-A review of the Vermis series of books by Plastiboo, and published by Hollow Press-
Sometime in 2024, through one of those circumstances facilitated by a chance exposure, I discovered the Vermis series of books, authored and illustrated by @plastiboo. As a working professional artist, I have no compunctions around stating that most of my pre-adult experiences with artwork derived not from galleries or museums but from book illustrations, and that some of these books included Nintendo's official strategy guide for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (notably contributed to by master artist Katsuya Terada). While books such as these were produced with the primary intent of helping people complete the videogames, should they ever find themselves stumped by a puzzle or opponent, I was drawn to how they amplified the depth of these fictional worlds through extra-descriptive text and artwork.
It was then something of a happy surprise to find that Vermis comprises a niche genre of "fake videogames" -- or, more accurately, strategy guides for nonexistent videogames. This personal history, combined with a broad (although not deep) interest in the dungeon crawler genre, and my fondness for games like Demon's Souls and Bloodborne, compelled a slow, eventual acquisition of Plastiboo's series. The first installment, Vermis: Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods, I received as a gift request at the end of 2024. It wouldn't be until early 2026 when I would acquire and read its two follow-ups.
I don't mean to dwell on myself much here, but, since it might be the highest compliment that can be paid to an artist-author, I want to include this anecdote: I credit Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods with generating the spark, now the fire, sustaining a project for a graphic novel I've been working on with few breaks for about a year-and-a-half. As work on this project continued, I would bring this volume of Vermis to my bedside table, or to the cafes where I publicly work, as a sort of companionable reminder of the necessity of keeping this project alive, and of its impetus. Now, I have been drawing kinds of architectural, game-derived fantasies since I was six or seven-years-old, so that practice is decades old; but I believe the possibilities I saw in Vermis were, and have been, of genuine inspirational power.
After a while, I had gotten enough proverbial juice from Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods, and felt it was time to explore at least the second entry, Mist and Mirrors. A month or two after this receiving and reading through this, I ordered the special edition of what may be the series' final book: Old Curses & Buried Horrors.
Each book is organized around a loosely structured and highly visual narrative. Each is also preceded by a bit of world-building details, and all include a character selection section, either at a book's beginning or end. It is presumably left up to the reader to imagine how the attributes of each might influence certain situations. This is not like the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. There is only one narrative route, but on occasion the character/reader is offered a choice involving the acquisition of some item(s) or a bit of text relating to a possible failure state. Neither splits up the narrative; it is simply game-like flavor text.
The trilogy's writing more or less succeeds at its apparent aim: to be descriptive and suggestive, rather than "literary." Put another way, these books work as they do thanks to the writing, but the writing is probably not the reason one reads them. As such, the text is at its best when it is partner to captivating scenarios or settings. One of these comes from Old Curses & Buried Horrors, wherein the protagonist encounters a stick-figurative being made of roots adhered to the floor, walls, and ceiling of an underground cell. Some of the prose has an eccentric charm which may or may not be an effect of translation (from Italian, I presume). Whether intentional or not, and, if so, by what degree, it brings the experience closer -- appropriately so -- to reading the prologues from various Japanese game manuals, as well as their in-game dialogue.
Were I prompted to describe these books in a word or phrase, I would reach for something like mood pieces or ruminative visions. For myself (and, I must assume, some others), the central draw of the Vermis series is not the textual specifics, nor the action scenes, nor the game conceits, but an ambience that settles among the mind as one lingers on a page. I found these books most pleasurable to go through as slowly as possible -- perhaps over the course of five, six, seven days -- even if each could have been easily finished within a day.
Plastiboo's art finds commonality with the anonymous, or mundane, environmental disposition which I've often found to be a weirdly alluring trait of certain dungeon crawlers and RPGs (e.g., Legends of Valour, Knightmare, Wizardry, etc.) -- architecture as piles of massive stonework punctuated by the odd window, door, or sconce -- as well as an intentional degradation of visual fidelity that amplifies the disparity between a book and the imaginary game it makes reference to. There is a resonance with magazines' or older websites' preview images for canceled videogames or their beta incarnations. In our inability to engage with that game, the images' suggestiveness gains an imaginative potency that would actually be lost were the games, or those versions of the games, to exist. This dynamic has long struck me as an interesting window into human psychology: how the idea of the thing can be more exciting than the thing itself.
As the series progresses, readers will note a general technical improvement to the artwork and graphic design, with Old Curses & Buried Horrors representing a fairly noticeable high point. Even so, I find the relative roughness and simplicity of the first book appealing. Strategy guides and game manuals were often not the sites of virtuosic illustration; more often, the pictures were of an amateurish quality, as were many of the games themselves. I do not intend it to be a pejorative when I say that Plastiboo's art has a proportionate "naivety." One can certainly draw parallels from Vermis' visuals to those of Dark Souls, but there is a coarseness here that both distinguishes Vermis' artwork and imaginatively situates it as a videogame release from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Armored characters are pieced together like clumps of clay, and buildings use basic constructional elements such as arches, pillars, and windows with an uncertain, makeshift application.
Also like Dark Souls and its pre-generational ilk, such as King's Field and Shadow Tower, the vision Vermis offers is not optimistic. The series is very much a work of "gothic" romance, that mode of anti-pleasure pleasure, reveling in dampness, tragedy, decay, gloom, and the spectral. Although there are gory moments, Plastiboo's preoccupation is not with sadism, but with the decay of bodies and places, all slowly broken down by time's effects. There is no virility here exceeding the unstoppable growth of ivy over sagging stonework. It is perhaps on this point -- whether or not one has a melancholic inclination, and if that finds its outlet through this aesthetic avenue -- that the series will or will not connect with a given reader.
It seems inevitable that one would compare the Vermis series' entries against one another. Popular opinion on Goodreads appears to regard the first and third books higher than the second. On this I would agree, and I think it is why I ordered Old Curses & Buried Horrors so soon after finishing Mist & Mirrors. Mist & Mirrors registers as an attempt to craft a more phantasmagorical and "psychological" narrative, but the result is a string of disparate scenarios which could be rearranged in almost any other order. While the first and third books feature distinct, environmentally-led progressions, Mist & Mirrors (at first promising to be the exploration of a vast desert spotted by ancient structures) rarely grounds the reader in any identifiable place or the sense of a wider world. Instead, it murkily reiterates a decapitative motif and the self-same nature of the protagonist's antagonists. This reorientation comes across as an enforcement of a conceptual profundity neither earned by the text nor enlivened by the strategy guide conceit.
Given these criticisms, it's amusing that Vermis could be compared to a number of actual, high-profile videogame series wherein the second entry is regarded as a divergent outlier, while the third entry commonly registers as a grander elaboration of (at least some of) the virtues of the first. A few examples here would be Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. (outside of Japan), Metroid, and Dark Souls. I'm not sure if Old Curses & Buried Horrors was then partially influenced by the responses to Mist & Mirrors, but it seems possible, considering its hard, backward-looking turn.
A degree of sadism is present in the third book's later portions, though, and I remain unconvinced that this kind of gratuitousness is to the creative advantage of anything beyond, maybe, erotica. All things considered, the first book remains my favorite. Its narrative has enough reprieves and is of a short enough length that the dourness never seems suffocating. It also has some elements of light humor, or situations that at least register as a bit humorous by contrast. For instance: a short paragraph of biographical text is provided for each member of its roster, but the one exception to this is Rat Man, whose bio simply reads, "Become Rat Man." Or: the protagonist is confronted by a large knight on a bridge, but when the knight charges his weight exceeds the bridge's capacity, and he falls through the planks into the chasm below. Silly details such as these are pretty much entirely absent from the second and third book, yet I feel they are crucial to works with a nearness to camp or kitsch.
Personally, I find that the graphic design, by Marco Cirillo Pedri and Christian Dolz Bayarri, is just as visually important, even exciting, as Plastiboo's material. The most appealing pages are not necessarily the ones featuring a single image but, rather, the ones with a multiplicity of features. Each of these is a smörgåsbord of faded borders, artificial wear-and-tear, antique-style fonts, and earthy colors set against dark grays and blacks. Some of the most fun examples include the rosters Plastiboo has devised for the areas' monstrous or otherwise bizarre entities, with one of my favorites being Mist & Mirrors' taxonomy for the Eclipse Towers' inhabitants.
Plastiboo's work can be purchased on Hollow Press' website. For only fifteen dollars each (not counting shipping), unless you opt for the special hardcover editions, the Vermis books are very high quality productions. The binding and paper quality are substantial, the colors are vibrant, and the special editions even include a couple of bookmark tassels. I have to wonder how much of a profit is being made (are advance payments involved?), but I hope it's enough for the books' makers and Hollow Press' staff. When at expositions I've sold self-published comic books, of a far lower quality and page-count than these, I had to price each copy between twenty and thirty dollars to just exceed breaking even. I have found several reports of books arriving damaged, but it seems that Hollow Press' customer support is usually good about responding to and rectifying this.
If you were previously unaware of these books and you like what you've read here, I'm happy to have been of help!
