The Works of Vermin
He was sent to kill a pest. Instead, he found a monster.
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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
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Community Reviews
Man, what a book.
First of all, this setting. This setting! The imagination at play in this book is amazing. Tiliard is such a wholly realized, incredible bit of world building. It feels rich, lush, lived-in, grimy, and somehow wholly alien and entirely familiar all at once.
This is one of those books where a simple plot explanation feels like you're doing it a disservice. Which is not because there's anything wrong with the plot at all - the plot is great! - but because the whole experience of this book is so much more than the plot alone.
But, okay: in a very biopunky city built into a massive tree, infested with all manner of wild (and large, and sometimes very dangerous) bugs, where the rich are obsessed with the arts and artistic movements and the poor sell themselves into bonded labor, an exterminator takes a job that turns into far more than he bargained for.
...and yeah, no, that barely scratches the surface.
This is about class and class division; fate and fortune; and the things we'll do for the ones we love. It's about revolution and art and culture. It's heartbreaking, and it's a little scary in parts, and VERY gross in other parts. Ennes has a particular talent for truly skin-crawling moments of body horror (and they never feel gratuitous, never feel like the book is reveling or basking in them, which makes them soooooo much squickier when they happen!)
Ennes' prose - both here and in Leech - is so sumptuous, and so pleasurable to read, but be aware that it is fairly dense. If you're a fan of sparse and spare writing, this might be a struggle.
I loved this. I absolutely loved it. Ennes is now one of the four or five pre-order, day-one, auto-buy authors in my life.
(crossposted from my Storygraph review)
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