Worms Best Reads of April 2024

Arcadia Molinas

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

I've wanted to read this book ever since I listened to the 2023 round-up episode of the Literary Friction podcast hosted by Carrie Plit and Octavia Bright. Carrie gushed over it, calling it her favourite read of the entire year, with compliments spilling from her mouth in a torrent, to which Octavia eagerly contributed too. 

I’d read one Kingsolver title in the past, Flight Behaviour, at university, as part of a climate fiction class, and liked it enough to write an entire paper on it

So, a couple of weeks ago, when I went to stay at my friends’ house in Norfolk for a weekend, and the book came up in conversation as we all lay on the grass in their garden on an unusually sunny and warm morning, my friends also similarly gushing over it, I asked if I could please borrow it. My friend ran upstairs and brought down a book, in pieces. He opened the kitchen drawer and took out some yellow tape and commenced to perform book surgery. He had to tape the cover back together in several spots and the last one-hundred pages required some serious rearranging. “Well, the pages are numbered,” said my friend, “so just make sure you check everything is in the right order.” I took the battered book back with me to London and started to read it immediately.

Demon Copperhead is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (apparently, as I haven’t actually read the source material, but from what I’ve read around it, its pretty faithful to the original, transplanting the original setting of a destitute London for the rural scene of Appalachian West Virginia, almost scene by scene). The epigraph at the start of the book is a quote from the source material, “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” And in her closing acknowledgements, again pays homage to the British writer, thanking him, very movingly (reading this literally brought me to tears) for “his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.” The narratorial voice, Demon himself, is extremely compelling and charismatic, as he takes us from the first line of the book, “First, I got myself born.” through his experiences living with his drug-addicted mother, to being shuffled through different foster homes, to his close encounters with the opioid crisis wreaking havoc across America. This last point is particularly moving once you know that Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, targeted areas like Lee County, where the novel is set, after conducting research on the areas most afflicted by poor health provisions and high rates of injuries, from the mines and more. 

Kingsolver is a genius at naming characters. I think that was my favourite thing about the book. During Demon’s stay at the Creaky farm, forced to cut tobacco and living in exploitative conditions, he meets the wickedly cool and charismatic Sterling Ford, who’s nicknamed Fast Forward. Demon often finds escape from his cruel environments by drawing cartoons, an din one, baptises Fast Forward as the farm superhero Force Fastword, which I thought was so inventive and funny and ingenious. I fell in love with Demon’s point of view and voice. I think any reader will find him hard to resist.

The recurring idea present in the book is that those born under certain circumstances - poverty, addiction, the stain of prejudice and stereotypes - “are marked from the get-out, win or lose.” At times refreshingly didactic, this book is a glimpse into children at the fringes and a place “where you keep on living the life you were assigned”. 

Now that I’ve finished reading this book, I miss reading it. My friend warned me this would happen. With a wistful voice she told me “I miss being its world”. With an unmistakable, strong narratorial voice, Demon Copperhead, real name Damon Fields (nicknamed Demon for obvious reasons and Copperhead for his unmistakable mane of red hair), is a modern, unlikely hero embarked on an epic journey in the name of survival.

Enya Sullivan

See What Life Is Like by Dorothy Spencer

Dorothy Spencer’s self-published pamphlets have been a talisman that I have been carrying on my person as much as possible this past month. The title ‘See What Life’s Like’ (I and II) already does so much of the heavy lifting, and Dorothy carries the heavy task of being able to depict life in all its pain, anger, melancholy and beauty to completion. Poetry operates here at its truest form. Veering away from the abstraction associated with much poetry that can often alienate a reader, worlds unfold and come alive across the page. We watch people outside the nightclub, the hospital, at work, in bed, out walking, watching the beauty of people and the pains of contemporary capitalism. The poems are generous: lyrical, insightful, and always trying to write out of a desire to understand life, rather than to exert power and knowledge as the author. She skits from personal anecdotes regarding her violent, suicidal father to daydreams about knocking down her neighbours fence so they can share their gardens. Even when Dorothy writes on harsh realities and the darkness of human nature, there is always a kernel of hope, a need to understand rather than banish people’s ugliness. She gives into sweetness, the blue of the sky and the gaggle of clubbers, desperate for hope, creating something deeply bittersweet.

For fans of Lucia Berlin and Maeve Brennan.