Review: Song of the Tyrant Worm by Hailey Piper

Title: Song of the Tyrant Worm

Series: The Worm and His Kings: Book Three

Author: Hailey Piper

Length: 197 Pages

Category: Horror

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: I haven’t read a Hailey Piper book yet that hasn’t twisted my brain in some far out and unusual ways. She has such a command of the macabre, and there is always an underlying message in what she writes. Song of the Tyrant Worm has plenty of them.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: New York City, 1990: The Gray Maiden has served the almighty Worm and his faithful for her entire life. Recently that has meant abducting women off the street to find the Worm’s destined Bride, but any brutality is worth his promise of a better world to come.

Until two strangers reveal a horrifying truth—there is no future anymore. No past. Unfathomable forces have broken all sense of the world, stranding Gray in a repeating nightmare, cut off from godly promises. Her only hope is to follow these strangers out of the catastrophe, first to safety, and then to answers.

But a sinister presence lurks beyond the universe’s skin, a cosmic hunger that has haunted Gray since before she knew its name.

Review: The last sentence of my review of Even the Worm Will Turn is “What happens next is anyone’s guess.”

I could never, not in my wildest imagination, have predicted this.

The world the Gray Maiden lives in is a fickle one, based upon a promise filled with oxymoron. Like fighting a war for peace, the Worm promises to destroy the world so hate ceases to exist and a better world will come of it. You see the the conflict here, of course. The Worm is a liar and manipulator. As Gray moves through this story and discovers that time as a linear construct no longer exists, she begins to see through the lies she’s been fed.

I haven’t read a Hailey Piper book yet that hasn’t twisted my brain in some far out and unusual ways. She has such a command of the macabre, and there is always an underlying message in what she writes. Song of the Tyrant Worm has plenty of them. That everything happens in this final installment of The Worm and His Kings trilogy in such a mind-bending way, rejecting continuity in favor of tossing its characters (and readers) through a maelstrom of time warps and inexplicable context, is only to lead to a concept so familiar and true as to seem simple in its revelation.

As Gray awakens to the truth, she finds comradery and kinship, she finds people who see her and understand her and want to protect her. She finds community and a sense of belonging, and in sacrifice she finds a world she didn’t know could exist for her.