I'm going to first try to discuss this book's vibes and themes, because I'm working myself up to how to talk about the plot without spoilers. The feeling of this book is a bit like Gormenghast, or perhaps, The Book of the New Sun, and then a soupcon of whoever we cite now instead of Lovecraft, and certain tales of men trapped on a ship in the arctic ice who watch their doom come as the sun fades.

Perhaps there is a little bit of The Left Hand of Darkness, but then aren't we all responding to LeGuin in whatever meagre way we can?

Anyway, that makes it all sound pretty grim, which parts of it are, but the book moves very quickly and is a wild read.

Spoilers follow:

This is the stuff that comes up in the first chapter; I will try to leave out later events, but it's hard to describe this book at all without the central conceit. The book is narrated by a/the parasite, a member of a being called the Institute, which has made for themself a home in humanity. They do this by infecting children who become its multiple bodies, as the world understands them, a society of doctors. The Institute's doctors are the only source of effective and sometimes miraculous medicine, rendering them indispensible to the rich and powerful.

The bodies are all in constant communication, until one of them is not. The institute sends another member to investigate why one of their bodies in an isolated village at the edge the habitable world went silent without warning.

The voice of the Institute is oddly charming; they are a little cowardly, a little curious, a little clumsy talking to people, and seem to genuinely like practising medicine for those who need it. Also they inhabit the body of a child who was unmade so they could live. They seem to feel vaguely guilty about this, as they justify it several times, and voice some regret, but. Well. A parasite has to live.

The other parasite introduced early is the aristocratic family in the castle which rules the frontier town. The Baron is there to extend the power of the capital to the mine upon which the capital depends; his family is there to extend his genes into the future. This arrangement appears to have made the entire family quite eccentric, not to say unwell.

The writing was very good when I noticed it, which I mostly didn't because I was too busy reading. (I was so pleased by the tight competence of the book's opening paragraph that I shared it on mastodon: fandom.ink/@Betty/114450135757619100) The world-building was the most Gene-Wolf-y part: the book teases you with references to things that you almost recognize, but never lets anything slot into familiar place. The language is French-y, the technology is half-familiar, half arcane, and the ecology is half alien, half hallucination.

The book does a thing about half-way through where it switches gears in a way that leaves your clutch on the high-way. Some reviewers didn't like it, but I enjoyed it. I can't promise how anyone else will take it. I can promise this is a weird book you probably won't feel like you've read before.

Reaching for Lovecraft as a comparison at the beginning makes me think that, as every horror in Lovecraft is ultimately a fear of contagion, the lurking horror of this book is that of parasitism; not of succumbing to it, but being the parasite. The book opens with a literal parasite, who is likable enough, but the reader is led through various social and economic parasitisms that are enacted in this world, and the way that parasitising mutilates both the parasite and the host.

It's worse for the host. The book isn't confused about that.

(I was about two-thirds of the way through this book when I went "wait a minute, it's all parasites!" because I'm quick on the uptake.) Various characters in the book vaguely regret that their exploitation of the environment, the people, and the bodies of those around them is harmful to those from whom they derive their living, but what can you do? The reader, who is maybe reading this story on a tablet manufactured using rare earth minerals mined under troubling circumstances may or may not choose to think about their relationship to these characters.

Although if this sounds like a bummer, this is more me than the book. I promise you can read it without getting up your own ass about it, I just failed to.