Wolf Worm

Hugo and Nebula award winner Kingfisher (Snake-Eater) adds a heaping helping of David Cronenberg’s style to her signature blend of humor and horror in this striking Southern gothic set in 1885. Illustrator Sonia Wilson once worked with her naturalist father, but after his death, she ekes out a miserable living teaching watercolor painting at a girls’ school in Wilmington, N.C. So she leaps at the chance to once again work as a scientific illustrator for Dr. Matthias Halder, even if the position means painting screwworms and blowfly maggots instead of the plants she truly loves. On her arrival to Halder’s decaying mansion in the woods, she’s greeted with a warning from one of the neighbors that the “Devil walks these woods at night.” She also learns that, 10 years prior, there was a rash of bizarre animal and human deaths, their corpses found dangling upside down from trees with their throats and wrists bitten out. But if the woods are so dangerous, Sonia can’t help but wonder why her new employer wanders them at night and what the rumors have to do with his vast and bizarre collection of insects. Kingfisher teases out this mystery into perhaps her most viscerally terrifying tale to date. Readers will come away with new nightmares. (Mar.)