I’ve been reading the web fiction series Worm. It’s a little difficult to describe, but it’s essentially a long-form superhero story, structured in arcs. The main character, Taylor, finds herself wrestling with the ideas of what being a hero or a villain means, in a world were monsters and dangers are heightened. It’s also a pretty dark story - there’s body horror, depression, PTSD, serial killers, pretty gray morality, and the villains play for keeps.

I like it a lot, but I will admit it’s long. It clocks in at 1.7 million words, which is something like 17 full length novels. It’s structured in 30 acts, so there are natural breaking points, but it reads very smoothly for being as long as it is. I’m coming up on the final arc, and maybe should’ve slowed down a little, or read a few arcs and paused. Once the first major plotline resolved, the story slowed down a little before gearing up for the final run.

The main character has the ability to control bugs in her general vicinity, and that means that since she’s not physically any stronger than a normal person, she has to outthink most of her opponents. The action scenes are good (though occasionally a little long) and the superpowers are varied and interesting. Half the fun is watching a 16-year-old girl outthink her way around people who are both physically and politically stronger than her, and one of the recurring jokes is that even when she does good things, it’s creepy to watch her being covered in spiders, so she must be a villain.

One thing I enjoy from a storytelling standpoint is that between the multitude of people with reality-warping superpoowers and giant monster attacks on major cities, the world has essentially fallen into an economic depression. Occasionally when I read comic books it seems a little unrealistic that a monster destroys half of New York City every other week without any real economic consequences.