“The Works of Vermin is a triumph: a must-read for those of us who like our fantasy weird and unsettling and dismissive of boundaries—those of us, in other words, who love the New Weird. But, especially given the book’s thematic concerns with art and time, this raises the question: what are we to make of a novel written firmly within the mode of a movement that flourished—and died off?—two decades ago?”
“The Works of Vermin has all of the hallmarks of a classic of the New Weird: weird fiction set in a secondary fantasy world, boundary-shattering monsters, body horror, New Wave modernisms, a concern with political economies and work and alienation.”
“All of this takes place within the modernizing city of Tiliard, built on and within a gargantuan tree stump suspended over a mysterious river.”
“the maximalism of the tree is reflected in the book’s overwhelming sense of cacophony, a fanfare of decadence and constant references to in-world events, a relentlessly rococo affect from which character, theme, and world emerge”
“the oozing, deforming character of Ennes’s work: an approach horrified by both vacuum and “the harmony of linear geometry”, where the centerpiece of a work, not always apparent, blooms into “proliferating nuclei”, elements that ”contain their own expansive energy” and embody “art in motion, a pulsating art, an art that moves outward and away from the center, that somehow breaks through its own borders.””