#People would induce hallucinatory states to VR online lmao

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I am very sorry. I just saw any leech stuff and freaked out because I just finished that book and O U G H

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Don't ever be sorry for freaking out about a good book. If I were still a bookseller I'd be slapping people across the face with it.

I really love me a narrative shift like this book pulls. AND it's on top of multiple layers of unreliable narrator? Boss move.

I really like the hive mind concept in general, and loved the way it was handled in A Fire Upon The Deep, if you care for crazy scifi. It was also very interesting in Ancillary Justice, which also has unwilling hosts/a parasitic quality.

If you want a recommendation for a book that mind fucks you over time in that same way, I recommend you read Sheri S. Tepper's book Grass, and then the second one Raising the Stones.

I often describe her way of writing as making me feel like a snake, properly charmed. She pulls the wool over your eyes. I frequently thought about Tepper's work while reading Leech. Things not being as they seem, the slow buildup of evidence that flies under the radar, the pov shift that leaves you scrambling...

I was still super surprised by the bold choice of having this Franco-English pigdin language. It felt very tailor made for a bilingual reader like myself, but idk how hostile that must have felt to a monolingual reader. The whole world slowly revealing itself to be far future instead of fantasy gothic alone... Genuinely this book felt like a puzzle at times, with lots of missing pieces.

Very very fun! Glad you liked it.