even addressed by the main character, Donna.
She's like either time is going to end almost imminently or not.
But you might as well act like it's going to be imminent,
because you know, it'd be really awkward if you're like,
I've got all the time in the universe and two days later the universe ends.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
That's the thing.
We need to get into left and right Donna soon.
But before we do that, the real thing that drives Donna to despair in this is the fact
that none of her actions are going to matter.
She believes because the universe is going to end,
but nothing she does matters.
And that fills her with a deep, deep, deep despair.
A despair that then manifests into anger and a desire to change things,
to turn things back, to change the world.
Whereas the experience of reading the first book is a sort of relief
of seeing everything come to an end, that it's just over now.
But all the suffering is going to go away.
And isn't that nice?
The world is unjust.
So get rid of it.
There is.
So it's interesting.
Sorry, I think you're missing a slight element there.
Monique is, although she's undoing the universe,
she is creating like a new path that is established to have already existed.
Yes, she's, I called it like, I can't remember if it's called it Karmic
or I think I called it Cosmic Justice in our previous review.
Time should belong to the Pangeans,
the people who already lived before the worm arrived on Earth,
on the supercontinent of Pangea.
And they only were destroyed.
They only, our timeline, where we existed,
only came about after the destruction of Pangea by the worm.
And their time was wiped out, leaving behind like refugees from old time,
capital O, capital T.
It's sort of that weird, I don't know how to describe it.
Do you know like Back to the Future 2, where they go to like the bad 1985?
Yes.
It's like if someone from that timeline, the bad 1985,
discovered the time machine and was like,
well, if I go back to stop it going bad,
I would still be undoing all the experiences that people have had.
Even if it's the bad timeline,
there are still people who would have existed in that timeline
because they would have gotten together with someone else,
met a different husband, like some people are being undone by Marty McFly in that film.
For sure.
It's not addressed, but that has to be happening.
It is not addressed in the same way that in a way, Martin McFly kills all of his family
and then replaces them with doppelgangers.
Yeah, but better doppelgangers, so it's okay.
Yes, superior doppelgangers who play tennis.
Yeah.
Okay, so what happened to this book, Duncan?
So in this book, we open on a very chilling scene,
but it's quite mundane and that is Donna, who survives the events of the first book.
She crawls away out of the collapsing cave system that we see her in in the last moments
and she's living a normal life, but she is being hunted by a mysterious organization.
At the start of the book, she's being chased by this man down the street
and she has a choice, turn left or turn right.
And the first Donna we follow turns right, get back to that point, and is captured.
And this book basically spends a lot of time going over Donna's experience
and relationship with the worm, the cosmic being, this shadowy organization,
who's trying to get involved in the cosmic horror stuff.
And the really interesting point is there is shown to be another Donna.
A Donna is introduced later in the book, about a third of the way through.
We jump back in time and we see a Donna that turned left
and how that small decision changes her experience.
And I've got to jump to the key point of this, Geordie.
The Donna that turns left eventually goes looking into the shadowy organization that she avoided,
sneaks down into their lair, which is in the ruined cave systems of the last book.
The Palace of Time, the Unknown Palace, what's it called?
The Palace of Lost Time.
And when she sinks down there, she finds and rescues the other Donna who turned right.
And in the book, they do call the left Donna D to make it easier for the reader
and the right Donna, Donna.
I think I'll probably do the same for sanity and clarity's sake.
Up until this point, the book was okay, you know?
It starts off a little slow.
It's a bit weird just having Donna be the main character
when she's such an interesting but loathsome character in the first book.
She's like a true, true traitor.
Now that she's just the main character, it feels weird.
I'm 100% with you there, Geordie.
She sympathises with the villain and someone I thought was pretty nasty ultimately.
And now you're giving me all these reasons why to think I can see things from her perspective.
And she's not as bad as I sort of led myself to believe in that book.
She does still care about Monique, even though their relationship is iffy.
It's a really hard one for me.
Because when it first started and we were following Donna, I was like,
I don't like Donna, you did an amazing job to make me not like Donna.
In fact, what was on the brilliant work in the first book was seeing Donna from Monique's perspective.
And Monique, in the start of that book, is in love with Donna.
She's trying to rescue Donna.
But also, it's like it subtly layers red flags in about their relationship.
So before you even get to the cults and the betrayal and the human sacrifice,
you still have a woman in Donna who is shown to be manipulative and taking advantage of our main character.
It's not just she ran into a cult and turned evil.
She was really well portrayed as loathsome and unlikable before that moment.
And the cult just sort of revealed her inner evil.
And the fact that this book, one, follows her and two,
feels like it tries to justify her a bit more or shows it from her perspective.
I wasn't quite there.
So she did get through to me, you know.
I bought into some more Donna sympathy stuff, especially when you get to D.
Something about D is just more palatable than Donna,
which is weird because they're the same person.
But you get much more of a sense that Donna and D are not in control of their lives.
They are a more sophisticated, older person than Monique.
They were someone who had a lot more power in that relationship than Monique.
But actually, deep down, as we know, Monique is the stronger person.
And Donna didn't really have a lot of control of her life.
She's living out a lot of secrecy.
She wasn't able to protect Monique.
And she feels shame for her inability to keep them off the streets when she was a lawyer.
And Monique was a pizza delivery person.
That is good.
And I think at the start of the story, what I felt a lot of is,
because I distrusted this character, because she literally betrayed my last protagonist,
a lot of her early thought processes, I was like,
oh, is this her twisted way to justify what she did?
Or in her point of view, she was doing nothing wrong.
By the time we got through this book, I did begin to come around and go,
okay, maybe she really wasn't being malicious.
Like, she really was struggling and she did have her best intentions were in the right place.
But...
Yeah, but...
But, like again, as I said in our previous episode,
all you have to do is not be susceptible to propaganda, like me, who cannot be propagandized.
Unlike me.
I'm very easy to get my mind to change.
Geordie does it every episode.
Less so recently.
It's been a while since I bullied you into disliking a book.
It won't happen today.
Yeah, we're on the same page here, I think.
Unless, unless we come down differently on the left and right divide.
But that remains to be seen.
So, Donna gets kidnapped by this secretive organization,
which kinda has a name, kinda doesn't.
They're referred to as Engine,
and their building has the name Engine on it.
But it's not really clear who they work for.
I wasn't clear if they weren't building an engine.
They're building a keyhole?
That needs, that is not adequate phrasing.
They're building a thing to unlock the door through time and space.
But not the key, yeah, it is a keyhole.
It's weird.
So, they have built a structure within, like, the Palace of Old Time,
under Empire Records, and they're using the material they find there,
this, like, the fragments of old time, to build structures.
And sort of unknowingly, partially unknowingly, partially knowingly,
they're creating a tool for which to, without really understanding it,
recreate the song that pierces the universe.
In the previous book, the people, the cults of the worm,
knew how to sing the song that would open time and space to summon the worm.
And they were doing it for their own ends, and we find it in this book,
or maybe it was in the previous one, and I don't remember, because it was a year ago,
but there have been, okay, no, full stop, wait, yes, this was in the previous book,
but we just get more detail on it this time.
There were previous groups who also tried to summon the worm,
and who paid the price for it, and got skeletonised.
They're the previous kings that Donna is trapped with when Monique finds her.
It's just the way we throw out so much from this book, and be like,
the previous kings, the previous sort of chosen channels for the worm to influence the world,
who once selected, have to basically stand guard over the entranceway
until the worm dismisses them, or shows up.
That's right, the dismissal, I have not been dismissed.
Oh, man.
That was a, Woman is King is a really good book.
This book is interesting.
It's, as I said before, slow start.
Once the split between Donna and D shows up, that's where things really get interesting.
That's why I sent Duncan a text saying, oh yeah, this is a good book.
Because what happens is...
Okay, Duncan, are you familiar with the filmography of Gwyneth Paltrow?
No, I am not.
You're more of a fan of her, you know, pharmaceutical stuff.
Oh, definitely.
The candles that smell like her vagina and stuff.
What else do you like when you get in the bath?
Um, are you familiar then with a movie called Sliding Doors?
I'm actually not. I have no idea where this is going.
Sliding Doors is a movie that came out in the 1990s.
It's about a woman who is going to get on the London Underground and either, in a moment of, you know, cosmic splicing,
she either gets on the Underground or she misses and she doesn't get through the sliding doors.
And this sets off this chain reaction because in one timeline, she gets on the Underground,
she gets home in time, and she discovers her boyfriend in bed with another woman.
And in the other one, she arrives late, she arrives home and everything's normal,
and the movie is about these two timelines working parallel with each other up to the end,
one where she has made this discovery and there's a lot of drama, and the other where she's in blissful ignorance.
I mean, cool concept and something that I...
Yeah, great concept.
I think it's fun. I love it when people play with that. I like seeing butterfly effects play out.
Oh yeah, it's some of the best parts of, you know, of a time travel story because we all have what-ifs in our life.
We all have moments we want to go back to. What if I had done this?
You know, I have, like, when I think about this, I can go back to two moments in my life specifically.
I'm like, different courses of action that I could have made would completely change my life, completely.
Like, split-second decisions. One I think probably would have made it better, one would have made it a lot worse,
and thank God I don't think about them as much as I used to, but they used to come be in my head all the time.
See, I actually used to have that as well, Geordie. I think what really just killed it for me is when it just occurred to me that
every time I get in my car, I'm generating thousands of those moments of,
what if I had not hit the brakes then? This would have gone very different. And to give you a point, you just go,
yeah, I'll just be happy I'm still here.
Yes, what if I let the intrusive thoughts win? Yes, so, but we have these focal moments where they change,
and the point of this story is that this tiny decision, left or right, could completely change your life.
Now, it's a little bit more complicated than your typical string theory, because what might actually be happening here
is space-time manipulation by a being that exists outside of our understanding of normal, you know, the normal flow of time.
Well, definitely, because in your normal string, the two versions don't bump back into each other.
There's definitely an element here where the character that turns left, D, so she's being chased by a guy called Tower.
Mr. Tower. Mr. Tower. Very foreboding, gentlemen.
Dee gets away, but later when D gets to the engine in the Pass of Lost Time, she's there with Donna, who was captured by Tower,
and it's very clear that the Tower that she meets in that scene is the Tower that captured Donna.
So, D must have transitioned from her timeline, with a Tower standing there going,
adoi, where did she go, to a different version of reality, with a Tower going, I have caught her.
Well, I don't know about that. I don't know if I want to say, like, she is travelling between timelines,
because I really think that the idea is that there is just one, and it's going to be unmade by the worm.
I think what's more likely to happen is that, literally, by the manipulation of our universe, our one whole universe,
there are literally two Dons.
Instead of, like, the classic string theory thing being, when you make a decision you create two universes,
I think the implication is, literally, Donna splits like a raindrop. One goes left, one goes right.
Oh, okay, and you're saying the reason why…
Literally, yeah, there are literally two Donnas in space, in New York City.
And in that moment when they split, that's why D gets away, because Mr. Tower captures Donna.
Literally, he turns right to capture the one that he can see clambering over a fence.
Yes.
Okay, and that would explain D basically goes back to her apartment and isn't really bothered again,
and that could just cover by the fact that they think they've got her.
Oh, maybe I'm wrong.
Well, there's the thing.
I think it's true, D, because they do come to her door and ring the phone a bunch.
But, I would like to point out, we never get confirmation that's Mr. Tower.
She's terrified, D, like, hiding in her apartment, the phone's ringing, someone's at the door,
but we never actually find out if that's Mr. Tower.
You know, that could just be she's scared, it could be her girlfriend, it could be someone else trying to contact her.
I guess, I guess that's true.
But that actually goes against the argument I was first making,
which is that I think she somehow steps back into the other timeline,
which I thought happened when she goes back to the palace, so even interpretation should get to the same point.
It's going to get more complicated later when we talk about the ending.
But yes, so, and one thing that you've set up to now is that D goes to find Donna,
but what's actually happening is that she's hearing a voice, and she's being lured back to Donna.
That's right, and D thinks throughout this stage that this is Monique, this is Monique as part of the Worm,
and it's really kind of nice, and I air quotes around the word nice, that D is like, I think she needs help,
am I going to like save Monique, like Monique tried to save me, and I like the fact that D kind of sets off,
because D at this point basically has gotten away.
She could jump on the next train and get out of town, but she's like, no, I need to say goodbye to my, you know, on-off, not on-off,
see occasional girlfriend, say goodbye to my cat, I need to go, and I think it's a bit of a journey of redemption.
Yes, she's being led there, yet there are Cosmos powers at play, but I think internally for the character,
she is genuinely seeking to help and to redeem herself.
She's being invited, she's being lured, but she's doing it because, you know, she's trying to do the right thing.
She's like, she's making the decision to cross the threshold, like she's answering the call, the thing that all heroes do in their stories.
It's quite fun when it's a literal call.
Yeah, you know, if Frodo's phone started ringing and Gandalf said, hey, hey, I'm just out here with my pal Gwaii here,
please just head to Rivendell and drop some of my old stuff off. Thanks so much, mate.
I'll see you there, maybe. I might try and run into you at Weathertop. I might be busy at the time. I'll try and see you there, dude.
And off he goes. No problem in the world.
So, but exactly, this is a really good kind of positive character and reputs D in a much better light.
D...
Van Donner.
...is good Donner. Other Donner.
Yeah, now this is the interesting thing. We are more inclined to like D, and the framing of this is really interesting,
the way in which Hailey Piper creates a difference between the two of them.
Because fundamentally, what makes Donner like a worse person than D?
Nothing really. They've had the same four years of the exact same experiences in between now and when we last saw them as a villain.
The only thing that separates them is like two days. It's two days of experiences.
Donner's two days have been spent interrogated, abused, and being forced to re-engage with the cosmic horror that impacted us so much four years ago.
Whereas D hasn't.
And most of all, the discovery that all her actions are pointless and that her universe is going to come to an end.
The way in which she discovers this is great because it's not spelled out, and she has to deduce it for herself in a way which I'm really amazed that it manages to be convincing.
Because it feels like it should be a huge leap of logic. She has no idea when she leaves behind, when she leaves Empire Records,
what Monique has really done to the worm or what she's going to do next.
The fact that she's able to sort of buy pretty clever but believable deduction to figure it out. I think that's really well done.
I agree. It was really nice. And particularly at this point in the story where I was still like, this Donner was like my protagonist.
I was getting quite like, yeah, go on, work it out. You can get out. You're smart. You can get out the situation. This is where we're going.
Oh, I thought you were like, yeah, now you know, don't you, you piece of work. You know everything's doomed and you're going to come to an end.
The thing is, I don't know, maybe this is clearly very much a personal me thing. I'm sure lots of other people feel the same way with me.
But the idea of like, oh, no, all the time is going to come to an end. I'm like, well, yeah, I think that's actually kind of a known thing.
Exactly. I mean, that's something I was trying to hint at earlier, which is that Donner's inability to cope with that is actually an inability to cope with the very things which we already know is that we're going to die.
And Donner, for some reason, some part of her background means that she can't cope with the fact that she's going to die.
You know, she, I think part of it is that she says, I want to make a world without suffering.
But I think part of her really wants to live forever. Like, she's just terrified of her own extinction, whereas D isn't.
And it's not quite clear why, as you alluded to, I don't think the experiences that Donner goes through would, no, actually, let me put it this way.
I don't feel like the difference should purely come from the fact that Donner's been having a really rough two days and she's been having a rough two days.
So I'm not going to back away from that. But I don't feel like D has had sufficient moment of, like, realisation to change her and what Donner is.
I feel like there should have been two aspects. A moment for Donner to kind of, like, snap and a moment for D to be like, there are more important things, like maybe an interaction with her girlfriend.
Is it Shell? Shelley?
Shell, yeah.
Like, a moment there to make her kind of go, oh, it's not all about me. Something.
I mean, I feel like it kind of is that, but done in a much really subtle way.
Like, the big difference I say between them, aside from the whole captivity thing, which again, we don't want to undersell, it's really bad.
I think there is something you said about the fact that D is the one who gets to see Shell. She gets to see her interact with her cat.
Like, she gets to have a little vision for, yeah, I'm not alone and I have stuff that matters out there and stuff I want to live for.
Maybe, literally, it just comes down to the fact that Donner, you know, right Donner, has been pricked by a needle and has made her really sick.
And, like, she thinks she's going to die.
I certainly think that's a fact. Obviously, with her further treatment as well, she clearly is off the mind that she might not be walking out of this scenario.
And she's been reminded that...
Yeah, it might have induced a sort of fatalism combined with the knowledge that her reality is going to come to an end.
Which, we should point out, D doesn't know and I don't think has ever revealed her in the story, period, full stop.
I think you're absolutely right.
Dee, there's no point where Donner goes, this is what Monique is up to.
They don't have that conversation.
So, do you know what? Actually, they've only rolled back.
I still feel like Dee's experience could have been a bit more heavily pushed for my preference.
But Donner's reasoning for kind of going more off the deep end, despite the fact that I would argue, you know, terms of your own mortality and, you know, the end of the universe and the pointlessness of humanity,
are somewhat universal concepts, she's definitely have them shoved in her face in a way that I think would make anyone more irritable on the matter.
I certainly would be.
Yes, and it's also appropriate for like a Lovecraftian story, for characters to go a little crazy, to see the truth of reality and be unable to cope with it.
So, what happens when they get back together?
I feel like I'm jumping over Donner's experience, I should say quite a large section of this book.
The first half, definitely the first third, is just Donner's capture and experience in captivity.
There's actually a really nice moment that I want to talk about.
I don't really want to spend too much time on like the time in the white room and the torture and the beating me up and the fighting.
But there's a really nice moment when she's in her cell and she taps a message on the wall.
Oh, so good. That's the bit where it's like, oh man, we're cooking here.
This is a scene where Donner on her first night, I think she hears a tapping first through the wall.
Yes, that's important. She hears a tapping and it's the tapping that puts out the rhythm of the song that pierces the universe.
And she goes, there's someone else, there's another survivor, because no one else could possibly know that song.
So she hears the first half and then she taps out the rest of On Her Cell wall, which is made from like some of this space time material, you know, stuff from old time.
And so she communicates through the wall with another prisoner.
And so a big mystery that you have in this book is who's the other person.
It can't be anyone else, so who is it? Oh, and then...
The next day she goes to us, gets thrown back in her cell after a horrible experience and she's like, I need to reach out to that person again.
She taps the first half of the song on the wall and they tap back the second half.
And Donner has a realisation. There's no other person.
Well, the first important clue is that she taps the first night she hears it in like her left wall and then the reply comes from the right.
And she's like, did they move the prisoner? Why would they do that? That doesn't make any sense. Is there another prisoner? Why are they tapping back?
Because it's her. And by her I don't mean D, I mean literally the walls are transmitting her tapping through time.
And this is the first real inkling. This is before we find out the split, by the way, between Donner and D.
This is the first bit of time travel to an elegance that's laid in.
And when this happens, I was like, as you said, now we're cooking outside. Oh, you can bring time travel into this.
I'm not going to lie. I thought we were just going for some cosmic minor kind of torture experience.
And that was quite good. I was a little bit. I was on the road to disappointment. I'll be honest. I did lose faith.
I'm like page 30. I'm really sorry, Hailey. I really shouldn't have. But I did. It shook. My faith in the worm shook.
But this moment happened. I went on an arm back. I'm here. Let's slide.
I will say I was I was really at high hopes for this thing. It gets sort of the way this works is that it heralds the arrival of D, of left Donner.
The idea that like, you know, you can communicate through time and that you can communicate with yourself.
That's obviously to like sort of set up for the other Donner to show up.
But I was really hoping some really cool, interesting stuff would be done purely with this mechanism.
Like, I thought like, OK, I know what's going to happen. She's going to like ask questions to the wall.
She's going to say like, what's going to happen tomorrow? Are we going to do this?
And then she would hear like a thunk from the other side of the wall as she like communicated messages to herself from tomorrow back in time to like help her get through the next day.
I got really excited for that, but it didn't happen. No, you're right.
It's not really a mechanic that gets used in the story at all.
I think it even really just gets referenced when D breaks Donner out and Donner basically has that moment where he's like, oh, yes, there were no other prisoners.
I was right. And that's really where it gets left.
Yes, it's a cool moment. And I think it had, and as you say, Duncan, had the same effect on both of us.
We're like, hell yeah, now we're getting into it.
Like, this is clearly like the element that works in this story.
And it's great that it then introduces D because the split between Donner and D is like the novel part of this story.
It's the part that makes you go, ah, this is what I can tell people the story is about.
That's the thrust of the story. And it builds on the stuff that was really interesting and worked in The Worminers Kings.
And it takes it to a new, exciting, different place.
We didn't see anything like this in a previous book, aside from the fact that they were like two separate histories of Earth.
And the place it goes in the climax is really interesting as well.
Duncan, are you ready to go there?
I actually think we need to pull back, Doradie, just a tiny bit.
I know you're disappointed because I want to talk about the climax.
But I think we should talk about it in our own climax.
And just before, let's just touch on two other characters.
Because there's one character who I think is quite important to climax, who we've not even mentioned.
OK.
Who's interviewing Donner?
What's her name? Dr. Ezra or something?
Dr. Ezra.
Wow, you're right. I didn't have that much to say about her anyway.
You're right. Yeah. Just a doctor in the suit who asks the questions.
Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is someone you could get really excited about because Dr. Ezra is someone who can't let go of the past.
Kinda like Donner, who is like, who longs after like what could have been before.
And Dr. Ezra longs after like her mother who vanished because she was in like a previous worm cult.
And she wants to approach the same search for the worm as a scientist, not as one of the faithful.
And Donner is dismissive of her and contemptuous of her.
She's like, you can't understand a worm. You refuse to understand it in a way you should, which is as something of the divine.
And this is great because when I read novels like this, I always come into it as a skeptic.
I can't remember in what review I talked to you about this, Duncan.
But whenever I experience something that's like the narrator says, this could be magic or there could be a rational explanation.
I always go for the rational explanation, even in something like the X-Files, where that's a stupid thing to do.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm with Scully here.
I mean, I would say I'm probably the opposite because I read a lot of fantastical fiction and I'm just always sat there going,
well, if it's the rational explanation, this would not be a fun story, guys. Come on.
Rational explanations are for the real world documentaries. Let's have something fantastical.
But I know what you mean. It's very interesting to have this cosmic horror.
And for someone want to be like, I think because I feel like this is the frustration that Dr. Azura feels a bit.
And when Donna's doing this whole you should see it as divine because Azura is like, I feel it's basically kind of response with,
no, we should try to understand it because you're just refusing to.
You're just going, no, it's divine. Let's not investigate anymore.
I just call it divine. Shut down that conversation.
And I was like, no, we must push further. We must understand as much as we can.
Obviously, from the reader's perspective and understand, you know, I know the genre. You're like, that's a mistake.
You'd be probably better off as an individual just calling it divine and not investigating.
But I like your attitude. I like to poke at things.
So she's the scientist. She's you know, she believes it must be a rational explanation.
And as the story goes on, those scales fall from her eyes.
And she struggles to cope with the nature of reality because the fact is the worm has an ego.
Like it's resentful. It holds grudges. It has desires.
And much to my surprise, it does appear in this story.
It does. So at the end of the last book, it's kind of very much inferred that Monique and the worm,
they kind of merge. They become sort of one being.
And Monique's consciousness rides the worm's power and does her whole resetting time thing.
In this one, we sort of revealed that a sliver of the worm, part of its essence,
a section of the worm without all of its power, but its original ego and very fragile ego, may I say,
still exists and is trying to find a channel for its revenge.
And that channel is good old Donna.
Donna, King Donna, by preying on her ego and manipulating time to split Donna
into the worm leads D back to Donna to rescue her and to allow her to sing the song,
the piece of the universe, so that she can merge with the worm, much like Monique did.
And it's revealed, like, because we don't realize is that these characters are marched to be to someone else's drum.
We can say, you know, D went down there because she wanted to, because she was trying to do the right thing,
she was trying to redeem herself.
But in reality, it's possible that D only exists for the sake of this one purpose,
that she has been created by a force of destiny to achieve a purpose and do nothing more.
Rescue Donna, allow her to turn on the keyhole engine thing.
At the end of the book, it's a teeny bit confusing.
So I think that's what happened.
And allow Donna to fuse with the worm.
Correct. That's definitely what's implied.
It's made very clear that the voices that D hears, which she thinks is sort of the Monique worm, is not.
It's this sliver of the worm.
One thing I just want to kind of touch on here, like, the worm really is quite interesting because Donna speaks about the worm.
When Donna speaks about it, it's such reverence, divine.
Oh, what is it? It is, we are like ants to it.
What is it? What is this thing? You know, how can we relate to the opinions of a tiny individual ant?
And I'm like, that metaphor doesn't quite fly because even good old vegan me,
I don't care what an ant thinks of me.
The worm does.
Which makes me think that the worm isn't as high above the ant as Donna thinks it is.
Oh, I know what you mean.
Because you're talking about the fact that the worm is spiteful and vengeful.
Yeah.
And it like, it wants to smash Pangaea because these guys slighted it.
There's no indication that it has any actual feelings towards Monique.
But it definitely wants to stop Monique from undoing its actions and probably wants to like, eat Monique.
Or like, replace the part of Monique that is now part of the greater worm-ness and like, become itself again.
Its desires are opaque and, you know, it doesn't convey anything to the narrative except by its actions.
Which is great. I love that.
I never ever want to watch a series where Cthulhu talks.
Except for Ant and Another Thing by Owen Cawford, but that's different.
I think one of the great things about the worm, I love that we call it the worm.
And I'm not gonna, even while reading it and saying that, I, you know, my mind conjures up an image of an oversized worm.
But it's never described in such physical terms.
It's just an influence of Pangaea.
Why it's a worm is that it makes wormholes.
It burrows through time. It's, and it rends.
That's the verb which is used by Monique and later by D.
It's not a maker. It's a destroyer. It carves. It cuts. It slices.
And when you think about like, the scale of, I don't know, time in the cosmos, it seems really petty.
And it just makes me then think it isn't as grandiose as the characters sort of, Donna prescribes it to be.
For it to then be that individually petty.
But that's just my view on it. I picture that actually, although the worm is obviously much greater than the humanity,
I think maybe on the cosmic scale, minor predictions, I don't think it's actually that big.
I think there might be things out there that are like, the worm is a worm to us.
That's just the vibe I've got.
It's totally possible, really. I mean, I hadn't really troubled myself to think about that.
But yeah, if one cosmic force exists that happens to have concerned itself with one planet because of Pangaea being caught its attention,
yeah, there could be scores of worms who don't care what happens to Pangaea.
It's just like the kid, again, going back to that metaphor of bugs, like a little child playing in the garden and literally playing with the bugs,
it's like, I'm delighted to the bugs, that child is all powerful.
But there are still adults in that child's life who would just be like, what are you doing? Come inside.
Yeah, or the worm could be a tendril of a greater being, one of many arms.
What, I like it.
Okay, we're speculating about stuff that just literally isn't even in this book at this point,
and we haven't talked about the climax and the weird places this story goes, such that, Duncan,
I think we're going to have to figure out what happened as a collaborative effort, because I think I know.
I think I do, but I'm not sure.
I said this to Jordie just before we started HitRecord.
I said, quite often when we review books, we give our thoughts on what happened.
And this time, it's like we need to share what we think happened.
So the events as Duncan experienced them.
Dee and Donna escape from their cell, capture Dr. Azura, and are like, you need to shut this all down,
or blow it all up, or something to that tune.
They end up in a room with the keyhole, and they start their singing,
because they want to wreck things.
And Mr. Tower comes in, stabs D, but it's too late.
The hole has been opened.
Donna gets infused with old-timey powers, which is like dark crystals,
and she's sort of metamorphosing into a different being.
Donna uses this power to grab hold of Mr. Tower, and her touch infects him,
and he basically arrives in agony and crumbles to dust.
And then D is all like, okay, Donna, we've got to shut this down now,
because we don't want to make any big trouble.
And then Donna's like, no, I am the Worms' king.
I will ascend with it and bring about my universe.
I am an egotistical arsehat.
And so D and Azura, we've got to hit the switches
and make this whole place blow up.
And they do, and they run out, and collapsing environment,
but bad Donna shoots away into the cosmos,
and we'll do bad things in the next book.
That's kind of what I got.
I think that's really close.
I think the thing is that...
The important thing to note is that D is really ignorant in this whole section.
Donna knows pretty much everything that's happening.
Dee knows very little.
So Donna says to D, before we go,
and Dee's literally hobbling Donna along,
because Donna has a broken leg.
It was broken by Mr. Tower.
She's like, we have to go to this room.
And Dee's just like, I mean, I trust myself,
so I bet this has a good reason to do this.
And they go.
And I'm going to be completely honest, Duncan.
I'm not really sure what she was intending here.
Like, did Donna know that she was going to try and summon and fuse with the worm?
I know that what she wanted to do was prevent Monique from shattering,
from unshattering Pangaea.
I know that's what she wanted.
I wasn't really sure how she was going to do that.
And to be honest, I think maybe I was a bit small-minded about it,
and I thought that she was literally going to try and walk through a portal
and literally go back physically in time and be in the past.
But maybe that was stupid to think that.
Yeah, I guess she did plan on fusing with the worm.
She must have had that in mind.
Yes, at this point, Donna has very much fallen back into the cult.
And she is like, no, now there's two of us.
We can sing to the worm, the bit of the worm that I think is influencing us,
because I don't think that's Monique.
So that's definitely her drive.
And in this room that they're going to is where there's,
didn't even touch on this earlier, the skull of a previous investigator
slash king slash cult leader, which forms a bit of a keyhole
that they're planning to use.
Donna's got the vibe.
Yeah, the mechanisms are not explained.
And it actually made me really funny when they mentioned that like,
like tape cassettes are being used.
I'm like, oh, yeah, it's 1994.
I'm imagining this as being big sci-fi stuff, but this is really old technology.
So, yes, I think you got most of it right in terms of like the action.
They are that one of D gets stabbed.
At first, you're like, oh, my God, it's a very serious stab wound.
And then several pages later, you're like, I guess it wasn't that bad.
I mean, she seems to be doing fine.
The conversation between Donna and D, it goes on for a while.
Yes, this is quite an interesting end.
And by the way, I'm loving this story at this point.
I'm really in there. Oh, yeah.
What we I'm loving it as well.
But it's the conversation is really cyclical.
It literally is just like it's literally just a couple of pages too long.
What I felt this month.
So this is the moment where Donna is like, I'm going bad.
And D as her other self is basically going, no, don't.
And I just feel like there's a little bit of what can you say to yourself?
You know, why not?
Yeah, you could pull on your memories or say, don't you know, you feel this and you shouldn't.
And I just felt like, as you said, maybe it went on a little long or for its length, it should have touched a bit deeper.
But I just didn't quite buy these two separate characters fully because they are so different at this point.
I'm like, how you should have a little more common ground.
The only way I sort of brought it is the fact that the worm itself was really getting mind tendrils in Donna.
I've got it. I know the difference.
Lay it out for me.
We've both convinced ourselves of something different.
We've told ourselves that the reason why D was going back in was to seek redemption because she thought she could help Monique.
What's actually happening is that as she's going down into somewhere she's afraid to go, she's thinking about what Monique would do.
She's making herself braver and more compassionate by thinking, I need to draw on strength here.
I'm going to act like Monique would.
And in this moment, in doing that, she has changed.
She has, in trying to be a better person, I think she's succeeded.
And in this moment now, she's almost been like the worm infected by Monique and the stuff that makes Monique good, courage and compassion.
And the fact that she finds Donna, the wounded, injured Donna, and then cares for her.
I think there's something really different.
One Donna is out for revenge.
The other is out to protect, to save and rescue.
And it would kind of show a really nice kind of parallel by the fact that the worm influences people in a very physical and intrusive sense.
Whereas Monique, even Monique in all her power, she's not here in the scene.
She's off in the cosmos or time traveling weather, but she's influencing D in the very human way.
She set an example.
She's with D, but in her mind, in spirit, but not the literal spirit.
And that's how that's influencing her.
It's much more of a pure, comfortable humanities kind of achievement of how we can influence others rather than what the worm does.
Yeah. And what's occurring to me now is that what's happening simultaneously is that we're seeing the duality of Donna and they're both undergoing a transformation.
Donna, right Donna, who is incorrect Donna, so poorly named there. Right Donna is fusing with the worm.
She's becoming King Donna.
She's regressing. She's going back to the things she was trying to achieve before.
She's failing to change.
And the thing that defines D left Donna in the final chapters is a desire to live.
She's running for her life and she's helping Asra as she goes, even though she has no reason to do so.
Would it be really low hanging fruit if I was to say that was Hailey Piper making a comment on left wing and right wing politics?
Not saying it is, but it's there.
Do I think that's what she's deliberately saying?
No. Do I think that saying one side believes that helping people is good and the other side that thinks empowering yourself so you can make yourself more high and mighty and then influence things in your own way is good.
Yeah, I guess there's a dichotomy there.
It's certainly a reading I think someone could take.
But no, you're right.
I don't think that was an intentional. If you're listening to this episode of a podcast, it can only mean that you don't hate trans people and that's a great sign.
I would like all of our fans to like our Worm and his King episodes and like trans people and everyone else can fuck off.
To be clear, if you don't like the episode, that is fine.
Oh yeah, but you better fucking watch out, TERFs.
You'll notice which books we've chosen not to read on the podcast.
Anyway, we're getting very off topic.
The ending, not the ending ending.
Let's go for D's ending, which is probably the most nebulous and hard to figure out part of the entire book.
It's the most opaque.
By a long way.
Geordie, you gave your interpretation of the other confusing scene Duncan.
May I go first here?
Oh, absolutely. Take it away.
Okay.
First things first, I don't know what happens this year.
I could definitely stand to reread it.
If I hadn't been quite as busy after work and before recording this episode, I probably would have read it for a couple of times.
I only had time to do it once.
Here's the deal.
As Donna, sorry, as D is racing for the outside with Asra, it's not clear whether she makes it.
It's not clear that she does make it outside because much like in the way, Kirke forward slash Circe, I have strong opinions about that.
Don't worry about it.
Ends.
It ends with like a flash forward, but it's a speculative flash forward.
There's no guarantee that this is what happens.
Dee envisions a future, but it's possible.
Considering if you've read the end of the Worm and His Kings, where we see this exact future play out in that as a vision of Manique, the worm,
traveling through time and visiting Donna at the time of her death.
Does that mean that Donna is literally having a vision of the future, a prophecy, or is it as she's kind of hinting a possible future?
As far as I'm aware, it's definitely, this is my interpretation to what you've just said, Geordie.
Yes, it is clearly a possible future.
There's the future gets described to us and then there's the line, would this fate come true?
Question mark.
Possibilities there.
You know, a simple choice, left turn and a right, could guide the future down separate time shattering paths.
She has no way to guess which turn in life might send her to an early death or guide her to this hospital bed.
Hospital dead being the end of the vision.
My interpretation is she has seen this possible future.
She now knows that left and right is all it can take to what path she's going to go down.
I got the interpretation that that possible future will definitely happen for one of the possible D's.
But it's not saying that this D we're following is definitely going to take that journey.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, I was wondering if what it might mean is that there was a future.
There was a destiny.
When Monique changed time, like she became the worm, she stepped outside of time.
She created a future in which we see Donna dying as an old woman with a younger woman.
Once again, old habits die hard, sitting by her bed.
And the only thing we know is that the 21st century goes to shit.
We do not survive into the 22nd century, basically.
And she captures a vision of that future as well.
But Donna, right Donna, is now changing time.
She has also stepped outside of time.
So maybe this is only a possible future because this was her destiny.
But now that's in flux.
Now anything could happen.
And the point is that because the future has yet to be decided, presumably it will be in the third book, Song of a Tyrant Worm, all our destinies are in flux.
Yes, I can definitely see that.
One thing that I would also add, maybe this is just an appreciation.
Maybe this is just de-appreciating the little changes.
Because this section ends with her saying,
To see herself from the outside to at last realise she was a monster and she never forgot.
The she never forgot line implies to me that she must live a time to remember.
So she never forgot the rest of her days and those were incredibly short.
Doesn't have the quite same effect.
Yeah, maybe there's something there, to be honest.
That would be my other influence.
But I certainly think the idea that the timeline is now open again, that what we saw in the first book, I'm going to reveal here.
I don't know if we expressly asked Hailey Piper this.
I wish we had.
Of how much she pre-planned the sequels.
I certainly don't get the impression reading this book that this was a master trilogy from the off.
The Worm and his Kings works absolutely works on its own.
No, no, I really don't think so.
In fact, I believe you were outright surprised that it had a sequel.
Because you're like, how could that be?
Yes.
Yes, I mean, literally, how could it be?
The universe ends in the book.
And I think that, genuinely, this is the most audacious sequel we've ever read on the podcast.
There are books we've written, like a lot of books go to publishers with the potential for sequels, but no guarantee.
Take, we haven't read this, but this is absolutely the case.
Throne of Glass.
You don't have to make a sequel to Throne of Glass.
It ends.
There's potential for stuff to come, but it could just stop there.
And in fact, it should have.
I was actually going to say, do you mate?
Classic case of a book that could stand on its own, if need be.
Yes, and a better example.
Thank you.
I thought it was kind of crazy to make a sequel to the previous book.
I know that Hailey said herself, she was sort of surprised by how well the previous book did.
So it makes sense to keep going with the story and go somewhere else.
And this book is like, crazy audacious.
It's a book.
It's a sequel to a book that feels like a sequel should be impossible.
The hero of the story is the villain of a previous one.
It's full of, it starts off with almost no timey-wimey stuff and then introduces the timey-wimey stuff after kind of a slow start.
And yet, despite all that, it really sticks the landing.
No book has ever come close to the amazing ending of The Worm and His Kings.
But this book really, once again, has an amazing ending.
Clearly, that's something, that's a strength Hailey Piper has.
Writing incredible endings?
Hell yes.
Normally, it is the other way round for an author.
Very much. And if you're going to be good at something, I mean, I was about to say being good at the ending is the key thing.
But I suppose if you're really bad at beginnings, people might not make it to the end.
Yes, that is survivor bias right there.
Hailey Piper is the opposite of a manga writer, because manga writers write incredible stories and they fuck it up at the last second.
Oh, I don't know. Certain mangas, they fucked up over the last couple of years.
Decades, maybe.
But, you're right.
And I certainly think when it's short fiction, it gets away with a bit more.
In terms of, I'm more willing to push through 140 pages in the hope of a really good ending, because it's not a lot to push through.
Sure. And I think it's also in line with a horror.
You know, horrors are about building anticipation.
And whilst this book isn't really scary, it definitely has a horror element.
Because it makes you think about stuff like duality and like a severing of a person.
Like, being disgusted by your own self.
Knowing that basically there's evil inside you and only small circumstances have stopped you from becoming that person.
That's good stuff.
It's not, ah, scary.
But it does make me think.
I said in this episode, there are times I look back at my life, there are two moments I can think of, yes, if I had made really small changes, my entire life would be different.
Would I be a worse person? Would I be happier? Would I be sadder? I'll never know. And I don't want to know.
Oh, it definitely wouldn't help to know.
Also, because you can now verify it, I can in theory tell you right now the answer. It would make just as much difference.
And this is good. This is, to me, really good cosmic horror.
We read one Lovecraftian work on this podcast.
I've actually read quite a few of it for H.D. Lovecraft and he's often held as like the originator for what we consider cosmic horror.
And I don't really want to take away from that title, at least not with a bit more research.
But I don't necessarily like his work that much.
And I don't think that is an opinion that we've really kept quiet.
We were very vocal about it in our Shadow Over Innsmouth episode.
Hailey Piper may be my favourite cosmic horror writer.
Mountains of Madness is better.
I think she gets horror, she gets the actual horror of the cosmic really, really well.
If, oh, this sounds really weird. I don't know why I'm back to your criticism, Geordie.
It feels wrong, but I feel like I need to slip this in now just to be just to be fair.
I would say I've sprinkled my problems for it is booked throughout.
The one thing I did have a little issue with this one is sort of moment to moment horror, the horror, sort of the slightly more violent horror,
the horror of Donna when she's like imprisonment in the early section.
I don't know. It's not proper horror. But that's the problem. It's not proper horror.
I didn't feel that as much as I certainly felt the horror elements in the early parts of The Worm and His Kings.
Like when Monique is just following the Grey Maiden and is going to the cult and is working her way down into the underground.
Like that had some real horror moments for me, which this book just sort of didn't.
Not like the classic horror, the fear of the dark and the big monster. And will our main hero make it?
Yes, that's all true. I will counter that with this.
Duncan, I think there's a really good reason why we didn't find this book, the start of this book, frightening.
That's because we're both men. And the start of this book is very specifically the fear of a woman being followed by a man.
Touche, I fully accept that. And now you've literally just said that I've gone, ah, yes, in fact, that I'm sure that scene would be terrifying
because it's actually so mundane, not mundane, so real, so non-cosmic.
You're right. It is. It's a mundane type of horror. It's some horror of like when Shell hears about that later in the story,
she's like, oh, that's so horrible for you. She doesn't go, oh, I can't believe it. How could such a thing happen?
She's like, oh, I hate it when that happens. I'm so sorry.
And you're right. There must be, you know, there's a very real fear of leaving work late and being the last one on an empty street.
So you're right, actually. That is well done.
That's something that I've never been afraid of. So like, it doesn't resonate with me, except for when I first watched the film Halloween.
Fucking hell, does that make you think like, oh, man, being followed by a big scary man is fucking terrifying.
And a key reason why I've never watched that film. Slaps. You should watch it. Duncan's really good.
Not happening. I do not do. I do not do the classic horrors. The closest I've ever got to is Scream.
And that is like my limit. It's not that scary. The opening of Scream is a bit scary, but it's not a very scary film.
No, it's more of a detective, to be honest. That's I think why I enjoyed it so much.
I loved the fact that in that film you're actually asking like, who is the killer? Yeah, I fucking nailed it, by the way.
Oh, well done. 14 year old me. I was with my girlfriend at the time and I said, huh, this doesn't really make sense.
Unless, of course, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she said, she looked at me.
She went and then she looked back at a TV screen and like, did I just nail this? And she went.
And then later I was like, I fucking nailed it. I got it exactly right.
How old were you when that happened?
Errr... 20.
OK, I will let 14 year old me off the hook then for not cracking that nut.
Fair enough.
So back to Even the Worm will turn.
Geordie, do you recommend this book?
Final thoughts? No, wait, final scene.
Sorry?
Final scene. We've done the penultimate scene. We haven't actually talked about what happened to Donna.
Do you know what? It's actually really suitable that I forgot that because I even forgot to read this for a few hours.
I finished this. I thought I finished this book in like a lunch break and then I got home.
I was like, yep, podcast later. And I went. I never actually read the last like three or four pages.
And I had to quickly speed read it 20 minutes ago.
So, yes, the final, final scene, the cosmic scene.
The last week had a similar moment where it ended on us with this more cosmic perspective with Monique.
And now we get the cosmic perspective for King Donna, as she is being referred to now.
Yes, Donna has succeeded in her aim.
She has fused with the worm in a way that's very interesting.
The idea we had before in the previous book was that Monique and the worm had sort of become one.
And that meant that like Monique, her ego was steering the great locomotive that is the worm.
And she makes it do what she wants.
The feeling I have is that the relationship between Donna and the fragments of the worm, it's different.
It's a much more symbiotic relationship.
They depend upon each other, but they are definitely separate.
She doesn't really know where they, where she starts and it ends.
Well, it starts, I guess.
However, she has maintained her ego and her purpose.
And her purpose now is that she is going to hunt down through time and get Monique.
And we know that she's going to stop her.
But what does that mean?
Is she going to devour Monique?
Is she going to separate Monique and the worm?
I don't know. I really don't know.
I kind of want to read the next book in like a year.
I do too. I thought this was a really interesting ending.
It opens so much into the question of what is the worm?
Because I understand that the worm needed Donna in this to sort of get the engine running.
That's like helping it crack through time because the worm doesn't have the strength anymore.
But the fact that the worm kept Donna about to like sing the song or like help it.
I was really interested. I was like, what are you?
Why do you need this human?
How much of you is still you?
Of whatever you are.
And it still doesn't have a voice, which I think is really interesting.
So I'm like, it's Donna just a voice.
Good. I hope it never talks.
I want to see, I am so excited.
And I really want to see King Donna and Monique have a reunion, have a moment where they kind of stand opposite each other.
Again, I think it could be fascinating.
I do think it would be interesting, but I also really don't want Monique to have to go through that.
She suffered enough.
True. But also like Monique has had in many respects an eternity to change.
I've been interested if the Monique if we do see Monique again as a character in the next book, which I suspect we probably will.
Is it going to be recognizable the Monique that we saw before?
I don't know.
So when I finished my audiobook, I also played a sample of the sequel.
Would you like to know who the main perspective character in Chapter one of the next book is?
I'm just going to say if it's a Zara, like I will understand, but I would be a trifle disappointed.
Is that your guess?
Yes.
The Grey Pilgrim, the Grey Lady.
The Grey Maiden.
The Grey Maiden, yes.
No. Doesn't she just say like oook or something?
She makes Falkhorn noises.
Yes.
Hang on. I can just, I just remembered I can just do Foley effects.
She goes.
Well, that is fascinating.
And she was one of the old Pangeans.
Oh my God, a different perspective.
Is she alive?
No, right.
I will wait for the time that the next book is picked.
Geordie, that will be on you.
But before we go to our next picks, let's do our summary statements.
Although I think it must be painfully obvious from listening to this episode.
Geordie, do you recommend this book?
And if so, who to?
Yes, I absolutely do.
The Woman is King is such an easy read.
Okay. Hang on. Backtrack slightly.
I don't remember exactly what I said about who I recommend the previous book to.
I have made very clear that this episode of the podcast, and indeed the podcast in general, is not for TERFs.
This is not a TERF-friendly zone.
If you don't like trans people, fuck off.
I happen to like trans people, so yes, this podcast is dedicated to them.
This podcast episode is dedicated to them.
The Woman of Kings was the first book we ever read that had trans protagonists rare to see in a fantasy novel.
However, the book itself, hard to actually recommend to trans people,
because a big theme of that is a hideous, grievous injury that has happened to a trans person in a botched sex change surgery.
And that's a bummer, but that's the first experience we'd have of a trans character in one of the books we looked at.
It's also potentially triggering for like body dysmorphia reasons.
So for that reason, I do recommend The Woman is Kings to everyone.
And especially to fans of fantasy who want to see queer perspectives.
But I also have to put a big trigger warning on top of that book for that exact reason.
It's about a trans person who goes through some bad shit.
This next book though, if you've read A Woman is Kings and you liked it, yes, you should keep reading.
It's a good sequel, it's a good story, it's complex, it's nuanced.
It really sets up some interesting stuff to happen in a third book, which I look forward to reading when I get around to it in a year's time.
And then over to me, what can I say that Jordi has so beautifully articulated?
I recommend even The Worm will turn to every single person that I recommended The Worms and His Kings to.
I will not hide that I thought this story got off a little bit slower, but it delivered full throttle.
It absolutely satisfied me as a continuation and it surprised me.
I genuinely thought that we could never have that experience of surprise that I felt when we first read The Worms and His Kings.
Because that came out of nowhere, I hadn't heard of that book before and it was such a wonderful surprise to read something of such quality.
This book also delivered a surprise, which was the fact that I was so doubtful that the sequel could deliver.
Though when it did, I was like, I'm shocked once again. Thank you very much, Hailey Piper.
This was great. I loved it. I'm sure anyone who enjoyed the first book will love this one too.
And I'm gonna point out, you know, this book, The Worm and His Kings, was a surprisingly well-read book for Hailey Piper, as she said to herself on the episode.
This book has not received the same acclaim and accolades as the previous one.
It's a really good book, so I would really encourage you to not only go out and read it, but leave a review.
This is a good book and it sucks. It has one review on Audible and that's from me.
That is certainly surprising and it's kind of hurtful because I want people to know that if you've read that first book and liked it, you owe it to yourself to experience this sequel.
I'm not going to stand here and necessarily, I'm certainly not going to make the claim that I think I preferred this book to the first one.
No, I'm not going to say that either. That first book is, it's a surprise hit and it's a strong hit.
But this book does nothing to insult its memory as a follow-up. It takes a very bold, different direction and still hits all the marks.
Well said, Duncan. Well, it's my choice what to read next. I am not going to pick The Worm, the Song of the Tyrant Worm.
I don't know when we're going to do it. Probably not for Halloween next year. I think if we do hit it, I think it'll be sooner than that.
However, however, this is a modern horror fantasy book. It came out last year. I figured, Duncan, my objective was I wanted to pick something genuinely scary.
Okay.
We haven't been properly scared yet in any of these episodes.
I feel the fear now.
What is supposed to be one of the scariest books of all time. That's what I've been told.
It? Geordie, we know you have a fortnightly schedule. That thing's like, talk about a doorstopper. That's knocked the door down.
First things first, if I was going to pick a story which I thought would genuinely be a fantasy novel and be scary by Stephen King, I would pick The Shining.
But I'm not going to do that because you're right, fortnightly schedule and pulling the curtain back, which normally won't do.
You're not going to get this episode in October. I really needed to milk that book club thing because that's the only time I'm going to get to do it.
I've already recorded our episode on Berserk and I forgot to do it there. So that was my only other chance.
This one's been recorded and it's being released in November.
Sorry, everyone. It's still a creepy month. You know, it's like the month that time forgot. It's not Halloween. It's not Christmas. What is it?
It's the period of time where Halloween and Christmas candy appears on the shelf exactly next to each other.
And I got very mad and complained about it on my D&D group.
And someone said, Geordie, I knew you were going to get upset about this. And that made me feel embarrassed.
The book I have chosen for this podcast is one which I've told is the scariest book of all time, which isn't The Shining and isn't.
What's the other one that's scary? The Exorcist. It's not a reverse to it is The Woman in Black.
Oh, dear. I'm going to struggle.
Yes, supposedly very scary. I have experienced this in two other formats.
I think the fact that I have seen it twice in different formats, the movie with Daniel Radcliffe, which was kind of scary, and the stage play, which was so, so scary.
Maybe that's going to diminish my ability to be scared by this, but I am going to determine I'm going to read as much of this book in a dark room as possible.
And I will be reading this book in as much direct sunlight as possible.
Geordie, you've picked it now.
With a teddy bear and a hot water bottle and your nightlight.
Well, I can't wait to discuss it with you and maybe you can help give a bit of therapy to me to get over what I'm genuinely a little bit concerned about.
But that will be next time. For now, if you have enjoyed listening to this and would like to know more about when new episodes come out, please go and check out our Instagram, if it's just fantasy podcast.
If you like sending your thoughts and opinions on The Worm and His Kings, even The Worm Will Turn, The Worm and Black or any other spooky or non spooky book that we have ever discussed or not discussed, you can do so one at the Instagram.
Is this just fantasy podcast or our Gmail, an excellent place to get a message out to us.
Is this just fantasy podcast at gmail.com.
We always love to hear from people.
If you enjoy this episode and you love this book series, go give this five stars on your podcasting app of choice.
It really does do a lot.
And when I say do a lot, I mean, it makes me very happy inside when I see it.
When I see a review go up, I go, yay.
To be completely candid, recently, especially in between the last unicorn and the heroes, which were two episodes which I either put a lot more effort into the normal or just took a long time to edit because it was a long episode and there was a lot to edit.
They got me really tired, like physically exhausted and also dreading the process of actually editing the episodes. But when Duncan said one person on our Instagram said they really wants to hear our opinions on the prior of the orange tree, I was like, OK, then fine.
And it gave me so much more energy and like enthusiasm about doing the podcast.
So, yeah, hearing from you listeners and knowing that there are people out there who do listen to the show and enjoy it and like to hear our opinions and stuff.
It really does just perk us up and make us much more excited about doing the show.
So if you want to keep this train running, just let us know.
It's always great to hear from you.
And we look forward to when you hear from us again soon.
I've been your host, Geordie Bailey.
I've been your other host, Duncan Nicol.
So long. Bye.