[Earth Worms] is better thought of as a work-in-progress than as a fully realized creation. Set in what is now the familiar Innaurato stamping ground—the dingy row houses of South Philadelphia—it pulls a group of familiarly unhappy Innaurato people into fantastic shapes, like some horror-comic version of Gemini in which the people have melted down into hideous, viscous blobs that, one is shocked to find, have human feelings even so.

The relatively stable family patterns of Gemini and even Benno Blimpie, like the characters themselves, are here stretched into weirdness. The time is the Korean War. A soldier from South Philly, on duty in Virginia, meets and marries the daughter of a Baptist minister, and brings her home with him. But home is a madness: … his aunt [who raised him] is blind, her only pleasure crawling on the floor to kill roaches. The house has been taken over by a retired professor, an unbalanced secret transvestite….

The wife, intelligent but uneducated, is annexed by the draggy professor, and what follows is what customarily follows in Innaurato: screams, fights, violence, and lonely inner pain—dirt level opera, in which the higher aspirations crawl like everyone and everything else, but still sing out ferociously.

Sometimes Innaurato's vision seems almost too narrow and gloomy; sometimes the will to degrade life appears to take over the pen, so that his writing loses control of the characters' lives and actions in its eagerness to make them swallow more dirt. The inevitability of Earth Worms, and its connection to us, are hard to infer immediately on seeing it. Rethought …, it will probably come clearer, be more valid as well as more moderate….

The fact of Gemini's having been written after Earth Worms suggests that Innaurato knows better than to fall into the trap of rehashing the same cheap tricks for the paying customers, that he is willing to earn his characters' existence the hard way, by imagining them fully. We're all waiting and hoping.