No matter what else has been going on recently, it has at least been a banner year for reading. Forget the top three, I’m going to have so much fun (difficulty) trying to whittle everything down to a top ten list. In the parlance of some of my students, there have been some absolute bangers.
The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes is absolutely one of those bangers. In some ways it feels like a throwback to the New Weird of the 2000’s; there is a strong shared vibe here with China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. The dual-layered setting comes across as gaudy and decadent but also somewhat tacky; all pulled together in a way that reminds me of a Robert Henri painting of Paris.
It is also a fantasy entomologist’s delight. As someone who has described their chosen career at times as that of a glorified exterminator, this pleased me to no end. It’s not futuristic enough to be biopunk, but it brings the body horror—much the same way Robert Jackson Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan books do, to think about it. (But with less mushrooms and more moulting.)
The city of Tiliard exists within a gigantic hollowed out tree stump, whose roots feed from an immense toxic river. It is urban, mossy and chitinous in equal parts. The social layers of Tiliard map well to their disance from the roots; the people living on the stump-face live a decadent but politically fraught life, full of perfumes, poisons and secret police. A fine night at the opera might mean the death of the tenor after their final aria, meaning they do churn through many of their performers. While I did have a little trouble trying to pin down the exact time period Ennes was going for here, I kept on spiraling back to France during the long nineteenth century as the best match.
But for those people living in the underside of the city; closer to the Catoptric River? Much more grime, and an overabundance of horrific insect life. The waters of the Catoptric seem to have mutagenic properties, and the canyon under the city is full of skittering, many-legged, Giger-esque horrors that need to be brought under control.
This brings us the Exterminators, like Guy Moulène. Guy seems to have fallen on some hard times in the past, which are detailed in the extensive debtors tattoos that run up his arms. A one time usher for the opera, Guy now labors with a team of exterminators to keep buggy incursions at bay. When he’s short on cash, Guy also takes on night shifts, which means indulging in a bit of sex work on the side. He specialises in elaborate forms of role-play, which is just fine by his wealthy benefactors, and just goes to show that Guy never lost the love for the arts he had as a boy. Guy balances these two jobs in an effort to ensure that his little sister, Tyro, has the chance to live a better life than his own outside of Tiliard. Tyro may be too young to appreciate what Guy is doing right now, but she’ll learn. Tiliard is not a kind place.
When we are not following Guy and his exterminator team, we are following Aster Vost, who works as one of the city’s best perfumers. Perfume is not just a sign of wealth and status amongst the upper class of Tiliard and Aster’s job is more akin to that of a personal alchemist. Fragrance development is also a more dangerous business than you might think; a drop of the potent ecdytoxin could bring a scent together in a way that simply cannot be imitated by cheaper imitations, or it could cause a delicate sinew and bone flower to spring from a victim’s ribcage, killing them in the process.*
Even metabolized with a cascade of BGS enzymes, a single drop of ecdytoxin is enough to elevate a scent to a strong impression, and a second is enough to elevate a strong impression to a fatal miasma. A third might elevate one’s workshop twenty feet in every direction and suspend the pieces there for an hour or two.
Aster’s position is also more fraught than first appears; the political situation in the city is volatile, and the Grand Marshall, her patron, is more often than not found in the centre of most political plots. Aster’s own declining health is another problem she has to deal with. But then she crosses paths with Mallory vant Passand, a man who simply cannot be pinned down like a bug, and her life’s threads start unravelling all around her.
Back in the under city, Guy and his crew have an explosive run in with truly monstrous centipede, which leads to a new contract with a new company and new dose of toxin that starts pushing down more and more dominos down around him. Like Aster, Guy’s life also unravels.
It’s not immediately clear how the two plot threads relate to each other, but the points where they cross are hinted at throughout the story—until we reach a climax that genuinely shocked me. I can’t say I saw most of that coming! I’m sorry to keep on having to draw comparisons with previous fantasy authors (and I am sorry, because I don’t think the author is being derivative at all), but what Ennes pulls off here makes me think their novel craftwork is up there with that of Tamsyn Muir.
Another set of intersections involves the overlap of art and politics. The elaborate, deadly theater productions aren’t simply there to entertain—they function as propaganda. And yet, there’s also a glimmer of hope that someone might mutate art into a form of protest. We also get to see what happens when someone attempts to cross the class divide. Both story threads also focus on the circular nature of cultural and political change, made all the more evident with the addition of the transformative, mutagenic ecdytoxin.**
I won’t lie; it took me a little while toe to find my footing in the first part of the book. But once I mangled to secure a firm hold, I really couldn’t put The Works of Vermin down. This is a truly impressive book, but not for the squeamish.
For cbr18bingo, this one is And. Why? New Weird vibes AND body horror AND so much more
