Layla Martinez

Sophie Hughes

Annie McDermott

An incredible reinvention of the haunted house as a place marked by history’s ghosts.

This supernatural story of an outcast girl and her grandmother lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power.

Wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy... filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of evil. Intergenerational trauma and monsters share the spotlight in this terrific debut.

A claustrophobic slice of domestic horror… With impressive economy and hurtling intensity, Woodworm emits a howl of fury against entrenched inequality and enforced servitude, and the constraints they place on working-class women

A house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge. Layla Martínez’s tense, chilling novel tells a story of specters, class war, violence and loneliness, as naturally as if the witches had dictated this lucid, terrible nightmare to Martínez themselves.

Mariana Enriquez, author of OUR SHARE OF THE NIGHT

If you’re in the mood to read a story about a haunted house that will make your skin crawl, then I cannot recommend Woodworm enough. This book has everything, from witches to saints to angels that look like praying mantises to some of the most unsettling portrayals of ghosts that I’ve come across in a long time.

Martinez’s debut novel takes cabin fever to the max in this story of a grandmother, granddaughter, and their haunted house, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. As the story unfolds, so do the house’s secrets, the two women must learn to collaborate with the malevolent spirits living among them.

A sophisticated ghost story…breathes new life into the classic haunted house motif through Martinez's vivid exploration of generational trauma, violence, misogyny, and class. Readers won’t soon forget this striking tale.

Martínez’s prose is fairly straightforward with a menacing snarl.…There are interesting dynamics simmering underneath, not least the palpable sense of inherited trauma and the oppressive nature of inequality.…A ghost story buried in a family closet laden with skeletons and sins.

It pounces on us from the first line and doesn’t let go until the last, if it lets go. The Gothic revival continues to expand and produce great works.

Woodworm is a true literary event.

Belén Gopegui, author of STAY THIS DAY AND NIGHT WITH ME

This book is the revenge of an intergenerational wound, the embrace of barbarity, the loss of morals when trying to protect your loved ones. This book is the miserable and the wretched saying ‘enough is enough.’

The house breathes. 
 
The house contains bodies and secrets. 
 
‘A house of women and shadows built from poetry and revenge’ Mariana Enriquez 
 
The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. 
 
It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. 
 
They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice. 
 
Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. 
 
Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott

Layla Martinez

Praise for Woodworm

An incredible reinvention of the haunted house as a place marked by history’s ghosts.

This supernatural story of an outcast girl and her grandmother lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power.

Wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy... filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of ...

An incredible reinvention of the haunted house as a place marked by history’s ghosts.

This supernatural story of an outcast girl and her grandmother lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power.

Wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy... filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of ...

An incredible reinvention of the haunted house as a place marked by history’s ghosts.

This supernatural story of an outcast girl and her grandmother lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power.

Wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy... filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of ...

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