The Worm and His Kings

New York City, 1990:

When you slip through the cracks, no one is there to catch you. Monique learns that the hard way after her girlfriend Donna vanishes without a trace.

Only after the disappearances of several other impoverished women does Monique hear the rumors. A taloned monster stalks the city's underground and snatches victims into the dark.

Donna isn't missing. She was taken.

To save the woman she loves, Monique must descend deeper than the known underground, into a subterranean world of enigmatic cultists and shadowy creatures. But what she finds looms beyond her wildest fears-a darkness that stretches from the dawn of time and across the stars.

Hailey Piper is the author of The Worm and His Kings, Queen of Teeth, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, The Possession of Natalie Glasgow, and Benny Rose, the Cannibal King. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and her short stories appear in Pseudopod, Vastarien, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, The Arcanist, Tales to Terrify, and Year's Best Hardcore Horror, among other publications. A trans woman from the haunted woods of New York, she now lives with her wife in Maryland, where together they cast hexes, raise the dead, and summon the elder gods, sometimes all in one night. Find Hailey on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays or at