Leech | Hiron Ennes (2022)

It's good enough that the fact that it isn't very good indeed is actively painful. It has a surfeit of brilliant ideas: to run through just a handful, the Earth has seen a handful of cataclysms which are in some way linked to the ability to fly—the closest thing to an explanation in the novel is that what we built couldn't save us from everything else we built (quite what did we build? ancient computers following orders long after the death of their programmers, and, it is implied, things of a more biological nature)—; medical practice is taken by an Institute which is a hivemind parasite using humans as its host; medical practice is somehow of such nature as to allow one to live almost totally on external organs; strange and disturbing animals wander a landscape buffeted by extreme weather events. Explanations are only ever hinted at, never given, which was very refreshing; as, indeed, is its blend of apocalyptic sci-fi w/ Gothic horror, seasoned with body horror. 

One result of the cataclysms experienced by Earth is an evolution in the biosphere, food grown from wheatrock, and linguistic evolution, the inhabitants of Verdira, the Montish, speaking a strange mutilation of French, with English a dead language. The physician's ability to see out of numerous eyes is fantastically compelling, especially when Ennes leans into this and bounces us from place to place. The nature of the set-up lends itself well to the question of identity, and by the end it's hard to tell what, precisely, the narrator is, except that it calls itself Simone, as roughly a third of the way through it is disconnected from the hivemind and has to reckon with itself as an independent entity. Underneath the lead storyline, there is the classic root of so many good stories in any genre: what's really happening here? And here it is a tale of abuse, running so subtly that until it was revealed, I didn't notice it. It's also brilliantly paced: having started reading, I found it hard to put down.

But its telling was frustrating. The prose—our first person narrator a body of the Institute (at least till it isn't)—is too detached and too clinical. I found myself wanting for more detail, for lusher and dare I say purpler prose. For a surfeit of ideas as rich as this, and so Gothic a setting, I expect an equal surfeit of beautiful prose, and tho' Ennes's prose is certainly beautiful, it is also very clean. There are many moments that might've punched harder with more visceral detail. (A particular scene—when the physician makes it to the dessert course of the baron's weekly meal—escapes this, the surrealism of the thing overpowering Ennes's restraint.) The twins sometimes felt like a remnant of a different draft of the book. The ventigeaux creature, hinted throughout the novel, when it finally appears, disappoints, neither as horrifying nor as interesting as it ought've been. For all that, though, Leech as a whole enormously compelling, stuffed with brilliant ideas, and magnificently paced. I look forward to what Ennes writes next.