On Writing EVEN THE WORM WILL TURN
by Hailey Piper
(minor spoilers for The Worm and His Kings)
How the hell do you write a sequel?
I had never done it before. Never even tried. There’s a distinct change in texture between digging into new and untouched earth versus a return to well-walked ground. When I wrote The Worm and His Kings in late 2019 and early 2020, I understood there were parts of the lore that I would have to leave out. Monique in that book has no interest in the Worm cult and no means to learn much more than she discovers incidentally. Her focus is singular—find Donna. Save Donna.
Nothing else could matter. I wrote the book to be a single volume, and that was supposed to be the end.
But pretty soon after The Worm and His Kings released in November 2020, people were asking me if there was more to this universe. And the answer was complicated, because yes! There was totally more! But did I have plans on telling it? No, I had kind of accepted that a bunch of that world would be something I kept to myself.
It was both a relief and a challenge to decide to share those ancient secrets and cosmic forces. In fact, it was a similar challenge to writing The Worm and His Kings—I have this universe, but how to explore it? I tried first to ambush it, tell more of a side story than a proper sequel, with new characters almost entirely unrelated from anything that happens in the first book, but taking place within the same continuity. (I might still take them up someday; they were interesting characters.) For all I know, that’s the kind of Book 2 some readers would like, but it wasn’t quite working for me. I have to go with my instincts, because I don’t have much structure inside me for what’s the Right way to tell these stories, and my instinct said I was off the mark.
I put the side story aside, and soon enough the right path became pretty obvious. Sure, Monique only understood so much of the Worm’s lore. She didn’t know about the Worm’s earlier sect pre-dating Bouchard’s, didn’t understand where Old Time residue came from, et cetera.
But Donna—she’s another story. She has an interest, and her own ideas about the future. To pick up Donna’s story was a chance to not only further explore the makings of this world, but to also dig into her head, see the facets of her that made Monique fall in love, while also glimpsing a past she never really let Monique fully understand. And once I turned in that direction, I couldn’t wait to write Donna Ashton again.
Donna has been part of The Worm and His Kings from its inception in that I can’t remember her occurring to me. It’s not part of my writing process to sit and try building a character in blocks and pieces. They won’t feel alive for me then—I need them to occur to me, like impulses and realizations. I remember when Monique occurred to me, the moment I had the protagonist of the first book at my fingertips, but I can’t remember how Donna came to be. Like she was always there.
Maybe because I can relate to Donna more than I like to admit. Or maybe because I can relate to Monique falling for her.
Donna Ashton is a vulnerable character while also a dangerous one. I think a lot of people take Donna at her word because she’s charismatic and confident and talks a lot. But we in the real world know that those traits do not make a person right.
Deep down, we’re all trying to understand things. Some people decide they already have everything figured out, and they’ll sell you on that solution for money, devotion, anything you’ll give.
One of the most important elements to me about The Worm and His Kings is how it’s full of people who don’t truly understand what they’re dealing with. Different cult members have different interpretations, and outsiders like Monique and Corene bring even more divergent perspectives. That element takes a more central stage in Even the Worm Will Turn when four years later, Donna Ashton encounters operatives of a clandestine facility eager to know what she knows, all the while dismissing her when her beliefs don’t match with theirs. The clash of faith and cosmology, the different value sets brought by Tower, Azara McCann—no one’s really on the same page, but everyone thinks they own the book.
That’s one of those things about cosmic horror. As with real existence, we’re too small a creature with too short of lives to grasp it all. We can only ever pretend to fully understand the universe, and whether or not we do, it will keep persisting around us.
In my own unknowing, I have no idea what people might expect from a follow-up to The Worm and His Kings. I’ve definitely seen confusion over how there can be a follow-up, and I absolutely get that.
But I can only tell the stories that make sense to me. As with characters beginning as more realizations and impulses, writing for me never feels like coming up with something. More like Stephen King has put it, of uncovering something already buried, and I’m dusting away the earth. I can’t wait to show you what I’ve found.