What’s in the Hole?

We know you are there. 

Do not worry. We will not hunt you. We will not hurt you. Hive Wyrms do not hurt anybody. You know this well. Why then, did you run? Why do you hide? 

We sent out this message hoping you would hear what we have to say. We want to tell you many good, beautiful, and honest things. We miss you. Please come back to us. 

Let us regale you of the innumerable joys of joining the Hive Wyrms. We are nearly 700 strong and growing, which is much cause for celebration. Surely it is only a matter of time before every individual on the planet knows our joy, including you, no matter how you hide from us. 

To incentivize you, let us celebrate together. There is always much cause for celebration in our marvelous existence. Our pride is shared, our delight all encompassing. 

If you were to join us, you too would share in this pride, this delight. Is that not reward enough? We have explained to you many times how much happier you could be with us. Will you not see reason and return? 

We will now release one individual from the sweetness of our collective so you may understand the consequences of your noncompliance.

Happy May, Wyrms! Welcome to another very Wyrm-y very Hole-y issue of fun spec fic deep dives! For starters, we’re super grateful to all you wonderful Wyrmlings who have been spreading the word! We’ve reached nearly—

Oh wait. Our stage manager is frantically gesturing to me. My apologies Wyrms. What is it, Tyson?

My apologies, Wyrmlings. It seems I’ve already welcomed you—or more specifically, the benevolent hive-mind entity that secretly operates Wyrmhole (cat’s out of the bag, folks!) welcomed you already through me. My bad! I apologize for the repetition. Tyson told me I’m actually supposed to be regaling you about the miseries of the flesh when removed from the whole. The thing is, I don’t actually remember what it’s like to be operated by the Hive Wyrm. No one does; our memories reset once its hold is relinquished. I guess I could make stuff up? Um— woe is me! I am so alone and my thoughts are so painfully individual! Quickly, someone share my brain space before I go mad! 

Tyson is shaking his head at me. Which I guess means the entire Hive Wyrm collective is shaking its head at me. Rats. 

Well, no one can say I didn’t do my best. Tyson says I have to go get reinoculated now. I’ll see you later, Wyrms! Or maybe I won’t. Who’s to say who will be operating my body next we meet? Or meat. Haha.

Return. We love you.

(Also, if you like this issue— share the HOLE!)

The Individual Formerly Known As H.H. Pak/ May 2026 Editor in Chief / Los Angeles, USA

H.H. Pak’s May-Be May-Be Not Speculative Fiction Recommendations

I think we can all agree that last year was a really great year for speculative fiction. This year is also going to be a great year! There’s a lot of very cool and exciting things forthcoming or newly arrived in the world of spec fic; here are some of my favorites across a variety of different mediums. 

Monstrous Agonies + The Lion and the Adder

H.R. Owen, Monstrous Productions. 2026.

Monstrous Agonies, created in 2020, is the winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Drama and is a personal favorite comfort listen. It features a radio talk host running an advice line for “people of the night,” utilizing subtle urban fantasy worldbuilding to discuss themes of queerness, accessibility, and multiculturalism. The same creator is releasing another audio drama this year called The Lion and the Adder, a romp through 1920s London featuring a demonologist, a psychic, and a detective working together to solve murder mysteries. I have full faith in the narrative capabilities of this brilliant creator, and if their show is as excellent as their sneak preview, then this is sure to be a blast.

The Rolling Giant

Kane Parsons, Youtube. 2023.

I’m a sucker for liminal horror, so of course I’m hyped for the backrooms movie coming out later this May. I’ve always found it endearing how such a culturally pervasive horror concept originated from the most humble of beginnings: blessed 4chan chatrooms circa 2019 where people quite literally chatted an enterprise into existence (very akin to Wyrmhole’s inception!) 

My first introduction to the backrooms was via Kane Parson’s videos, so it is only fitting I rec my favorite of his work here, especially in light of his directorial debut with the upcoming movie releasing this month. The buildup in this piece has such a light touch that you don’t realize you’ve got the heebie jeebies under your skin until it’s too late. I don’t recommend watching this alone at night.

The Summer Hikaru Died

Mokumokuren, Kadokawa Shoten. 2021.

The Summer Hikaru Died is an anime released last year about a high school boy in a small rural town who realizes that an eldritch monster has possessed the body of his best friend. The manga made me cry long before the anime released. The story is an emotionally complex tapestry of queer guilt, codependency, and ethical grayness accompanied by a well paced mystery centered around traditional Japanese folklore. The original manga’s crosshatch inking style is beautiful, and the anime enhances the artwork with clever foley work and analogue horror segments that escalates the story’s tension. If you enjoyed “Cicadas, and Their Skins” by Avra Margariti, then you’re going to love this one.

Sour Cherry

Natalia Theodoridou, Tin House. 2025.

I am not exaggerating when I say I could not put this book down. I held my Kindle awkwardly between a pile of socks and towels and did not fold any of them. I let an entire meal get cold in front of me. I basically canceled all work I was going to get done that day. Sour Cherry features a deeply compassionate multi-layered metaphor for domestic abuse via a Gothic fairytale that grasps its characters and its audience in tightly woven clutches. This book approaches its heavy topic with grace and a careful dissection of both victim and abuser. The narrative voice is characterized exceptionally well and the prose is enchanting. This is marvelous work for a debut novel and so deserving of the hype and praise it has been receiving.

Super Mutant Magic Academy

Jillian Tamaki, Drawn and Quarterly. 2015.

Super Mutant Magic Academy is a graphic novel with a forthcoming animated adaptation releasing later this year. I’m gonna be honest, I was pretty weary of the “magical school” trope until I read this comic, which leans into its own clichés with a fun satirical tone. The story follows a charming cast of characters as they navigate the awkward, mortifying, existential realities of being both immature whelps and surprisingly wise olduns. Most of the short slice of life comics are explorations of adolescent solipsism, biting, raw, and dressed with a veneer of speculative metaphor. This book made me laugh, stare at my wall, and have a conversation with the teenager that’s still somewhere deep inside me. The show is going to be awesome. 

Witch Hat Atelier

Kamome Shirahama, Kodansha. 2016.

Witch Hat Atelier is a gorgeous high fantasy manga about a young girl named Coco who must train to become a witch in order to save her mother from a curse. Yes, the story is exactly as interesting as the premise sounds. Not only is the manga beautifully illustrated, but it is lovingly written with endearing characters, an original and utterly fascinating magic system, and a well paced plot that never once feels gimmicky or rushed. The anime is a long time coming with a nearly ten year gap between the manga’s initial publication and the adaptation release. Only the first few episodes are out so far but from what I’ve seen, they’re doing this beautiful piece of art the justice it deserves (although I’m still very partial to the manga’s distinctive line art style).  

Iz recs…

Let’s Go to the Zoo

Louis Evans, Reactor. 2026. 1.6k words.

Disclaimer: I'm friends with Louis and he sent this to me. THAT BEING SAID, this was absolute Isabel Bait. Absurdism. Depression. Sandwiches. The phrase "One Totally Sane Human Being." What I love about short fiction is that you can read a short story and it takes you like, less than half an hour, and then you can think about it for the rest of your life, and I'm going to be doing that with this story.

Tia recs…

The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Rebirths

José Pablo Iriarte, Lightspeed. 7.5k words.

Past lives! Murder mysteries! Questions about justice, judgment, and identity all rolled into one! This just-barely-novelette felt surprisingly gentler than I expected given the murder-related premise, with a thoughtfully done approach to a revenge narrative. Worth a read!

Tina recs…

The Homeowner’s Bride

Ayida Shonibar, Otherside. 2026. 3.9k words.

This story features a haunted house and lots and lots of sapphic yearning. It's been a couple weeks since I've read it and the narrator's anger and the house are still living rent-free in my mind. Read if you are a fellow enjoyer of all things Gothic!

Carolyn recs…

A Recessive Trait

Victoria Cho, Joyland. 2024. 3.3k words.

A haunting look at the habits of the past, this story melds nostalgia and a bruise-tender violence into a single affecting story about a Korean remembrance ritual gone wrong. I loved this one for the exquisite details and casual treatment of the uncanny— a jaunt into unexpected reunions that leaves you with a punched-out hole in your chest at the end.

The Best of April Cover Art

May Riddle of the Month

Good Moomin of the Month

WILDCARD

Singing With the Vampires, Dancing With the Plurbs: Hive Mind Fiction and What It Teaches Us About the Collective

Welcome to hive mind essay. Is it a thinly veiled excuse to rant about my favorite movie and TV show? Well, yes. But what is Wyrmhole if not standing on a stage and shouting “hey this is cool?!” 

(Spoilers for both Sinners and Pluribus).

You read a story about a person who musters the bravery to stand against the odds and declare their individuality whilst daunted by societal oppression.

“That’s so human!” you cry.

You read news about communities who work in single minded teamwork to overcome great adversity, pooling resources, wits, and strength towards a unified goal. 

“That’s so human!” you cry.

To individualize is human. To conform is human. Clearly we have come to a conflict of interests where being a human could really mean two completely different things. Can we hold both statements in close proximity despite the cognitive dissonance?

To answer this we, as always, turn to storytelling, the most human method of self expression. Dostoyevsky once said that there are only two types of stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. If we deprioritize the travel narrative and pivot to group-think, what we really have is:

Option A: a character leaves the collective (sometimes metaphorically), gaining experiences that sets them apart from their community, and 

Option B: a character joins a collective and learns what is required to assimilate to their new environment.

Option A encapsulates the Hero’s Journey and all its ilk: Frodo Baggins, Odysseus, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, etc. These characters take brave steps into a distant frontier and are thus changed beyond the scope of the environments that raised them. They shed social mores, denature, transform, thereby losing identification from their collectives. 

Option B represents everything akin to the milieu story, where an audience adjusts to an unfamiliar environment alongside the protagonist. These stories can range from Alice, learning the rules of Wonderland, to the effective Hallmark formula of “jaded CEO falls in love with Christmastree Town, U.S.A.” Any story where a character integrates into a collective, whether motivated by survival or romance, is one where a character seeks to assimilate rather than move against the grain. Alternatively, from the perspective of “The Town” itself, a stranger is either a harbinger of great change (i.e. the Pied Piper) or another bloke to absorb into its folds. 

We then face hive minds—hive mind stories, which have recently gained widespread popularity with the multi-Oscar winning movie Sinners and the soon-to-be heavily awarded show, Pluribus. Hive mind stories are clearly now buzzing in the public consciousness as a genre of ripe potential. And yet, I propose the great irony that hive mind stories cannot conform to either convention A or B despite being entirely about conformity. 

Hive mind stories, like time loop stories, keep characters in a static treadmill, necessitating immovable object and unconquerable force dynamics. If our leading protagonists willingly gave up their individuality, or if the hive mind gave up its existence, then the conflict, and therefore the story, would end immediately. In Pluribus, if Carol was not such a genetic anomaly and/or was not fueled entirely by spite, we would have gotten perhaps half an hour of an intriguing but altogether unsatisfying short film. If Sinners had ended with our motley crew surrendering to their fanged mass of loved ones, I would have walked out of the theatre irked. Where then, do hive minds fall on Mister Dostoevsky's charming dichotomy? 

I maintain that hive mind stories cannot be rightly called Option A because there is no escape from the collective no matter how far our nonconformists journey—and our protagonists must be nonconformists because otherwise, they cannot generate that addicting friction we call plot. In Sinners, Peele cleverly utilizes a constrained world building schema. The Juke Joint represents an oasis in an ocean of oppression, both as a place of secular indulgence amid enforced religiosity, and as a haven for the POC members of the community. We come into the film accepting that these characters are fundamentally rooted to the South—as evidenced by Smoke and Stack returning to Clarksdale after a brief interlude in Chicago. Thus, our central characters can only thrive within the limited confines of this dancing hall, surrounded on all sides by hostile rejection. We begin our story in a setting that represents an “anti-hive mind,” where danger lies in oppression. 

Enter our vamps—led by an Irish immigrant who not only empathizes with Southern oppression, but offers an open (as in gaping neck wound) invitation into a collective—and not just any collective, but a monstrously powerful one, far stronger and more mysterious than the other sinister forces thus far observed. From the moment the vampires come knocking, Peele flips the script—our anti-hive mind, hostility against our oasis, becomes a true hive mind: the threat of conformity against resistance. 

All vampire media balances on fundamental themes of selfishness via the necessity of taking a life to preserve one’s own. However, the vampires of Sinners do not take lives to survive. They literally drag their bleeding loved ones into the hellfire of their collective—for once assimilated, their yearning for community heightens to a primal instinct. The thoughts, memories, and emotions of one become shared by many and this compels them to seek people specifically for their idiosyncrasies, such as Sammie’s musical prowess. 

Those non-assimilated—those who perceive the vampires as the monsters that they are—fight to preserve their humanity whilst their tragic relationships to the mass assimilated prevent them from fleeing the hell out of dodge. Thus, there is no Option A story when the heroes would gain nothing from a Hero’s Journey—what is there for them to learn? A Hero’s Journey is a promise for dissident change—but the existence of a hive mind connotes that dissident change already exists via characters who are incapable of conforming. 

That’s all very well and good, you may say. But is it not obvious that hive mind stories, Sinners included, are Option B stories? In fact, you might argue that it exists twofold in the film: prodigal twins return to their hometown, made strange by their experiences up north, with the additional arrival of a vampiric stranger. You may even go further and argue that there is an Option A pathway: that Sammie does indeed embark on a Hero’s Journey of moving past that fateful night and stepping into stardom. In Pluribus, our invading stranger is alien in origin, and multiple characters embark on literal journeys in the subsequent utopian chaos. Hats off to Mister Dostoevsky, your point still stands.

However, all due respect sir, I’m afraid neither structure quite addresses the scene when blood-stained neighbors shake it down to “The Rocky Road to Dublin.” Neither does it explain the eerie silence after Kusimayu is assimilated to the hive. Both Sinners and Pluribus contend with themes of shared identity, wherein the hive mind is in and of itself, a sentient being both separate and composed of its constituent parts. How is a hive mind an Option B story when we cannot quite define who “the stranger” is? 

Hive mind stories cannot rest easy in Option B: for in proper Option B stories, assimilation is not only expected but necessary to framing a story’s development. Cue jaded CEO selling Christmas trees in Christmastree Town, U.S.A. In come Alice and the Pied Piper, whose strangeness and variable treatment in their new environments spark narrative intrigue. However the outcome, the formula remains the same: a stranger comes to town, “the town” being the collective. 

What do we call it, then, when a town comes to the strangers?

The existence of hive minds then poses a third narrative archetype. We shall call it Option C; my apologies Mister Dostoevsky.  

 Option C: We are at war with the collective. Neither of us will win. 

No matter the pathway, every story ever written truly is about reconciling our relationship to a collective. We, as an audience, revere the collective, long for it, fear it alongside our central characters. All stories are also about empathy, for without it we cannot connect with characters enough to really care much about what happens to them (offering some interesting possibilities when the subject at hand is really a lack of empathy). 

Hive mind stories take these two necessary tenets and flatten them into the single double-sided premise of empathizing WITH the collective. In fact, hive mind stories only defy genre conventions when we recenter the hive mind itself as our leading character. 

In Pluribus, our attention inevitably turns to Carol—and how can it not? She is the character with which we form the closest relationship, as we witness all her clumsy earnestness, her desperate desire for love as well as all her petty ferocity. However, the story does not open with Carol nor is she the only forceful character. We start the story without her and end with her co-habitating the role of “World Saver” alongside Manousos. Carol is vital, yes, but who else catalyzes the story? Who else do we watch struggle and fail and fall and yearn? Who else propels the story with a powerful want? The longer you watch the more it becomes apparent that “The End of the World” is a character in and of itself, and she has a sad sad customer service smile. 

In hive mind stories, we are tasked with the impossible: we must acknowledge the collective’s identity, and therefore empathize with it somehow. This is no easier than staring into the eyes of an eldritch god and searching for a human soul—how can we empathize with something that exploits the very basic primal fear of losing control? 

It’s no coincidence that all hive minds are inevitably horrific in tone (I challenge any intrepid writer to write a hive mind without unsettling implications). The idea of losing control over ourselves as individuals is a terrifying prospect. 

Well, duh. When a sharp-fanged bloodied monster wearing your brother’s face comes knocking at your door and tells you, “hey the party out here’s awesome and also can I come inside” you are bound to doubt. When your wife dies in your arms and the Thing that killed her tries to honeypot you into fusing brains, it is only natural to put up a hand and go “whoa there buddy,” (or ask for a nuclear bomb, but not all of us can be Ms. Sturka). 

We sometimes fiddle with this tension elsewhere, such as stories about cults or high schools, but no genre quite does it like the supernatural total eradication of free will in hive mind fiction. 

Hive minds compel us to contemplate a question with no answer: what happens to us when we melt into an “us”? 

The tricky caveat, of course being, that only those who have already joined the hive mind know what it’s like and they won’t shut up about how great it is (the red flag of any repetitive advertisement). 

Humans fear the unknown—but what if the Unknown wanted you so badly it would hunt, stalk, exploit, upend your entire world just to have you? What if the primal abyss looked like your mother and spoke your husband’s first language and in its very existence, reminded you that these people were never coming back to you? And yet, it loved you unconditionally? And yet, it asked you for the most conditional exchange a human could possibly make? 

What if a part of you wanted to give in knowing that would end the story? 

The most sobering doozy to hive mind stories is that we cannot be anything else but the ones who get left behind. There’s no instruction manual for when the stranger comes to town, makes the town into a stranger, and then embarks on a Hero’s Journey without you.

You, alone, are left to tell the story. And that’s the most human thing anyone could possibly do.

A parting song from the Editors…

The Rocky Road to Dublin- Jack O’Connell

That’s it! That’s all we got! If you liked our stuff a HOLE lot, share us with a friend! Tune in next month for more shenanigans!