I would like to thank Tor UK for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Tor

Published - Out Now

Price - £16.99 hardback £8.89 Kindle eBook

In an isolated chateau, as far north as north goes, the baron’s doctor has died. The Interprovincial Medical Institute sends out a replacement. But when the new physician investigates the cause of death, which appears to be suicide, there’s a mystery to solve. It seems the good doctor was hosting a parasite. Yet this should have been impossible, as the physician was already possessed – by the Institute.

The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the horrors their ancestors unleashed. For hundreds of years, it has taken root in young minds and shaped them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. But now there’s competition. For in the baron’s icebound castle, already a pit of secrets and lies, the parasite is spreading . . .

These two enemies will make war within the battlefield of the body. Whichever wins, will humanity lose again?

Exploring the truly inhuman is something fantasy and science fiction can do with a little more ease than other genres. WE can imagine the not human and what they may say. How do they see humans and how they act can tell us a lot about ourselves too. In Hiron Ennes unusual novel Leech we get to explore that with an unusual lifeform hiding in plain sight among people and indeed actually hiding among many people in plain sight and meets a powerful force that may be its equal and seeks its own destruction.

The Institue is a well-known network of doctors around the land. Tending to the sick and injured it is well respected if occasionally thought to be strange. In reality though its a centuries old conscious parasite that has continually taken hosts and operates across the world as a hive mind. But in one remote corner the Institue is disturbed at one of it’s hosts deaths allegedly at its own hands. Taking a more active interest it despatches a new host across to investigate and in a rowdy aristocratic family it meets a new parasite that may be about to bring competition at last.

I appreciated Leech for being a very unusual story and it really does have from the start an unusual first-person narrator - The Institute itself! Ennes gives us a narrator who is very dispassionate and has the air of the scientist using constant scientific and medical terms, but we soon realise they do not see themselves as human - they’re ultimately a predator among us but one that sees humans as something to collaborate with and but also often to give it new host bodies. They’re so dispassionate that you may feel they’re a good person and then you see their occasional actions across the world. Not necessarily an unreliable narrator but one who we have to decode how they see the world.

The mystery is compelling and here Ennes manages to give us some very solid new weird worldbuilding and descriptions. We are in some form of post-apocalyptic society re-bullding itself very slowly. We may hear of nuclear reactors, machines lurking in rivers for the unwary and people who scavenge plastic; but we also have almost a 19th century world of Barons, miners and dilapidated priests. It is a grubby, tired and faulty world that probably suits the Institutes purposes a lot. But via the narration its captivating a sense of so much to explore and understand. But be warned there are many scenes of body horror that may me too much for some readers

I won’t explain the mystery too much; but the book does change directions in a way I did not see coming but ultimately although a short novel I did find the pacing a little too slow for my tastes. Its only around halfway this picks up and then takes its final direction and I did wonder if a novella would have been more effective.

Overall Leech has impressive writing and creates an unusual reading experience that fans of the New Weird would definitely enjoy just to see how it works in the 2020s. It is a more literary take on storylines we usually see in movies like The Thing - not for everyone but intriguing enough to try.