Review - In the House of the Worm by George R. R. Martin

I've always found GRRM to be a good bit of fun; an author who contemptuously kills off characters under the most ignoble of circumstances after spending 800 pages lovingly developing their personalities, but who also shows great respect for his readers by a distinct lack of mollycoddling. I'm fairly sure that old George must have some serious psychological hangups...

But anyway, on with the review. "In the House of the Worm" is an immersive tale of decadence, ignorance and perversion set on a strange, barren planet with a dying sun. Humans (or the "yaga-la-hai") live topside, and grouns (or the six-legged, no-eyed, pale things without names) live deep underground. The two races spend most of their time hunting and eating each other, and both live in complete denial of their respectively encroaching dooms; the decaying sun and a plague of giant subterranean worms. There's only one way to survive, and the only one who knows that is the Meatbringer -- a sinister groun hunter.

A fast-paced, claustrophobic story featuring an unrelenting barrage of simultaneously beautiful and disgusting imagery to make Lovecraft proud; and two races who show us the danger of losing touch with our past, forgetting our mistakes in a haze of self-absorbed decadence, and letting ignorance and fear run free.