Incandescently and Extravagantly Weird: The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes
The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC, chronically ill MC, MLM MC, major trans-or-SOMETHING character
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 14th October 2025
ISBN: 1250811228
Goodreads
He was sent to kill a pest. Instead, he found a monster.
One of BookPage's Most Anticipated SFF & Horror of Fall 2025
Enter the decadent, deadly city of Tiliard, a metropolis carved into the stump of an ancient tree. In its canopy, the pampered elite warp minds with toxic perfume; in its roots, gangs of exterminators hunt a colossal worm with an appetite for beauty.
In this complex, chaotic city, Guy Moulène has a simple goal: keep his sister out of debt. For her sake, he'll take on any job, no matter how vile.
As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny creatures that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is different: a centipede the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork. As it digests Tiliard from the sewers to the opera houses, its toxin reshapes the future of the city. No sane person would hunt it, if they had the choice.
Guy doesn't have a choice.
“I will follow this writer anywhere.” —Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
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~opera as a bloodsport
~political movements as art
~prose to get drunk on
~queer as in rainbow
~queer as in strange
~so good I read it twice
I think it says all that needs saying that when I first reached 70% of this book, I couldn’t handle it being nearly over…so I went back to the beginning and started it again.
I suspect a third read is in my near future.
If you read Ennes’ debut Leech, then I don’t need to sell you on this author because you already know they’re a genius. But I will say that Works of Vermin is incandescently and extravagantly weirder than Leech was – to the point where, having now read both, I’m now convinced Leech was Ennes toning themself down in order to test the (silvery, burning) waters of the publishing industry, the equivalent of dipping their toes into The Market to see if it was able to handle such a writer, such a wildly warped imagination (complimentary). Because it sure feels like WoV is Ennes letting loose, going no-holds-barred baroque, gleefully cutting the safety line and dropping us into free-fall.
I loved it. Obviously.
If you haven’t read Leech, then please brace for gorgeous wtfuckery, ecstatic prose, and genres that smear into each other to become something unnameable.
(Seriously, what are we calling this book? Horror? Dark Fantasy? Secondary-World SciFi? I could make arguments for all three and none of them would be wholly correct.)
My favourite kinds of books are often called fever-dreams, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a case where that was so justified as here. Works of Vermin feels exactly like being lost in a high fever; it is a grotesque rococo hallucination, surely impossible for a sober, lucid mind to ever dream up. It has all the infectious passion of a fever; it consumes the reader like one, like a brain-eating disease or a hallucinogen cut with something deadly. It gets into your blood; you have no antibodies for a book like this. There is no vaccine, no cure. You can only be obsessed.
Heads will roll like fruit, but he knows those that fall will be the ripest, not the rotten.
As if dosed with the ecdytoxin the book revolves around, every thread of Works of Vermin mutates into something else before the final page; we open with Guy, a lowly pest exterminator who does sex work on the side to keep his feral younger sister fed and clothed; and Aster, a perfumer – which is something between an alchemist, wizard, and personal stylist, in this setting – whose lungs were badly damaged by a chemical weapon when she was a child, in the city’s last civil war. Guy and his coworkers are hunting a very, very big bug; Aster is sent to ‘acquire’ a dancer for her employer and patron, the Marshal (think head of the military under a dictator; he’s not the dictator, but he is not someone you want to fuck with). By the end, the city is on fire, and neither Guy nor Aster’s stories are anything like what you thought they’d be at the beginning.
Because the bug produces ecdytoxin, which warps (horrifyingly, exquisitely) everything it comes into contact with, organic or non-organic – and there are far too many people who see the potential in that. Because Aster goes to fetch a dancer and meets someone very strange, with even stranger embroidery. And on those two happenstance facts, our story turns.
Elspeth and Mallory play, one like a stanza of metered verse, the other like an honest, if not funny, slip of the tongue
Vermin is doing and saying so much, on so many levels, and I can’t tell if any of it was conscious and deliberate or if Ennes’ mind just works like this. (Again: extremely complimentary.) On the one hand, it feels as precise as jewelled clockwork – but on the other hand, it feels so lushly, horrifyingly organic, in the vein of ophiocordyceps unilateralis puppeting zombie ants or male angler fish dissolving themselves into the flesh of female ones. There are all sorts of little motifs and tableaus and recurring themes, glinting like gold thread amid the dark, meaty silk of the story Ennes has woven – like thumb names, and Guylag’s dragon, or even the Revivalist movement, which presents itself as bringing life back to Tilliard. But unstoppable life is just cancer, and with the way ecdytoxin mutates everything from bodies to buildings, the scathing commentary isn’t subtle.
“What fucking choice do I have?”
“Same choice we all have, my dear. Same as every creature. Domestication, or extermination.”
And I don’t want to tell you anything else about the plot; it will be so much better if you go in as blind as possible. I’ll only say that you should pay attention to character names, to people’s titles, and that this is a story that lavishes rewards on those who take heed of every detail, who linger to savour them. Which is seductively easy to do, in this book of all books, where every word is a silken firework in your head, phantasmagoric music to your ear. Enne’s prose in Leech was exquisite: in Vermin, it is sublime, and I mean that in a near-spiritual sense. This is syntax so gorgeous you’d lick it off a scalpel, toxically psychedelic but so impossibly sweet you go feral for it anyway, knowingly rabid for it, starving for it, turning the pages faster and faster. You’ll swear the ink is a poison, a potion, seeping into your skin every time you turn the page.
the Palas. The eloquent threat of a building looms a few blocks northward, panes of watchful stained glass winking up its turrets. Golden light threads across armories and prison towers, up the dome that bumps against the broken half-moon like the puffed chest of a rival god.
This is language that bites you, envenoms you, leaves you with opalescent scars. I lost count of how many lines I highlighted, how many times I paused to roll a sentence around my mouth like candy, how many times I swooned at the razor-gleaming brilliance of a turn of phrase, a simile, a moment of dialogue. It is not purple, and it is inextricably tied to the extravagance of the worldbuilding – they reinforce each other, the writing and the world, the world and the writing, they complete each other, they melt into each other to become a mutated secret third thing, and it is unspeakably glorious.
As is the blase, effortless queerness, and that shouldn’t be a surprise after Leech, but someone smarter than me needs to write us all an essay on how Ennes is not just playing with sex and gender but with queer theory, with the concept of queerness as strangeness (on multiple different levels). This is storytelling, queered, and that means so much more than the sexuality or gender identity of its characters. I can barely articulate it, but I know it when I see it, and friends, this is it.
“God, you’re beautiful. Stay ruthless for me.”
The TL;DR is that all of Works of Vermin is like this. Ennes has created a world where the sun is green and water burns; where deaths onstage at the opera are very real; where debts are tattooed and successes are embedded in your skin as gems. Perfume is mindfuckery; the right scent can make others see you as taller, or more charismatic, or tidying papers when you’re actually sweeping them all to the floor. And the story itself – this is a book about civil war, and theatre, and a society wedding. It’s about poverty and art and dictatorship. It’s about chemical (corporate) warfare and so many kinds of love, many of them as warped as if they’d been attacked by the beauty-eating bug. (Perhaps that is another level of the metaphor? I wouldn’t put it past Ennes for a second.) It’s about siblings who’d burn the world down for each other. It’s horror as art, politics as art; art as transience, art as mutation, art as a weapon and an escape. There is plot-relevant embroidery. As a whole, it’s kin to Kerstin Hall’s Asunder, the kind of opulent dark weirdness that is soul-scarring.
Forget the best of year list; Works of Vermin is going on my next Best of the Decade list.
I don’t know how else to say it.
If this review is a little manic, well, you won’t blame me after you read this queer rococo bugpunk book for yourself. I’m still high on the venom, and I suspect I will be for a long while.
And I’m not even a little bit sorry.
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