50-year-old, dark and disturbing YA novel from an award-winning author

In this extremely depressing novel, the pathetic, 12-year-old FMC, Jessica, has been horrendously neglected by her single mother, who got pregnant as a teenager and has never developed any emotional maturity in the years since. Based on the descriptions of Jessica's thoughts and behavior, she seems to be suffering from untreated schizophrenia. She hears a voice in her head telling her to do destructive things, which she attributes to an unattractive cat named, Worm.

Typically, a novel with a 12-year-old protagonist would be considered Middle Grade fiction rather than Young Adult fiction, but the tone and subject matter of this novel is so dark, I assume that is why it has been classified as YA.

I received access to the audiobook version of this novel for free through my Audible membership. The narration is well done.

A very easy to read (it's a YA novel after all) story which for it's target market has quite a lot of depth to it. On the surface this is a fairly formulaic story but it's one of those that you can mentally spin in a lot of different directions. It's also snappy, and moves along at a lovely clip, perfect reading for when it's grey and miserable outside.

Kindle Daily Deal 7/30/14 $1.99.

This is a really well written book. It was a Newberry Honor book. The premise is that a girl who doesn't have friends and feels that nobody likes her starts to think that her cat is evil and is telling her to do evil things. The girl, Jessica, began to read a book about the Salem witch trials and how the girls felt that they were being possessed. Jessica feels that her cat, Worm, is possessed and is telling her what to do. There are plenty of links from this book and many of Mrs. Snyder's other books. It is a good story for children who feel that nothing is ever their fault.

I was inspired by this Jezebel review on The Witches of Worm to pick it up and read it. It was creepy, unsettling, and well executed. Jessica, the neglected daughter of a mother who is out at work or on dates more often than not, feels abandoned by her mother and what few friends she had. She also may or may not be on the autism spectrum - she has trouble opening up to others or sustaining friendships, she takes things too seriously at times, she delves deeply into subjects to the point of ignoring other tasks or work... or she may be emotionally stunted. One cannot diagnose a fictional child, but people have pointed this out before.

One day, while reading about the Salem Witch Trials, she finds an abandoned Abyssinian kitten she takes home to the apartment complex she lives in. The nice, dottering old lady downstairs, Mrs. Fortune, a cat lady herself, gives Jessica advice on how to take care of the kitten, which has not opened its eyes yet. Jessica feels conflicted for reasons she cannot express to herself - she doesn't want to take care of the kitten, even feels a little disgusted by it, but nevertheless takes proper care of the kitten, feeding him and cleaning him. Her mother, Joy, is creeped out by the cat and says he looks like a worm (with his gray coloring) and hence, the cat is named Worm.

I feel like Jessica's relationship with Worm mirrors that of her mother Joy's relationship with her daughter. She initially keeps Worm alive, more than enough to sustain him (to the point of getting up every two hours to feed and clean him), but once Worm begins to look after himself she will ignore him for long periods of time, but also makes sure he is fed. She can be really rough with him, yelling at him and tossing him around - things her mother has done.

Over the course of the book, Jessica starts to believe she is a witch and that Worm is her familiar, a supernatural entity that would assist witches and cunning folk in their practice of magic. Jessica also does that thing all pet owners have done at one time or another - pretending the animal has a human-ish personality and giving it a voice and a character. "Worm," the version that lives in Jessica's head, talks to her and convinces her to do mean things - like manipulating the mother of a former friend to go really strict on her daughter in retaliation for abandoning her for a girl who has a swimming pool, ruining the instrument of a former friend/neighbor, and at one point Jessica, as Worm, nearly convinces herself to light the apartment building on fire. She doesn't do anything "magical" per se, she does not become someone like Stephen King's Carrie, for instance. But she does have scary dreams, sees visions in the clouds and in the night sky, and decides to lash out at the people that hurt her. When she is called out for it, she will pretend to be ill with the flu and manipulate the people around her, mainly to get her out of trouble.

Joy and Brandon are the real villains in the story, the ones who pushed Jessica to the breaking point. Joy, who is in her early 30's in the book, had Jessica very young and her husband (if she was even married, we just have her word for it) ran off. Jessica has been fending for herself while her mother lives the life she wanted sans Jessica - going off on dates and leaving Jessica in front of the TV, munching down TV dinners. In one heartbreaking passage, she wants to go with Alan, her newest boyfriend who might be considering marriage, to meet his parents but Alan doesn't want to bring Jessica along, because dating a woman with a child is simply not done, you see. So, Joy proposes leaving Jessica - a 12 year old child - ALL ALONE for an entire weekend so she can simper up to Alan's (who Jessica never meets, btw) parents. Jessica responds in a fit of rage by "accidentally" ruining an $80 dress (which would cost roughly $568.05 in 2022 dollars) and feigning illness so her mother has to stay at home. And it is described as one of the times when Joy has spent this much time with her own daughter, playing cards, taking her to a movie, and actually acting like a mother and not a roommate - but it gets under Jessica's skin, in part because she feels like her mother is spying on her and I also think because she knows the attention can only last for so long before Joy flits off again.

Brandon is a "neighbor" in the building, living on the second floor (I think). They were good friends since they were 5, when Brandon and his family moved in. Brandon is very violent though - he can be nice, considerate, and thoughtful for awhile until he suddenly snaps. He has hit and punched Jessica several times, including giving her a black eye and nearly breaking her jaw. One day he brought a bunch of guy friends over and told her to scram, which she did. And because she took him so seriously, she never talked to or played with him again. There is also part of her, I think, that also recognizes how dangerous he is. From the first chapter:

You could never predict anything about Brandon - what could make him angry, what would make him laugh, or what crazy things he'd decide to do next. But if you were never sure about what would happen next, at least you were always sure about what was happening at the moment. You never had to wonder, for instance, if he was angry or not. When Brandon was angry, you found out immediately. But then he didn't stay angry. And afterward everything was the same as it had been before. He was weird that way - different.

I feel like Brandon is the type of person that would grow up to be a domestic abuser, just because of the casual way he will assault Jessica for seeming trivialities and then pretend nothing out of the ordinary happened.

There is another passage when Jessica is "invited" to speak with the school counselor, Mr. Roy Weaver. They have a chat and near the end of the session, Mr. Weaver asks her to pick a picture and write a story about it. Jessica picks a picture of a bunch of people at a park, with a baby in the crowd. There are a bunch of people at the park who look at the baby and walk away. They think that the woman sitting near the baby is the mother, but the woman says she isn't and thinks the baby belongs to an old woman sitting nearby. The crowd gets distracted and everyone abandons the baby. Not knowing how to end the story, Jessica writes the baby was left out at night (exposed to the elements) and was covered in falling leaves. Jessica is that baby - abandoned by everyone around her.

To quote the Jezebel review - "Though bleak, The Witches of Worm never crosses over into the truly violent or dangerous, and Jessica’s arc is ultimately redemptive. She learns to love the cat who’s capable of looking “so incredibly evil.” But The Witches of Worm’s rather careful examination of Jessica’s interior world is uncommonly sensitive and precise for a character who does shitty things to other people on the regular, while conjuring the possibilities of supernatural activity afoot."

It's weird to reread this an adult because as a kid (this is true of many of Snyder's stories) it seems ambivalent whether there is actually magical stuff going on. Is her cat [gasp] a witch?! As adult it it obvious that this is an abused kid projecting crazy, rage-filled fantasies on her equally unlucky and abused kitten. Knowing what the score is makes it more disturbing, not less.

A modern take on how the Salem Witch Trials came about. Here, a 12 year old girl with issues does bad things, hurts people and blames them on her mysterious cat that she found in a cave. By reading about the Salem witches, she finally realizes that she can't blame her bad actions on anybody else but herself. The people she hurt were certainly not to blame for what happened. Her cat wasn't to blame either. It is a nice story, easy to read and with a good message for teens and adolescents.

Timeless masterpiece. I've loved this book since the 80s, and having my own demonic "Worm" right now really made me want to reread my childhood favorite.

This is the third time I read this book and it’s still as good as I remember it. Zilpha Keattey Snyder’s take on the inner workings of an adolescent mind is just superb. She was able to simplify the turmoils that a teen goes through with just the right Mount of mystery and magic.

Not a bad read, but I read the foreword first, and that totally ruined any suspense the book might have had. I found the main character not only unsympathetic, but a child badly in need of a thrashing. I spent the entire book feeling extremely sorry for the cat (Worm) and really hating Jessica, the little girl protagonist (antagonist, more like it). Not Snyder's best work; disappointing. If your child is assigned this book in school, make sure (s)he does not read the foreword first. It will completely ruin the story. I don't know what the publisher was thinking, not making it an afterword, where it would have been much better served.

I remember seeing this book everywhere when I was a kid, with hundreds of different covers, but I finally decided to give it a go when I saw it on the Bookmobile. I really like this. It has that perfect vibe of the classic children's books I read as a kid, probably because it is one of those books. It's literary and doesn't talk down to its audience, but it is also simple to read.

Overall, its a breezy, slightly spooky book that I highly recommend!

This book was really good. It's about a girl who finds a kitten in the back of a cave, taking it home with her and caring for it. Then a voice speaks to her inside her head. It comes again and again telling her to do terrible things, and she does them. Then she figures out that the cat is possessed by a demon.