A Wandering Bard’s Review: Heartworm by Lack of Poochline

‘Heartworm is not so much read as survived—a cosmic dog sermon barked through a mythological blender, occasionally brilliant, frequently deranged, and utterly committed to its own beautiful nonsense.’

Editor’s note: This is a Wandering Bard second opinion on a story previously reviewed by Bardic Planet.

A Psychotropic Detonation

This work is a psychotropic detonation of language wrapped in a wet fleece of dog hair and philosophy. It is absurd, excessive, pretentious, occasionally brilliant, and deeply allergic to restraint. It reads like the author set out to write a serious metaphysical treatise, fell face-first into a pile of puppies, and just kept writing. The commitment to the bit is admirable. The bit itself is horrifying.

Characters Wrapped in Existential Angst

Character-wise, the cast is a warband of tragic robot-philosophers, mind-scarred captains, and gelatinous joke-goblins wrapped in existential angst. Dirofil is the most consistent, a mournful Frankenstein of purpose and metal who still manages to throw puppies like grenades and wax poetic about rat ghosts.

Parvov is both emotionally compelling and exhausting, a rage-dad who thinks loyalty can be hammered into the universe. Leptos is a decent foil, though he mostly exists to be disassembled like furniture. Babesi is a clown in a slime suit and might be the only spark of real joy in this glacial techno-dirge. The rest are named like failed prescription drugs and act like depressed computers from a French play. That may be intentional.

A Sideways Scream Into a Mythological Blender

The story is not a story. It is a sideways scream into a mythological blender. There is no arc. There is trajectory, but it’s vertical and spiralling.

The central plot is a promise made under the floating ass of a retriever tide, followed by a scavenger hunt for limbs and a sequence of hallucinatory dog-dodging across crumbling towers and oceans made of barks and betrayal. It’s rich with implications and starved for momentum.

Things happen, but they happen like poetry happens, or like the emotional breakdown of someone who has recently been licked by God’s favourite beagle. By the end of four chapters, we’re not so much engaged in a narrative as we are trapped inside a thematic zoetrope powered by canine entropy.

Ultraviolet Prose

The style is relentless. Every sentence is doing far more work than necessary, as if the author is afraid a simple clause might be mistaken for a coherent thought.

It is purple prose, but not in the usual sense. This is ultraviolet prose. It is thick with invented cosmology and theological gibberish.

Every noun has a proper name and at least four invented titles. Every verb is bent around the author’s spine and thrown through a prism. The metaphors are everywhere, most of them uninvited. There are beautiful lines, but they drown in syrup. It is a style that mistakes density for depth, rhythm for meaning, and worldbuilding for world-beating. It is good writing trapped in the body of a bad magician.

Grammatically Precise, Syntactically Abusive

Grammar is generally sound, which makes it even worse. The author clearly knows what they’re doing. Every sentence is deliberate. The text is grammatically precise, but syntactically abusive. The punctuation is tortured into dramatic servitude. Dialogue is clunky when it tries to be funny and effective when it tries to be sincere, which unfortunately happens rarely. Paragraphs are bloated and breathless. Syntax is kinked like a hose. It is the linguistic equivalent of watching someone try to describe a cathedral while being eaten by a golden retriever.

Cosmic Dog Epics and Suffocating Humour

The author, a self-described humorous fantasy writer, has managed to take the core premise of “what if dogs were God and the sea was made of them?” and treat it with such catastrophic seriousness that it loops back into comedy.

He has described a Labrador as an inspiration and war criminal, which explains a lot. This is the kind of fiction that happens when you stare too long into a puppy’s eyes and then write down what you saw in the void behind them. There is humour here, but it’s buried in self-serious lore and you can feel it suffocating. This is someone who should be writing absurdist short stories or satirical novellas, not cosmic dog epics with footnotes for their own metaphorical failures.

Final Verdict

Authorial intent is the backbone of the story. This is not a story for everyone, but it is a masterclass in absurdist humour.

★★★★☆ (4.5/5)

Editor’s Note: The star rating reflects the score given on the review’s original platform, while Bardic Planet’s editorial interpretation of the review text is closer★★★☆ (3.5/5)