Fun, eerie little novel about a house, the bad vibes it absorbs from the husband who built it as a prison originally, and the cages that the family becomes trapped in throughout the generations, as well as a good old fashioned family feud.

Woodworm is a novella about a house and the women doomed to live in it forever. Woodworm encompasses generational trauma, inequality, and the things that haunt us.

The story follows a young woman, one of many in her familial line doomed to live in the house forever. She has recently run into trouble as the child she nannies for has gone missing on her watch. You learn that her mother disappeared long ago and she lives in the house with her grandmother. The two are disliked by the rest of the town, leaving them isolated in a house full of ghosts.

Many translated texts can lose the author's true voice, but I did not feel that way about Woodworm. The writing is very lush, gripping and easy to read.

Woodworm is reminiscent of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, one of my favorite books of all time. The stories are obviously different, but the ominous, isolated feeling you get while reading them is very similar.

This is a great fall read and I highly recommend it!

This book is bizarre in such a great way. A semi-haunted house story, with female rage and neighborhood vendettas of a sort, I went into this not really knowing what to expect and I'm glad I did.
The way the reveals happen is so good and I love how each topic is taken on.
It's creepy and a little gross at times, but Woodworm is a fun, off-beat, horror novella.

I had some trouble really getting interested in this book at first because you're hit with some chaotic horror right from the start! I'm glad I stuck with it because it's a really great revenge tale. It's told through the viewpoints of different women belonging to the same family, each finding herself in subservient circumstances. The descriptions were vivid, and I got an overwhelming sense of terror the more I read. There's even some great nods to Edgar Allan Poe!

What a delicious, wonderful, weird book, it truly belongs on the front of "recommended weird fic this year" for 2024

This book blew me away! I can't speak for the faithfulness of the translation but the prose was unique, evocative, and eerie. The house as a manifestation of its occupants' rage and helplessness, as well as a co-conspirator in their revenge, is extremely compelling.

I really enjoyed this novella - I felt it packed in a class-consciousness horror that is salient, easy to understand, and not limited to the horrors only the rich perpetrate, but those with any amount of power. I enjoyed the alternating POV between the grandmother and granddaughter as well as getting the context of who built the house and why. I think I would have enjoyed more of that as well as a reveal of how the house works.

It's like over a month later (like 2) and I've forgotten to give this a review. Very typical of me.

It's hard to give this the review it deserves when so many have really done it better than I ever could. On the surface, it's a book about an odd house with cursed women...once the numerous layers have been peeled back and exposed, you see it explores some really fucking serious, important themes that have been embedded for generations.

This one lends itself to be read more than once--no longer is it about an odd house with cursed women, but a prison built on the exploitation and suffering of the women who inhabit it.

That's just one aspect; I could see myself reading this a couple more times. I have to say, I didn't feel all that strongly about the book when I first finished it but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

This book was very 50/50 for me. It was difficult for me to get initially get into. I think that was mainly because of the narrative voices; they just felt quite clunky at times. I can probably attribute that issue to this being a translation. However, I found the story to be quite the interesting take on multi-generational trauma. It was a different kind of story than others I've read with similar topics. I have several customers who specifically love to read Latinx horror, and I will certainly be recommending this title to them!

Woodworm is exciting and shocking at times, but also confusing and not as fleshed out as it could have been. The writing wavers between crisp and vague imagery, and the style often felt halting. Without critiquing the book for what is doesn't do, I'd say the comparison to Samanta Schweblin was apt and a big part of the initial appeal for me, but this novel lacked a similar degree of unsettling mystery and intrigue that I find to be a staple of Schweblin's work. They are different authors, of course, but this comparison is useful for readers familiar with Schweblin. This one didn't land so well for me, but I'm glad Martinez (and her two translators) created this book, which felt original enough to earn the title of "a novel."

This is quite a strange book. At first, it sounded interesting. It was easy enough to follow the characters and there was a clear horror aspect. But after the halfway point, I was lost. The book flipped between the past/present and it was jarring. There wasn't anything to suggest that the narrative switched so when it did, I had to rethink everything that I had read because I read it with the wrong character in mind. The "horror" aspect seemed to loose its lustre at this point too with nothing really creating a climax or leading to a takeaway point.

Woodworm, the debut novel of Spanish writer Layla Martinez, is the story of a haunted house told in alternating point-of-view chapters by an unnamed grandmother and granddaughter. Like any good ghost story, the house is only as haunted as its residents. No one’s ever heard of a well-adjusted, trauma-free person falling victim to a haunting. Then again—who’s ever heard of such a person at all?

The book opens with the granddaughter returning home from jail. She was accused in the disappearance of a boy she nannied but has returned home because the authorities have been unable to find enough evidence to incriminate her. With a matter-of-fact delivery reminiscent of We Have Always Lived in the Castle’s (1962) Merricat Blackwood, the granddaughter walks us through a house in which you shouldn’t check under the bed unless you recognize the shoes sticking out. The place might be as sinister as 29 Barton Road in White Is for Witching (2009), if it weren’t surrounded by equally powerful forces keeping it in check and women who have learned their lessons about following voices coming from the wardrobe. The granddaughter introduces a grandmother who speaks face-to-face with saints, who creeps around the house and garden like a woman come out of the wallpaper, and who posts guardian-angel prayer cards around her daughter’s and granddaughter’s beds (even though the old woman knows angels look more like praying mantises rather than blond beauties). On switching to the next chapter, however, the book subverts expectations when the grandmother immediately insists on a reconsideration of the granddaughter’s reliability as a narrator. Their alternating chapters fill in gaps and tell new lies, but we end with the realization that the truth has been present since the very first chapter—we just didn’t know what we were seeing yet.

Yet the Woodworm house, set among parched fields in rural Spain and built by “a pimp who lived off women,” hasn’t had its fill of those who live there; it’s hungry for more to fill its rooms and cabinets. The hate of the generations of women who are trapped within it is not enough for the house. It calls to it the shadows of those buried in unmarked graves, along the road or down in the ravine.

The translation of Woodworm from Spanish to English was undertaken by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. Both translators have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Hughes in 2020 for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2020) and McDermott in 2024 for Selva Almada’s Not a River (2024). They chose to preserve some of the narrators’ colloquialisms, translating them into English where possible (“cuz” instead of “because”) but preserving some Spanish. Cansao and comío, rather than academy-approved cansado and comido, and the granddaughter’s employers’ “pretentious drawn-out Ss, those over-the-top Ds” persist as untranslatable markers of class difference in the book (p. 82). This attention to linguistic discrimination is important for the book’s cultural context. A forced conformity to Castilian Spanish, accompanied by bans on regional languages like Catalan and Euskara, was part of the mid-twentieth-century Francoist agenda of Spanish cultural unity. The shadows that come to take up residence in the house are explicitly referred to as victims of the “little walks,” a sinister euphemism for those knocks on the door in the middle of the night that disappeared members of the community during Franco’s White Terror.

Language allows us to hide certain horrors. We can say someone has “depression” rather than “dying of a broken heart,” or that they “keep secrets” rather than that they’re a “liar” (pp. 145, 50). Much like Woodworm’s house, language is “either protecting us or smothering us or maybe both,” covering itself in domesticated pleasantries (p. 13). In the novel’s swapping voices, the narration betrays itself in similar ways, projecting, in true Gothic tradition, violent desires onto a house, and onto a landscape, that are ultimately derived from the chambers of these women’s hearts. But buried underneath the supernatural horror in this book, as restless as the house, are the horrors of Spain’s past, poisoning each interaction between members of the community.

Following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, Spain entered into el Pacto del Olvido, the Pact of Forgetting. To ease the transition to democracy, amnesty was granted to those who committed crimes against humanity during the decades of Francoist rule, when tens of thousands of people (perhaps hundreds of thousands by some estimates) were killed. Just this past year, the Law of Democratic Memory was passed by the Spanish Parliament to support the exhumation and identification of remains of the disappeared and to require that lessons about the dictatorship be taught in secondary schools, yet right-wing politicians threaten its implementation. [1] The lingering effects of the Pact also continue to be challenged not just internationally but domestically—that is, within the home and village and family. The legacy of the Pact is intimate. People knew well which neighbors likely snitched on their fathers, sons, mothers, daughters and never faced repercussions. Woodworm is about the hatred that worms its way in through this forced forgetting. Justice denied accrues interest. The grandmother, known for her work with her saints, helps people collect in whatever way they can:

I put curses on relatives, policemen, priests, informers, whoever, with all the hatred in these guts of mine, and in the house’s guts too, because I knew that once we poor folk started collecting our debts they wouldn’t have so much as a pigsty to hide in. (p. 93)
Martinez refers in interviews to the usefulness of horror as a genre. It comes with its own set of symbols, readily understood by audiences, which allow exploration of collective trauma and open wounds. [2] We all understand what it is to feel trapped in a place, to feel the lifeforce drained from us, to feel haunted by memory. Woodworm is about the legacy of state violence. But more than that, it’s also about how those at the margins bear the brunt of its weight. Even in a nation not at war with its citizens, the women of this family would be subject to systemic violence due to their poverty or intimate violence due to their gender. There’s a twisted sense of humor towards it throughout the book, like when the granddaughter speaks of her interview outfit that lends an air of “total willingness to be brutally exploited,” but their precarity tinges any interactions the women have with other villagers and with each other (p. 7).

There are two primary modes of haunted house in literature: the get-out house, that wants to be left alone and pulls out all the bleeding walls and jumpscares to evict the unlucky living residents, and the hungry house, that insists you stay awhile. Woodworm falls into the latter category and vamps on it, assigning the women the same dark hunger in their desire for vengeance against their men, their employers, their neighbors. The violence manifests as the titular woodworm in their bodies, a “gnawing restlessness … that won’t leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either,” a “cracracra” refrain that moves constantly against the walls and scrapes inside their skulls (p. 67). But what sets Woodworm apart is its ultimate denial of escape or catharsis. Even if the violence of the past is reckoned with there is the everyday violence of existing in capitalism and patriarchy. The house may be silent for a time, but there’s always room for one more.

Endnotes

[1] Marc Martorell Junyent, “Spain’s Memory Law Hasn’t Banished the Ghosts of Francoism,” Jacobin, January 14, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/01/spain-memory-law-ghosts-francoism. [return]

[2] Alba Correa, “’Carcoma’: el fenómeno literario que bate la tierra y despierta fantasmas,” Vogue España, February 9, 2022, https://www.vogue.es/living/articulos/carcoma-libro-layla-martinez-entrevista. [return]

I am so conflicted with this one because while I loved many things about this one, I found the plot to be difficult to follow. Although the POV of each chapter was confusing when it shifted the first time, I quickly started to really enjoy it. I love that each chapter provided different information about the characters we were reading from and how both our unnamed grandmother and granddaughter got to where they are and why they've done what they've done (I won't explain too much because I believe the allure is with the unknown). The way Martinez writes about the more creepier aspects of the home; it was probably one of my favourite aspects of the novella and I wish we learned more about it (it is probably also why the grandmother's perspective was much more interesting to me than the granddaughter's). The novella sort of failed for me in the granddaughter's perspective - I understood that it was meant to demonstrate how the women in this family get revenge on the horrible men in their lives but I think I just did not understand the subtleties it was trying to portray. I wish the novella was just a little longer to really develop this aspect of the plot, because I think this would have really made me love the story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Two Lines Press for and eARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

Woodworm is the story of a woman and her grandmother living on the outskirts of a town that fears their power. Beholden to a rich family in their town, the woman and her grandmother tell the story of their lineage, from the man who damned them to the cursed home and the mother that disappeared. The book feels like its set in a place before time, but every character has a car, a phone, a camera, so it was really funny to feel like there were anachronisms but knowing that I was wrong.

I enjoyed the premise of woodworm. I found the titular theme of a "woodworm" be an interesting addition to the idea of generational trauma. The book was unsettling, but not scary in any way. However, the non-linear storytelling confused me and let this story feel like it was dragging on. I liked the writing, and hope that I can find the original story in spanish to see how the translation affected the story.

When reading Woodworm, something decaying starts to settle in under your skin

A short, visceral bite of a book about the violences that make up a house built upon hope and resentment - the saint and the rot - that the two intergenerational women experience during post-civil-war poverty and misogyny in Spain.

Unlike many revenge stories, Woodworm leaves a deep disatisfaction in the pit of your gut, all the while leaving you hungry for more of its spite.

Such a fantastic read. I am a big supporter of women's rights, and an even BIGGER supporter of women's WRONGS.
An amazing revenge story. I love these women.
A great translated work. I need more from Layla Martinez.
Top tier dedication.

Woodworm was a slow start for me, but I think that is my fault as a reader. Something Layla Martinez does very well is forces readers to learn to tell each character's perspective apart. Once I began to understand the grandmother and granddaughter as individuals, I was enamored and finished the remaining 150 pages or so very quickly. Atmospheric and powerful..

This wasn’t my typical book to read but the plot sounded interesting! It was creepy but the Martinez’ descriptive storytelling kept me engaged and turning the pages.

A very quick read and a well plotted story with a high level of creepyness. Excellent storytelling and world building.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

The house breathes.

The house contains bodies and secrets.

The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.

A fantastic horror novella. I loved it!