Mystery, violence, and eerie presences: When feminism and horror unite in a single story. Three women, heirs of the violence of war, patriarchal oppression, and the brutality of deep Spanish inland, observe the inhabitants of the village they live in from a house filled with shadows in every corner.

Grandmother and granddaughter narrate the story hidden behind its walls and reconstruct how violence has bequeathed the need for furious revenge that swells and rages on every page of the book, an unveiling of a haunted feminism. With over fifty editions in Spain and translations into more than ten languages, The Worm is a horror novella, poetic and harsh, filled with charms and spells, prayers and curses, demon-like angels, and saints marked by profane male hands.

Laila Martínez delivers a text where blind fury grows like a worm against all kinds of social injustice, a dark and captivating book that grips you from the very first page. As the author herself notes in an interview: “The house (described in the novella) belongs to my grandmother. People think that the relationship with the supernatural is my own invention, but that is not true. My grandmother truly believes in it. The culture of ghosts is deeply rooted in Mancha and Alcarria. The deceased relatives that appear to you, the connection with death, the shadows… All these are a real backdrop, a belief existing in these regions. Where I let myself be free to invent is the ending. It is the story of female victims of various kinds of violence (class, patriarchal, etc.), so I wanted these women in the current fiction to manage to take revenge, to carry out this narrative closure of open accounts.”