Review: The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

Rating: 5/10

Monster hunters tangle with court politics in this horror adventure by the critically acclaimed author of Leech.

Enter the decadent, deadly city of Tiliard.

In a complex, chaotic metropolis, 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 pests that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is different: a worm 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.

A deeply fantastical and yet incredibly reflective fever dream “The Works of Vermin,” by Hiron Ennes blends baroque world-building with commentary upon class and art, with prose like butter and giant scary centipedes. Beneath its perfume this novel is rotten and mouldy and entirely unsavoury, and it very much straddles both horror and fantasy- and whilst frankly, it veered a little too far into the fantastical for my personal taste, truly a me problem, there were many a mandible-clicking, pincer-snipping passage that had my palms clammy, my stomach churning and my heart doing an awkward can-can in my chest. Beauty and rot, gilt and decay- it’s all here. “The Works of Vermin,” hits shelves from Tor October 14th, thank you for my ARC. 

We follow Guy, an exterminator by trade. In the city of Tiliard however, the term trade hardly does justice to the profession, with the work centered not around mousetraps or poison pellets, but the 397 species of pest that can be found there. Some are relatively easy to handle, termites say, others, like chimeras and pleasure hornets can be cause for concern, but when Guy and his colleagues are called down to the Root of Abrupt Ends, where a man has blinded himself as opposed to go on seeing what he saw, Guy is convinced he has discovered something else entirely and the manual is incomplete. 398 pests. 

I am conflicted world-building wise, because that was my personal burr with the novel- I prefer stories where I can just rock up and watch the horror unfurl, and yet, it’s something I, perhaps, begrudgingly, really appreciated. It’s intricate, full of original lore and really quite beautiful, as far as obstructions go- so the reason I’ve not put a rating at the top is to tell you that if this is no issue for you, I think you’ll love it. With rich, lush prose, three-dimensional characters, and a commentary upon class, servitude and art- every discipline one can imagine- that even I could decipher, objectively, it’s meticulously crafted and pretty awesome. 

Ennes is quite clearly in love with art, a love that is absolutely apparent through the obvious wordsmithship of their own sentences, but also the exploration of dogma and bloodshed as an artistic movement. Art as a literally powerful medium. Art as separate from propaganda, an equally powerful one. Ennes also comments upon the commodification of and access to art, contrasting the elite, who lounge in gilded halls and regularly attend the opera, and yet are largely unappreciative of it, to the impoverished, who scrape and bleed and yearn for it- art of course washing away from the soul the dust of everyday life, in the words of Picasso. It’s about art, queerness, relationships, gender and metamorphosis, it’s heady, deeply interesting stuff. 

With shades of Miéville, but a palette that is completely its own, “The Works of Vermin,” is an opulent but festering novel that will ensure you never complain again about that fly that bounces incessantly off of your window, or a little eight-legged house-guest. For the dark fantasy inclined, or those who, unlike me apparently, are not complete doctrinaire horror purists, Ennes’ latest is rich with prose and bugs and commentary, and I do hope it works for you.