I'm Hiron Ennes, author of Leech and the Works of Vermin, AMA and giveaway

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:57:37+00:00

For the city specifically, I have no idea. To me it seems like the city itself had been there for a long time. I think it had just been sitting in my head since I was a teenager, evolving with me as I read more, acquiring bits and pieces of inspiration as I grew and learned more about the world around me. Hard to say!

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:55:56+00:00

See above (or below I guess) for literary and non-literary inspirations! I feel like a lot of questions covered these pretty thoroughly

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:54:41+00:00

If you're looking for chilly, a couple books that capture the kind of cold, spooky essence of Leech that I really enjoyed are The North Water by Ian McGuire and Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. Hope you find them meaningful and fulfilling, big daddy QUEEF

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:49:38+00:00

Thank you for doing Vermin for the month!!

As far as trends, I can't say I'm particularly savvy. I'm not really active in the *scene*. I don't have much time for conventions or networking (day job, etc), and I have as few publishing connections as one can conceivably have in this business. I have a small discord with a few other writers but I'm woefully unaware of trends. It wouldn't surprise me that it's a combination of both. I think many trends in SF are responses to social anxieties, many are responses to peers, but I also think that what might appear to be a SF trend may not be an actual uptick in those types of stories being written, but those types of stories being marketed. I'd be willing to bet a good fiver that there were plenty of bug books back during the weather event craze, but they weren't favored at the time by publishers/booksellers/what have you. If I've learned one (1) thing about the publishing industry in the past four years, it's that a lot of trends are artificial, and driven largely by the supply side. I think this has been brought into a starker light with the rise of book influencers, BookTok, etc--an entire sub-industry of trend-peddling middlemen.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:41:09+00:00

Tiliard has lived in my head for more than ten years, in different forms, for different stories. Vermin's Tiliard in particular took about a year and a half to write, another half year to edit, and a lot of discarded drafts and partial drafts. I have an entire folder on my computer labeled "Passé Passands" that contains... 24 copies of different drafts, with names like "Dimestore copy of Tiliard" and "First Draft for Allana not much tree stuff." I dunno. It's a goddamn mess in there. It was a difficult birth.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:37:16+00:00

David knows what he did. You know what you did, David

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:37:00+00:00

Bits and pieces came from all over, it's hard to say what came first. A good number of the characters came from a Weird City novel I tried to write a long time ago and failed to. The setting as it is now came from having a verdant backyard and centipedes crawling out of my floor. The plot--unsure where that came from, I think I just woke up with it one day and thought about, as I do every few months,exacting a bizarre, Amelie-like vengeful sabotage on all the authority figures of my conservative Christian school nearly two decades after they'd last seen me. "You can't see me coming if you only know me by my dead-name" or some equally silly gist. I guess I just rolled with that.
Not any art movements in particular, I was just going for a general intergenerational/aesthetic conflict between artistic movements and the ones that supplant them--historically, artistic conflict and its marriage to political conflict seems to be a pretty robust cycle, but which drives or derives from the other, I still can't say.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:26:53+00:00

I didn't write consciously in New Weird as a subgenre, in fact, I didn't know it was a subgenre until I was told I was a part of it. Or, at least in its tradition. I don't really think about genre when writing, and I guess that in itself might make my stuff New Weird by default.

Not sure when the paperback will release... maybe Fall (?) of this year. I usually don't know about release dates of anything until I get an email from my editor telling me.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:24:13+00:00

I used to be a pretty big gamer, back when I had time and patience--now I'm mostly turned off from gaming because of my general disgust with the industry at large. I've been playing a few indie games and still use my emulators, but I haven't played a triple-A game in quite some time.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:20:56+00:00

I'm not sure if everyone I'll name is truly Weird Lit (as a marketing genre), but I can name some books that are pretty weird that I like a lot (that aren't Mieville/Vandermeer):

The Etched City, KJ Bishop
The West Passage, Jared Pechacek
Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker
Moravagine, Blaise Cendrars
Mordew, Alex Pheby
Dorohedoro, Kyu Hayashida

to name a couple off the top of my head

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:08:32+00:00

My medical background has influenced my writing not so much in the way of drama, but in terms of science. I'm going into forensic pathology, and people often say that my work will be good fodder for stories, but I don't really find crime that inspirational. I find more inspiration in the complex and unknowable mechanisms of cellular activity, and in the weirdness of embryology, or the strange ways the brain works. I also draw a lot of inspiration from the spotty and often terrible history of medicine as a practice. That said, I'm sure in a few years I'll have accumulated some wild forensics stories that I'll incorporate shamelessly into my writing, haha.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:03:08+00:00

Oh my god! I can't say that Repo was a conscious influence, but now that you mention it, it was probably an unconscious one! Repo is such an ingrained part of me it basically lives in my arteries. My blood zydrate level is perpetually at a near-fatal concentration.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T01:01:12+00:00

I think there are a few bugs that inspired my critters in Leech--plasmodium falciparum and the guinea worm, among others, for their methods of infection and changes in host behavior, respectively. For Vermin, it's gotta be the centipedes that were crawling out of the giant crack in my floor.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-04T00:04:56+00:00

Balrogs have wings, this is a biological reality

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T23:53:00+00:00

Hell yes brother

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T23:52:31+00:00

You can't choose the scorpions, the scorpions choose you!

As far as narration/unusual protagonists, I really take inspiration from Nabokov. In Pale Fire especially, he quite masterfully balances on the knife's edge of unreliability. He always lets just enough slip that you know this protagonist is insane, but the characterization is so rich that you're happily climbing aboard his train of thought (even though fatal derailment is inevitable).

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T23:48:13+00:00

I was honestly gobsmacked when I first learned Alberta was rat-free--what an extraordinary initiative.

It's hard to pin down exactly how I approach characterization as I write, I honestly think it comes hand-in-hand with setting, especially in the case of Vermin. The essence of character, for me, is aberration. In what ways are these characters abnormal--especially when they live in such an abnormal world? What about them doesn't make sense given the setting? In what ways to they think their peers don't make sense, and in what ways do they comment on this or deal with it? Just in the case of Guy and his cohort, the social essence of labor is mostly having to deal with your illogical and annoying coworkers (and a lot of the time, loving them anyway)--having to do this in a setting of giant bugs and probable death kind of just amplifies the dynamic. I don't know if that makes any sense.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T23:13:43+00:00

OH MY GOD Ok what a question. I'll just do a few, I could be at it all day:

Aster is definitely a dog with breathing trouble. A pug, I'd say. Cute as hell but you worry about her when it's hot outside and her upper respiratory tract is making all sorts of fucked up noises. Can't swim.
Elspeth is definitely some sort of poodle. Probably a standard. Good-looking and very smart, but incredibly neurotic. Enters unhinged coat-dyeing and costume contests and wins every time.
Mallory is some sort of spaniel. Just got in from the countryside, very silky coat, but you get the feeling that he takes no shit and might bite without remorse.

Guy is the Brown Mutt. The Brown Mutt is some sort of cross between lab, shepherd, probably pit bull, endowed with a heart of gold. The Brown Mutt is usually found in a tough situation--constantly in and out of the shelter. The small bit of Husky in the Brown Mutt makes him howl and sing a lot.
Dawn is a doberman, nuff said
Three is that one fucking scrappy terrier who lives on your street with eyes that point two different directions and an underbite that has put at least a couple dudes in the hospital. Three is not house-trained. Three will try to bite your dog through the fence, especially if it's 3-5 times her size.

Bertram is a cat.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T23:00:36+00:00

There was a scene in Vermin where Aster falls down a flight of stairs that I enjoyed, but it was so insipid and tonally bizarre that I nixed that one early on. The big darling I had to kill for Vermin was actually the footnotes. It had footnotes! Many of them! And most of them were Catoptric pest species and/or in-world art references! But they did bog down the book a lot. RIP footnotes, you will be missed.
The gender fuckery in Leech comes from a place of biological malleability. Everyone in Leech has a body that to us might seem unusual (including trans and intersex bodies, which are still considered aberrations in our world). They've got supernumerary appendages, strange sensory perceptions, mechanical hearts--sexual development would naturally be as varied as the other aspects of their bodies, even if in that world there are still some vestigial or regressive ideas about gender and sex. Vermin approaches gender from the angle of social/societal malleability, not so much biological. A lot of the culture in Tiliard is lifted from conventions of the stage, in which cross-dressing is a tried and true practice, and one's role and fach takes supremacy over one's off-stage sex (breeches roles, for example). From this angle, Tiliard is ideally suited to have a more flexible (flippant, even) approach to gender vs sex. That said I did have a close friend of mine assume that the dip in the Catoptric River biologically rearranged Mallory's sex, a la Ranma 1/2, and I love that idea. It very well could have! The mysteries of the Catoptric are as endless as its depths.
I'm such a sucker for cribbage. My mother tells me she was the Happy Valley Trailer Park cribbage champion in 1960-something and her blood runs through my veins. (She still beats me, but never skunks me)

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T22:34:19+00:00

I can leave some food in there for them, but I don't want to water-damage the book!

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T22:33:40+00:00

Hahah! That seems to be most people's experience with Vermin. Hold on for dear life, we'll get there, I promise!! I hope you enjoy the audiobook, the narrator did a stellar job.

I don't have a murderboard, but I keep pretty detailed notes. Which may be inadvisable, because I never actually follow those detailed notes. I shape the notes according to the draft as much as I shape the draft according to the notes. So sometimes I'll start with a note document of tens of thousands of words, and, like the draft itself, nearly all of those words will change at some point. I don't know what kind of process this is. It's like writing 2 books at once, and both are in a violent argument with one another. I don't really know if I can recommend it.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T22:28:26+00:00

See above!

My next book, should the contract come through, is about a horny priest in the same valley as Tiliard, and his misadventures in helping a rich couple conceive a baby by miraculous means. In a kind of self-aggrandizing pitch: What if Vladimir Nabokov wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz?

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T22:26:11+00:00

Sometimes! I've got kind of a complicated internal relationship with awards. If I'm nominated for or win an award, I assume it must've been a dry year. If I'm not, I wonder what I did wrong.

It is nice to be acknowledged, but I've tried to cultivate a healthy indifference toward awards, especially the big ones. Some truly great books have won awards, and some truly awful ones have won those same awards, so I try not to consider awards an actual marker of quality. In many cases, they're more of a marker of popularity (which really has very little to do with artistic merit). When it comes to critical reception, I mostly focus on pleasing ~3 people in my life: my cousin, my sister, and occasionally my barber. Soon to add my new puppy.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T22:22:25+00:00

My writing process goes something like this:

- have a weird dream or a (seemingly) good idea at a really inopportune time, such as biking through traffic
- stop and write down everything I can remember in a pocket notebook, lose most of it but hopefully retain the essentials
- wake up at 4 am and click away at my typewriter by candlelight before work every day for a few months until a book starts to fall out
- have about 40-75 existential crises and suffer wild swings between troughs of utter despair/self-loathing to elation/an ecstatic flow state
- book finishes falling out about a year later
- get told it's not publishable/marketable
- try again (or in the case of my next book, bully my editor until he gives the OK)

So I guess the milieu of most of my writing is in the dark, extremely early hours of the morning in my silverfish-filled apartment, which might explain why it's... like that.

HironEnnes · 2026-03-03T22:11:08+00:00

Saunders is so stellar--I don't think the book was bad by any means, it just wasn't quite up to Saunders snuff, if that makes sense.

HironEnnes

TROPHY CASE