... And Now For Something Completely Stupid

Blood Worm

by John Halkin

p. 1988 

After reading a lot of heavier fare lately, my mind cried out for something mindless and entertaining, and directed my eyes to Blood Worm, because what screams ‘mindless entertainment’ better than giant, bloodsucking worms terrorizing London? Penned in the late eighties by John Halkin, author of such revolutionary literature as Slither, Slime, and Squelch, and with a hilariously over the top cover featuring a slathering serpent rising from untold bloody depths to twine itself around a crumbling Big Ben, Blood Worm seemed like just the remedy I needed, but sadly it fell prey to the old standard for horror books of its sort: too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but not ridiculous enough to circle back around to awesome.

There’s nothing wrong with the mechanics of Halkin’s prose. If anything, it’s too ordinary. Riddled with clichés—such as the hero championing his wild theories, whom no one believes until it’s too late, the constantly-in-peril child, even a disorderly death scene where a former soldier suffers from ‘Nam flashbacks while he is devoured by beetles—Blood Worm just tries a bit too hard to be something it has no chance of being. Bloodsucking worms and beetles are swarming over small town England; nobody cares that the hero’s wife was unfaithful to her marriage or that another character feels shame at her cowardice. All of these tedious things detract from the BLOODSUCKING WORMS.

And let’s talk about those worms for a minute here.

The cover of Blood Worm, which undoubtedly drew me to the book in the first place (years ago, before it sat on my shelf collecting dust), presents a gigantic, skyscraper-sized beastly worm, but this is false advertising. The worms in the book never reach this size. At most they are human-sized, and even at that size, they aren’t even the biggest threat in the novel. That honor is bestowed upon the green and pink beetles from which the worms emerge. Dazzling and deadly, it is the beetles we see first and the beetles which are significantly harder to defeat, especially since they present a double threat as they also eat away at the wooden infrastructure of the town’s buildings, threatening collapse if not properly inspected. And here is exactly why I suppose nonexistent Megaworm got to star on the book cover: it’s just not as thrilling to tell a story about the dangers of compromised structural integrity.

But, like the reporter in the story who sensationalizes the insect threat and coins the term ‘Blood Worm’ for the headlines, the advertisers of Blood Worm know how to get ya.

I know this stretches the bounds of believability that I expected anything at all from a book called Blood Worm, but I must admit it was a terrible letdown. I expected to read the literary equivalent of a bad SyFy movie—you know, like Mansquito or Arachnophobia or Dinocroc or any of the wretched tripe you catch on Saturday morning television or at 3 a.m. when you can’t sleep. Blood Worm started off promisingly but quickly failed to meet my expectations.

Perhaps this was just bad timing. Blood Worm seems like the type of book I would have loved to read when I was younger, laying on the beach in the summertime, lazily soaking in the cheesy action—the kind of book you can put down at any time to do something better or from which you can still absorb most of the bullet points no matter what sort of commotion is going on around you in the physical world. Perhaps this relaxed setting would have been more conducive to my enjoyment of Blood Worm.

... Then again, delivering the super-sized bloodsucking beasts the cover promised us certainly couldn’t have hurt.