Dangerous, Decadent Depths

John Knych dissects Hiron Ennes’s ‘The Works of Vermin.’

By John KnychJanuary 12, 2026

• SF

THE ENTRANCE TO the smuggler’s tunnel is dripping with ion-charged sap oozing from naked rhizomes and rotting vines. An odor of carcass and pestilence curls through quivering nostrils. A boat on a poisonous river enters a city that consumes and withers, pumps and contracts, like a cancerous, monstrous heart.

With no preamble, the reader is thrust into the fantastic, infected, and mutilated universe of Hiron Ennes’s second novel, The Works of Vermin (2025), in which a rioting, graphically violent, and art-obsessed society is marked by an anachronistic mismatch of human history and technology. It’s a world in which politicians and artists achieve great power and fame until, inevitably, they are cast aside in a violent cycle that is repeated generation after generation. The decaying remnants of various earlier historical periods coexist in a hodgepodge present—a society sloppily stacked on top of itself. There are newspapers, journalists, and radios; mind-altering perfumes; incessantly quoted poetry; a drinking vessel from ancient Greece; past wars echoing in the present; giant insects and their exterminators; and opera performances.

The atmosphere, hatched out of intricate and multilayered world-building, is lush and extravagant. Things, people, and buildings are gnarled, gnawed, splintered, and impaled. The morbidly blossoming setting, the city of Tiliard, located in the stump of an ancient tree, seems to be of primary importance, while the characters and plot are merely literary devices to illustrate the wretched and contorted contours of the vivid and vicious stage.

The narrative is divided into two threads. In one, Mallory, an enigmatic visitor, arrives in the city with a mysterious purpose. Then there’s the exterminator, Guy Moulène, whose motivation is to keep his younger sister out of debt. Guy has a roommate and co-worker, Dawn, a war hero who, along with him, hunts the monstrous insects that emerge from the city’s river. The pair carry strange weapons and risk their lives for their daily bread. One day, Guy is stung by a dragon-sized centipede that will soon wreak havoc on the populace. Meanwhile, Mallory entangles himself with Asteritha Vost (Aster for short), a perfumer who works for the Chancellor and the Chancellor’s impetuous bride-to-be, Elspeth, skillfully crafting scents with mind-altering properties.

Ennes’s force as a writer is in the absolute avoidance of cliché. They confessed in a recent interview that they revise relentlessly (even as they wrote this novel during their last year of medical school and first year of residency) in pursuit of an original turn of phrase. Never does a line seem rote or stale, and Ennes clearly relishes exuberant description: “His heart beats an anxious pizzicato in his ear”; “chandeliers multiplied by the mirrored walls.”

But while the language and the world of The Works of Vermin are vivid, Ennes falls prey to the risk run by all prodigious world-building writers: they become so consumed in their worlds that they forget (or don’t care) about the reader’s ignorance. Throughout The Works of Vermin, there are references to imaginary works of art that fall flat and drag the pacing. It sometimes feels as if the reader is on the periphery of an inside joke. While Ennes is attempting to depict an art-obsessed society that has risen and fallen countless times, the sheer quantity of art references is excessive and sometimes tedious. No doubt there is much of the novel’s world that we do not see, but Ennes could have gone further in hiding it. In creating such a complex setting, perhaps Ennes forgot the reader’s lack of familiarity.

The characters seem two-dimensional, much as the characters in The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) are two-dimensional: they have simple purposes (revenge, money, family, work, power). Their voices all sound similar, their dialogue peppered with expressions like “Oh,” “Oh, please,” “Oh, stop,” “Oh, Mal,” and “Oh, God.” They frequently laugh at one another’s jokes, though the reader may feel left out. There were times when I laughed out loud, but never when the characters were chuckling among themselves. Perhaps they laugh so much because their world is so brutal and cruel.

Where the narrative shines is in scenes of intimacy. There are bizarre love triangles that shift, sizzle, and shudder. While science fiction has often depicted love triangles between a heterosexual man and two heterosexual women, Ennes explores the hazy, steamy borderland between deep friendship and love among two men and a woman who becomes a man. The intimate scene between Guy and Dawn is masterful, full of uncertainty and awkwardness, desire and confusion. On the other end of the intimacy spectrum, the first encounter between Mallory and Aster is comic, unconventional, and engaging. You feel them both click with a joyful naturalness. You want to ask Mallory for a cigarette so he can share another of his seductively elusive anecdotes.

While through much of the novel the two narratives seem to be taking place at the same time, Guy’s story is actually set in the past. His younger sister, transformed by toxins in the poisonous river, becomes Mallory, and the “art-quoting” Guy becomes the renowned artist Aufhocker. The climax of the novel, Mallory’s arrival at the opera house to reunite with Aufhocker/Guy, reminded me of the climax of the film The Substance (2024)—on the one hand, a spectacular, chaotic, gushing horror show; on the other, gratuitous, too much, over the top. If only Ennes had held back more, they would have done justice to the subtle and brilliant way the relationship between the novel’s two narratives is revealed. While this kind of parallel narrative structure and temporal twisting can feel cheap or contrived, here it emerges organically out of Ennes’s distorted, cyclical world, where the past and future are entangled.

Novelist William Gibson famously said that “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” Ennes takes this idea to the extreme and imagines a society thousands of years in the future that has progressed in some ways, regressed in others, but is stuck in a savage loop, frayed at its flailing seams. Some technologies seem dated (magazines being shipped into the city) while others seem futuristic (mind-altering perfumes).

We, too, are all living in an increasingly unevenly distributed future that is progressively being destroyed and polluted with the advent of technologies such as generative AI. I have a friend who uses ChatGPT for relationship advice, a 19-year-old student who used an AI agent to plan their vacations, and a 77-year-old neighbor who still writes checks and listens to a radio with an antenna. Every day, there are over 100,000 flights, yet over two billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water. We continue to stretch and bend ourselves with new tools, new demands, yet things seem stuck. Mass shootings, deportations, irreconcilable wars, teenagers driven to suicide by strangers online, a massive ballroom being constructed at the White House, a seven-minute jewel heist at the Louvre, hours sucked out of each day on addictive platforms designed by tech billionaires—daily life has the quality of a cynical and relentlessly churning spectacle. While some details of Ennes’s world are superficially fantastic, the overall picture of a violent Ouroboros strikes the reader with horrifying realism.

The 432-page journey through The Works of Vermin sometimes feels long and uncomfortable. The path is dark, rancid, and doesn’t always have a clear trajectory. But the atmosphere is thrilling and the story is propelled by intimacies and shocking and profound revelations. An artist can be forgiven much if they strike out on uncharted waters and explore dangerous depths. Ennes creates a sick and twisted world that mirrors sick and twisted aspects of our own. When you leave the tunnel and breathe the fresh air, you’re grateful to have taken the plunge.