Of the many horror titles released in the run-up to Halloween, none had me more excited (and terrified) than the debut novel of writer, musician, and medical student Hiron Ennes. A surreal, frightening Gothic listen with shades of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, promising a visceral plunge into our deep-seated fears of parasites and body invasion? Sign. Me. Up. Almost as thrilling as itself, which stars the spooky narration of Abigail Thorn, Ennes graciously sat down to answer my many questions about their buzzy debut.
Audible: Congratulations on your debut novel! What does it feel like to publish this novel—did you always want to be a writer?
Hirron Ennes: I don't know if it was a matter of always wanting to be a writer but always being a writer. I have been attempting to write stories since before I could even write properly, and now that I can almost write properly, I can't seem to stop. It's an impulse, almost like breathing, and always has been. That said, being paid to write is something I never expected to happen, and honestly, I'm pretty stoked. Also terrified. Now that people are actually reading my stuff, I'm suffering from this weird, prolonged and distant kind of performance anxiety. Almost like I have, after all these years, forgotten how to breathe.
Leech is a wildly original story with a captivating Gothic setting and gorgeous prose, a delicious contrast with its revulsion-inducing medical descriptions, body horror, and chilling sci-fi premise. Can you talk about some of the influences behind Leech?
The narrative style of Leech was largely influenced by classic horror—Stoker, Shelley, et al. But the majority of the themes and medical science were influenced not by fiction but by the odd discoveries we've made about the microscopic world around us. Quorum sensing, or the emergent behavior of molds and bacteria, for example. How a cluster of mindless cells that would otherwise be easy to dismiss as primitive can achieve great feats of cellular architecture and function—or even band together to perform acts that resemble altruism. When I consider how the human body is basically that same collective on a more specialized scale, dependent on the billions of microbes that live on and inside it, it makes me question what it really means to call ourselves a single organism, or if the definition even matters. I find that both inspiring and existentially terrifying.
How do you think the Covid-19 pandemic affected the creation of
