How do you review a book like Hiron Ennes’ Leech, a novel that’s as disturbing as it is compelling, in which a theoretically benign parasitical distributed consciousness has possessed the entire population of medical practitioners, but finds itself in unwanted, unexpected competition when it stumbles upon a new, opposing parasite? It’s a book that does things entirely its own way, with a blatant disregard for normal genre conventions that somehow really works but which makes it very, very hard to talk about without giving spoilers. Well, I did manage to write a review, which you can read here, but this book is so strange and so damn good that I want to tell as many people about it as possible. If there’s any author’s work that Leech reminds me of, it’s the brilliant Peter Fehervari, so I thought I’d add a few more thoughts about that comparison.
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Leech – Hiron Ennes
Hiron Ennes’ Leech is eerily good, an unsettling tale of parasites, shared consciousness and collective history that’s quietly creepy and endlessly compelling. In a bleak, ravaged world, the Interprovincial Medical Institute has cornered the market in medical personnel…by possessing the body of every living doctor, sharing its gestalt awareness across countless physical forms. When one of its number dies in a remote snow-shrouded château, it simply sends another to take its place. When the replacement arrives however, it finds that its predecessor’s death was far from natural, with a horrifying parasite having taken root in that body. As a bitter winter closes in and the presence of its distant bodies fades, the château’s doctor is soon trapped inside with the fractious residents, few real resources, and an insidious, unseen but utterly deadly enemy.
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