In “Danse Macabre,” Stephen King wrote “I recognize terror as the finest emotion … and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”

T. Kingfisher went for all three.

Set in 1899, “Wolf Worm” is the story of Sonia Wilson. She’s down on her luck after her father dies, teaching art to school girls and hoping for something better. Along comes a job working as a scientific illustrator in North Carolina. Her new employer is a reclusive old naturalist who studies parasites and needs her to paint the pictures for his book.

The other members of the household are a no-nonsense cook and her husband, a mixed-race couple. They don’t seem to like Dr. Halder very much but appreciate him for hating everyone equally and not caring if their marriage is illegal in that state. There’s also a fanciful younger girl from the nearby town.

Sonia is given the room belonging to the former illustrator. There begins the mystery. What happened to her? Why did she leave? Is there something going on in the locked shed in the woods?

“Wolf Worm” is working in fine gothic tradition. You have crumbling architecture, secrets from the past, rumors of devils and “blood thieves,” and an undeniable sense of claustrophobia. The more Sonia learns about her employer, the more questions she has.

And then there are the bugs.

Even beyond the library of mounted insects Sonia must study for her illustrations, bugs are a constant presence. They get into everything. Kingfisher slowly ratchets up the tension with each new lesson about parasites, leading to a disturbing scene featuring a tumor-covered possum displaying very un-possumlike behavior and trying to get into Sonia’s room … almost as if it’s being controlled.

To go beyond that would be entering spoiler territory, but “Wolf Worm” is worth your time if you like horror novels. Readers with an insect phobia will want to stay far away, but for everyone else it offers some truly disturbing and barf-inducing imagery that will stick with you a while.

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Here are some short takes on some recent reads:

* “Dollface,” by Lindy Ryan. If “Serial Mom” and “The Stepford Wives” had a baby and let “Scream” raise it, you’d have this slasher novel. It has murder, mayhem, and mean girls running the PTA.

* “King Solomon’s Mines,” by H. Rider Haggard. Before there was Indiana Jones, there was Alan Quatermain. This novel helped lay the foundations of the lost world genre’s formula of devious traps, lost treasures, and deadly tribes. It’s more respectful of racial matters than you would expect from a novel about English colonizers in Africa.

* “Nevernight,” by Jay Kristoff. This novel feels like it originated as Arya Stark fan fiction: a young girl vows to join the Church of Assassins to learn the trade and avenge her father by wiping out the men who executed him. It may be about teens, but it’s definitely written for adults.

* “Worst Case Scenario,” by T.J. Newman. Fans of Michael Crichton will love this disaster novel about a passenger jet that crashes into a nuclear power plant and the anxious hours that follow. It was a fun thrill ride that needs to be made into a movie.

* “The Guns of Navarone,” by Alistair MacLean. Confession: I spent decades thinking this was a western because of the title. Instead, it’s a rousing World War II novel of a small team of men sent to destroy the titular weapons in order to rescue 1,200 Allied soldiers from an island before the Nazis can wipe them out.

* “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice,” by Laurie R. King. The first novel in King’s long-running series finds a young Mary Russell befriending a retired Sherlock Holmes as he’s tending his bees in Sussex. She proves to be a capable student for the aging mentor as they solve mysteries together.

Terry L. Estep can be reached at testep@newsandsentinel.com