Leech

Hiron Ennes

Pan Macmillan

Otago Daily Times, January 28th 2023

In Hiron Ennes’s florid debut, what remains of humanity (which may or may not be human) clings to civilisation in the face of environmental, climatic, and technological dissolution. Central to survival is an alien symbiote that subsumes child hosts into a medical hive-mind – the Interprovincial Medical Institute – which has eliminated all native practitioners. After the physician servicing the Chateau de Verdira, which controls the world’s only known deposit of a vital mineral, dies under mysterious circumstances, a replacement is promptly dispatched to investigate. And when the cause is revealed to be a rival parasitic fungus, the Chateau becomes a battleground on which the fate of multiple races hangs.

It is a clever conceit overshadowed by chaotic execution, full of confusing and contradictory details (not least that a world all but destroyed by machines uses medical steam-punk cybernetics), and the multiple allusions to other works – a Gormenghastian castle overseen by a despotic baron of Harkonin monstrosity; a missing dog straight from a John Carpenter movie; the shadowy menace of an ersatz White Walker – feel appropriative rather than tributary. The titular Leech is not just a punning conjugation of the doctors’ form and function, but an apt description of the novel itself.