A review by eb2701
Leech by Hiron Ennes

dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

While I think this is a very well conceived and well executed book, I found myself disappointed in what it chose to focus on. While it promised to be a complex exploration of identity and bodily autonomy, I found it to be quite cut and dry and even a bit heavy handed with its moral messaging about autonomy. 
while yes, obviously taking people’s bodies is bad, the Institute makes the point that it has to survive too, and needs human hosts to sustain itself. Is it evil to do what you have to to survive? Parasites are just fulfilling their ecological niche. And the book dismisses this question out of hand and doesn’t pick it up again. I would have been much more interested in grappling with that dilemma than so quickly concluding that no, parasitic lifeforms do not deserve to survive under any circumstances. Similarly, when Simone's personality began to assert itself, I found that I would have much rather been spending more time with the doctor in the second half of the book than having to get to know an entirely new protagonist that I found less interesting than sitting with the uneasy state of being one semi-autonomous disposable body in a collective.
 

That said, the prose is excellent and the structure of the book is very strong. I really enjoyed the throughlines of folklore and supernatural imagery, and the subtextual richness of parasitism as metaphor, parallelism both class oppression and the insidious nature of sexual abuse. The overall gothic framework functions perfectly, and the body horror is great. 
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