Leech by Hiron Ennes is a Gothic, atmospheric, slow-creeping dread that burrowed deep into my mind as I read and left me disgusted and unsettled by the end. Ennes did something out-of-the-box, ambitious, and experimental with this book that I personally liked. It started with the POV of a parasite, not the host being hunted and succumbing to a parasite, but the parasite itself. The next 300+ pages are a slow-burning, horrific journey through a wintry, desolate town, a crumbling chateau, enigmatic townspeople, a disintegrating hivemind connection, and a new parasitic competition. It tackled themes of parasitism, survival, exploitation, ethics in medicine and the medical industry, and autonomy.

There's so much world lore to sink your teeth into. It is dense and demands your attention, but I did wish the worldbuilding were explored more. There were so many interesting concepts and ideas thrown around about the world outside of Verdira, but to tie all of the details together to form one image felt like trying to pull wisps of smoke into a knot. By the end, I am still left with so many questions.

The story can also feel a bit disjointed at times. The ending particularly felt a bit rushed and disconnected from the rest of the story. I understand how we got there, but after a rollercoaster of crazy in the 50%-80% of the book, the way the story ended didn't carry the same weight as how it started.

What carried me through these rough moments was the writing. Ennes can Write. There is no doubt about that. The stream of consciousness from both parasite and hosts, the devolving and switching perspectives, the timing of details that just don't sit right, and the experimental use of pronouns to denote different minds were engaging and inventive. I loved the character voice of the parasite and the way the voice changes as the story goes and more of its past is revealed. Reading this book felt less like usual horror but more unsettling and uncanny, like seeing a face in the crowd that doesn't seem quite right staring back at you.

I liked the adventure despite its weaknesses, and this read has only solidified Hiron Ennes as a favorite author. Their books might not be for everyone, but I know for certain that with every book they write, I will always be given something creative, ambitious, and unapologetically, fantastically weird.

what stayed with me most after reading this book isn’t the magical and mystical moments that we see in the book, although the descriptions of the hula are mesmerizing; it is how heavy the burden must be to ensure your culture survives, the burden of loyalty, the burden of historical trauma.

many of us fortunately have never had to carry generational responsibility to this degree—that one day you will wake up and realize that your culture may die if you let it, that only you and a few other families are what’s left of it if you do not pass down the traditions you grew up with to the next generation, to instill in them the importance of this knowledge that they must also pass down.

for these characters, that’s what it’s like living in hawaiʻi. they reflect the real and tangible experiences of native hawaiians today. their fight to keep breath in the lungs of their culture is intertwined with their land. when you take away the land, you effectively erase the life that was built upon it, the traditions that were built because of it.

and to carry this weight of responsibility alone is not an easy task. there’s a reason why there are pov switches in the book and one of them belongs to the community as a whole, watching generations of women go through love and loss, partaking in community/political events, offering their opinions and their knowledge to us as readers. the community’s generational voice is as important to the framing of the story as the main characters are.

multiple times, hakes uses the words “accidental” when describing native hawaiians as activists. they never wanted to be. they were forced to be political because they were introduced to politics by violence. they had to involve themselves in the meetings so they could hear what these people were going to do to their land, and effectively, how they were going to continue erasing their people, in order to stop it, prevent it, to dismantle a system built without their permission.

the land is as hawaiian as its people are. you destroy one, you destroy the other. there is no separating them.

this book opened my eyes in numerous ways and made me shed tears in many moments. i loved the mix of history within the chapters, the local tidbits you can’t google to get the meaning of, the pidgin to da max kine language no one wen explain.

overall, the responsibility is not the only thing inherited, whether intentional or not. grief that is consumed by one generation is passed down, shaped into a new form for the next, and so on.

and just like any other hula, these stories will be told.