Fiction Reviews
The Works of Vermin
(2025) Hiron Ennes, Nightfire, £22, hrdbk, 423pp, ISBN 978-1-529-07365-2
Dear reader, do you long for the return of the New Weird? Do you miss those early years of the new millennium when China Miéville and Jeff Vandermeer were making their names?
New Crobuzon and Ambergris were fantasy cities the like of which we had not seen before,* both ancient and modern at the same time, brought to life in grand visions and a thousand incidental details, with corruption at their heart but madness at their margins. And threatened, with a tip of the hat to Lovecraft, Burroughs and other literary forebears, by insectile and fungal horrors.
To these legendary places can now be added the city of Tiliard, the unacknowledged main character of Hiron Ennes’s The Works of Vermin, which is very much in the New Weird town planning tradition.
Tiliard is an improbable city of wood and steel, carved from the remains of a giant tree, wedged over a river gorge with roots dangling into the water. A port, a trade hub, a place of high culture and incendiary politics, a mess of poverty and diesel-punk technology, a sink of corruption where the wealthy and powerful wear custom-made perfumes to emotionally manipulate those around them.
Given its organic nature and proximity to the river, it comes as no surprise that Tiliard is plagued by all kinds of vertebrate and invertebrate pests of unusual size. Exterminators like Guy Moulene of Borisch & Sons are a necessity in a city like this, though it’s a job that only the desperate would do, especially when there are rapacious giant centipedes with an unnatural venomous bite on the loose.
All Guy really wants to do is get out of debt, provide for his younger sister Tyro, his only surviving relative, and revisit his memories of the opera house where he worked as a child.
While he and his squad find themselves charged with hunting down and capturing the many legged menaces, in the meantime the mysterious Mallory Vant Passand exercises a fascination for members of high society and the government, which in Tiliard amounts to more or less the same thing. Half Jay Gatsby, half Count Of Monte Cristo, his motivations and aims are unclear. But Aster Vost, perfumer to the Grand Marshall, is determined to find out more, to the point of developing a dangerous romantic connection with Mallory.
There is a lot happening at once in The Works of Vermin, and we’ve not even covered the slow poisoning of the Chancellor of Tiliard ahead of his wedding, or the warping effects of chemical warfare on the general population like Aster and her best friend (and the Chancellor’s fiancé) Elspeth, or the book’s repeated, but plot-relevant digressions into the bloody world of Tilliardian opera.
Author Hiron Ennes cannot seemingly resist including another juicy anecdote or piece of information in what was already an astonishingly complex and baroque act of world-building. Tiliard is an unlikely city – I struggle to imagine it as described looking at it from the outside in – but it’s almost as Ennes feels that by stuffing it full of data points he can bring it to life from the inside out.
Does he succeed? To a certain point: the novel cries out to be adapted into a high-end role-playing sourcebook, rich in detail and atmosphere as it is. I would positively relish the chance to run a campaign set in this city. But the constant accumulation of background and throwaway references reduced the scope for my imagination to fill in the blanks.
The problem is not the common one of ‘too much tell, not enough show’ – here the issue is ‘too much show.’ And the characters and writing – strong though both are – are reduced to sideshows by the emphasis on the city, with neither Miéville’s politics or Vandermeer’s humanism to balance things out.
Tiliard, and by extension The Works Of Vermin, are certainly impressive achievements and I would have no hesitation in describing it as a good book or recommending it to fans of the New Weird. The only advice I would offer Ennes – an extremely promising writer – is that less is sometimes more.
Tim Atkinson
* Alright, I’ll give you M. John Harrison’s 'Viriconium' series.
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