I first discovered what I would much later hear described as cosmic horror in junior high, when I bought a battered copy of At The Mountains of Madness and Other Stores from a flea market bookseller. At that time I was still working my way alphabetically through my local library’s science fiction and fantasy section, and I hadn’t gotten to the L’s yet, so I had not read any Lovecraft. (By the way, this turned out to be a good way to immerse myself in a genre I had grown to love. By the Time I hit high school, I had read everything in the section, and I knew what types of stories, and which authors, I liked, and which I didn’t. But, I digress.) (Okay, another digression. As I read more deeply in later years, I began to see the caustic, damaging side of Lovecraft’s writing, and I appreciate all the authors who called it out and made me aware.)

I found that I did like cosmic horror, with its old, powerful gods, mysterious cults, indescribable monsters, and books that lead to madness. Movies like Evil Dead, and more recently novels like Lovecraft Country and The Fisherman, have kept my love for the sub-genre alive.

The Worm and His Kings is the first novel by Hailey Piper I’ve read, but it certainly won’t be the last. It tells the story of a cloaked, taloned monster who is snatching homeless people off the street, and a woman who goes searching for her missing girlfriend and winds up in a subterranean world filled with nightmarish creatures from another world, and human cultists waiting for the reemergence of an elder god, the Worm.

There’s much more to the story, but I don’t want to give too much away. This is a slender book with no filler. Piper ratchets up the tension and keeps it there, and the story moves along with frightening intensity.

Piper takes some of the basic tenets of cosmic horror and twists them in new and surprising ways. The biggest thing to me is that she grounds her cosmic horror in the more familiar horrors of modern day life. Her main characters are homeless, living in the darkest recesses of New York City, cast off by society because they dare to be different. She deals with sexual orientation and transgender issues with compassion and understanding. There’s a kind of desperate, heartbreaking love story here, and tenacious bravery that’s as inspiring as it is ultimately hopeless.

As I said, Piper begins her story with gritty realism, but the deeper in we travel, the wider the scope. As it nears its terrible, inevitable conclusion, The Worm and His Kings catapults across space and time in truly transcendent ways.

The Worm and His Kings deserves a spot on the shelf among the very best of cosmic horror.