The Conqueror Worms
by Brian Keene

Published by Leisure Books
336 pages
May 2006
Paperback
ISBN: 0843954167

In his recent duology The Rising and City of the Dead , Brian Keene created one of the most original premises in the very well-worn genre of the zombie story, very different from genre fathers George Romero and Richard Matheson and much deeper than even the best of the recent zombie novels World War Z and Monster Island . The zombies in Keene 's work fit into a larger vision of a universe that is at its heart chaotic and entropic. He has developed a mythos freely adapted from ancient Sumerian and biblical sources to give a face to a cosmos that is hostile to rational order and life itself. In this, his work is Lovecraftian in its implications, not because he makes occasional use of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, but because both depict human events as minute and pathetic in comparison to the great forces at work in the universe. Keene 's novels depict all life as thin and transient, floating upon a roiling chaos, like scum settled briefly on a pond's surface before being swept away by spring floods.

In his novel The Conqueror Worms , Keene again sets his story against this cosmological backdrop, making use of references from Lovecraft and the Bible with some Led Zeppelin and ELO thrown for good measure. The title of course comes from Edgar Allan Poe's poem “The Conqueror Worm” in which the worm in question is that which feeds on human remains in the grave and the theme is death conquers all. In Keene 's novel, the worms are gigantic flesh-eating monsters awakened from deep in the earth by rains and floods of biblical proportions. Most of the world's population has been wiped out by the floods and the end of the world is at hand. The bible plays a further role as the main character, Teddy Garnett, while trying to survive both the floods and the worms, reads passages from the Book of Job. His plight echoes Job's struggles to keep his faith while going through torments set up by God. Teddy like Job is left to reconcile the existence of evil in the world, and in this case the mortality of the world itself, with the belief in a benevolent God.

Thematically this should distinguish TCW from other giant worm stories like the tongue-in-cheek Tremors or the ecological Dune . Structurally, the novel is made up of three parts, the first being Teddy's. In part one, the elderly Teddy is a self described West Virginia “good old boy” living in his mountain home still above the floods, writing his memoirs of the forty-one days since the rains began. He describes what he has heard on television and radio of the storms, tsunamis, and floodwaters that wiped out most of humanity. Joined by his friend Carl, Teddy begins finding giant slime-covered holes that worry him more than the rain. When local conspiracy theorist and madman Earl shoots down a helicopter, Carl and Teddy are joined by Kevin and Sarah. They are the last two survivors of a group that had been living in the last dry top floors of a Baltimore skyscraper otherwise immersed in the advancing ocean.

In part two, Kevin tells the story of their group of eighteen men, women and children. They survived by scavenging for food and supplies from the other buildings still sticking up from the waters. But they begin to find evidence of creatures out of mythology: mermaids and a giant squid which may be the biblical Leviathan. Almost as dangerous are the human acolytes they call the Satanists who think they will survive by appeasing the Leviathan with human sacrifices. When Kevin's group comes into violent conflict with the Satanists, they discover that they had been calling the Leviathan forth with spells from a demonic book. And when they see the Leviathan itself, one of them realizes it is the living incarnation of Cthulhu from the books of H P Lovecraft. Kevin and Sarah escape in the helicopter and eventually meet Carl and Teddy. The final sections of the novel recount how the four of them face the final conflict with Leviathan's land-bound brother, Behemoth.

The choice of Teddy as main character is refreshing. Rather than making his hero a young or middle-aged man capable of some physical heroism as most contemporary action stories do, Keene has chosen a clearly frail old man for the role. Teddy is an octogenarian with creaky bones, a weak heart, and a nearly crippling case of nicotine withdrawal. There will be no illusions in this novel about a mere human outfighting the monsters to come. More significantly, Teddy is one of the “greatest generation,” a World War II vet who fought in the good war against an easily defined enemy, with a clear victory at the end. He is also a Christian man, at least to the degree that his late wife could instill religious beliefs in him, with sense of the moral order of the universe. But his faith in the righteous fight had already been shaken by the loss of a son in Vietnam . So the question is raised, how does such a man who combat an evil that defies all meaning and rationality? How does he even conceive of it?

While much of the narrative drive of the novel comes from the characters' struggle to survive, part also comes from the attempt to solve the mystery of what caused the rains. The characters discuss and debate possibilities as they deal with the rising waters. Global warming is dismissed since the icecaps have not melted. Government conspiracies are dismissed as well, being the domain of crackpots like Earl. Divine retribution is discussed but if man sinned, and all agree man has sinned plenty, then what was the sin that brought the flood? The novel opens with a quote from Genesis 6:14, “There were giants in the earth in those days…” In addition to nicely evoking the giant earthworms to come in the novel, this passage concerns God's, more correctly YHWH's, justification for sending the Deluge to wipe out humanity. The giants in question were divine figures from pre-biblical religions with which humans were mating. This consorting between humans and the divine brought disorder to YHWH's Creation, so he decided to send the Deluge. The Satanists similarly embrace this disorder, but could they have brought on the punishment? Keene wisely allows for no easy answer.

In fact, the inability to find a simple cause is very much the point. Another biblical passage that figures in the novel is Job 14:19 , “…the things which grow out of the dust of the earth and destroyest the hope of mankind.” Teddy is reading the Book of Job at the beginning of the novel, and this passage keeps coming back to him as he discovers evidence of the giant worms. This line from Job is about how man, when dead, does not rise again. Unlike God he is mortal and death, or the worm, will have him in the end. In the story of Job, God permits Satan to put the virtue of Job to the test with numerous torments. It is after the hardships have befallen him that Job debates with his friends – much like Teddy and the others – why God punished him so. Two of his friends insist Job must have sinned to be punished and would have been rewarded if he had been good. But another, Elihu, says that God does not use such a simplistic logic that mere humans could ever understand. The universe does not have meaning as we define it and cannot be explained rationally. God's confirms this and tells Job that the world contains many creatures, some of which feed by taking the lives of others, and He must be God of all of them. So, He is the God of the worms too and is now feeding them.

It is a grim worldview, and Teddy seems to gradually come to terms with it. The man of the greatest generation comes to see how insignificant humans are. And he sees that there are things neither rationality or modern Christianity can explain: “I don't pretend to understand everything in our universe, but I know there are things that science can't explain…Maybe that's why we're in the mess we're in now – because of our reliance on science. Maybe we've lost touch with something else. Our spiritual side. The part that still believes in – and needs – magic.” It is Earl however who sees that not only can humans not understand the universe, but that there is nothing there to be understood. At the center of the all things is madness. In his madness, Earl becomes a mouthpiece for the worm-god Behemoth and says, “The worms know what lies at the heart of the maze – 'cause that's what it is at the center of the earth, a big maze.”

Despite the inhumanity of the cosmos described here, it is the human warmth of the way Keene writes characters that gives the greatest strength to his stories. Even though Teddy's wife passed away two years before the events in the story unfold, we learn a great deal about their marriage, how they met, how they raised their children. We see how Teddy and his wife, and their children and grandchildren, cared about each other through small details in the house: photos, children's drawing taped to the fridge, embroideries. The people being threatened are not abstract. They had relatives and were husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. We as readers care about them because of the way they care for others. So even as they deal with the bleakest of events, there is some warmth that tempers the writing. It is only in the face of losing something precious that understanding the nature of the universe becomes important.

by Nemo Swift
reprinted from BOFFM #3