(Minor spoilers for specific events and people, mostly if you are either actively reading or are liable to remember details. Some very small spoilers for the overall structure of the story.)
“I worry about you. You throw yourself into these situations like you don’t care if you die, like you’ve got nothing to stick around for except for those people you insist on protecting. Dinah, the people from your territory. People you barely know, if at all. And then you actually make it out okay, so you do it again, only more so. Riskier stuff.”
I folded my arms. This was uncomfortably close to what he’d been saying before.
“I start thinking about how I’m supposed to protect you, get you to stop, get you to focus on a goal that’s actually attainable, because you’re so capable that you could be amazing if you stopped acting suicidal. Then I get pissed at myself and I get pissed at you, because I can’t figure you out, and you move forward so fast that I can’t keep up. I let my guard drop for one evening to focus on other things, and then I find out you’d gotten in a fight with Mannequin.”
The plot is just about entirely carried by Taylor's personality and agency. The world is great, but it's mostly interesting as a very good, rules-based playground in which the characters can act. The existence of superpowers just sets the scene for how a bullied 17-year-old girl can go from that to world-scale power, without straining plausibility. In fact, this is more scaffolding than real life requires, aside from the some of the extreme time compression. See, for instance, Napoleon. Real life strains plausibility.
Worm feels...real, it feels immersive, you can lose yourself in its world quite well. I think this is probably the straightforward consequence of making a piece of fiction 1.6 million words long, but still, it's good at that. It gets much better over time, probably both objectively and due to increased immersion and context. I read the first third on and off for 9 months, then the rest in about a week.
Every angel girl secretly wants access to a private ICU, chemical lab, a large unofficial budget, access to corporate procurement channels, and phone numbers for legal contacts in every country
Worm is quite fun for this sort of thing. Tattletale, Coil, Accord, and {---} in particular.
The romance in this novel is extremely good, likely because it's very minor.
The aesthetics are...not something you expect to be good, and then they are. I don't know, maybe I just enjoyed the story. But the superhero genre is not generally good at aesthetics, in my view, and I in fact might even prefer Worm to Watchmen in this regard. Probably substantially because of size; Watchmen is quite short. Worm is a work, it's a world, it sticks with you. Fiction is kind of incredible.