Ever since their debut novel, Leech, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Hiron Ennes next novel. As you may already know, The Works of Vermin fell into our top ten best of 2025 and for many very good reasons.
The city of Tilliard is on the precipice. Its elite, though powerful, is facing stagnancy and rebellion. Its primary tool, the once grand Operahouse, is looking down the barrel of a gun called renaissance. Violent upstarts are making their way through the acting scene while street battles between exterminators and mercenary groups rage in the streets of the underworld. At the center of these battles is Guy Moulene, an exterminator tasked with hunting down a gigantic and disruptive worm that is eating away at the foundations of society. Meanwhile, the rebellious youth of the elite try to maintain their status within society while pushing against the boundaries that raised them, and continue to support their very livelihoods.
Something that is very hard to distill about Ennes’ work is how much their story is suffused with atmosphere and vibes. They aren’t foundational to the story, but they are an ever-present feeling that pulls the reader into their world. The vibes are a sort of mycorrhizal fungus that allows all of the other pieces of the narrative to communicate and build a whole larger than the sum of its parts. Characters, dialogue, setting, and prose are all pushed to their limits within The Works of Vermin, and the vibes allow them to shine together. It is a web, and by god was I trapped within it. And what exactly are those vibes? A darkly comedic, tantalizing, macabre rock opera set within an organic steampunk city filled with vermin from the lowliest insects to the upper echelons of society. I fell in love with how Ennes establishes them as well, starting various chapters and sections of the book with sweeping descriptions of the city and its denizens. It gave the city its own character, its own miasma by which the people living in it are soaked. Perfume itself is a tool for the elite to control people’s perceptions of them and make themselves feel more aggressive or placating based on who they want to impress or befriend.
The story itself is one that snowballs very quickly. Guy is working a lowly job, trying to pay off debts while keeping his younger sister out of the hands of his company. Due to his own success as an exterminator and his best friend, an old war hero who is legally dead, he’s been able to stave off the worst. But when a young and ambitious noble learns that Guy has spotted a near-mythical worm, he’s pulled into that man’s war to “clean” the city of its vermin. Luckily, Guy has his handy-dandy exterminator’s almanac, but while it’s been stuck at 996 entries for years, the higher-ups have ideas about what and who should be added to the list. It isn’t long before rival factions become worthy of extermination as the noble takes his ambitions further up the chain.
The cast surrounding Guy is all incredibly fun, making the work feel consequential but also like you’re reading a warped version of Ghostbusters. Everyone has roles to play and reputations to uphold, so their dynamics, while friendly, also contain a small amount of unconvinced malice, almost as if they could jeopardize each other’s positions if they don’t act in line with company policy. His relationship with his sister is complex and misguided. The noble always strides in as he has a flowing cape, but his project is constantly on the verge of collapse, requiring bolder and more shocking displays of power to cement their place within Tilliard. That’s not even getting into the whole other half of the cast that barely even interacts with Guy and the exterminators. They are in the upper echelons of society, attending to the art and culture of Tilliard, or employed in the service of its ruling class. They have their own schemes and stories that juxtapose nicely against the street battles in Guy’s daily life.
And this is all well presented through Ennes’ command of the English language. It is nothing short of theatrical in the best ways possible. I have stated on several occasions my general lack of ability to easily imagine books and scenes within my head. I may have mentioned that sometimes I don’t really care to put in the effort, as the words do enough for me, allowing me to coast on the vibes of the language to carry me through. But The Works of Vermin battered my mental doors down like a medieval ram. I think you could make the argument that too much from the author stifles the reader’s creativity, but it wasn’t so much the quantity of vivid words used as it was the seductive nature of that language. It invited me as the reader to try to envision Tilliard using vertical and horizontal language. It filled the air with scents and sounds that permeated the aether like radio signals tuned directly to my imagination. It felt so beautifully overwhelming to fly through the streets of the city like some bird spying on the rabble waiting for a crumb to drop so that I may stoop down for more detail encased in that small morsel. There was a sense of place within Tilliard so that when the battles happened, you were thrust into them and could be embedded with Guy and crew in their desperate moments. It was incredible.
My only genuine complaint with this book is that it is incredibly hard to discuss some of its more interesting ideas without giving away major details within the book. Things that were cleverly hidden through the story make you, as the reader, feel like something is off. And right as you start to question just what the hell is going on, the curtain drops, the orchestra blares, and you find yourself sitting in a completely different theater, watching a completely different show, but yet you know that nothing has really changed, except for everything. The book would have been a great fun ride without that shift, but the shift for me, is what makes The Works of Vermin one of the best books of 2025. It was so all-encompassing, so well executed, that I still get goosebumps thinking about how it was pulled off. And it fills out the themes of the book so well, especially the ones revolving around identity, revolution, and the nature of change. I don’t know, maybe I’ll find a way to talk about these themes separately from this review, but it’s one of my favorite aspects of the book (beyond the several references to Fahrenheit 451 – I’m a sucker for those). And I want more people to read it because it is worth talking about.
The Works of Vermin, by Hiron Ennes, is a towering speculative fiction novel that defies genre conventions in favor of producing a world that is deeply rooted in its material reality and drowning (in a good way) in vibes. Its characters are fun, exciting, and complex people who have chances to live internal lives despite their very external actions in the world. I didn’t even really get into why I feel the book is essentially a rock opera, but if you’re into that shit, you have to pick this up. And if you just want a theatrical story about political intrigue as the hushed conversations of the elites in backrooms clash with the flamethrowers of exterminators in the streets of a decaying city, then why are you even still here?
Rating: The Works of Vermin – Look Upon These Works Ye Mighty And Rejoice
–Alex
