Let me start with this - if you have any issues with parasites stay away from this book. But if you, like me, have a fascination for them (for me, it started with a documentary I watched as an innocent kid) then this could be a perfect book for you. The story is literally about two parasites fighting over who gets to be the most perfect parasite, with people going through all sorts of body horrors between the two. We're in the head of the hive-mind parasite that managed to expand in the human population, parading bodies of their hosts as doctors, pretty much destroying any competition in medical field making itself the only authority on medicine. It's focused on science and discovery and because it's inhuman and without empathy or sense of morale, it makes for very cold and calculating doctors, ready to experiment on people and whatnot, instiling a growing sense of horror in a reader stuck in its head and some visceraly horrific scenes (one in particular, the way it was written, managed to hit me really hard with the visual and the tragedy of it all). There's also dark humor in it all; our pov parasite is very arrogant and its interaction with others are amazingly hillarious. The setting is also distinctive post-apocalyptic world that looks and feel in line of gothic horror. I mentioned once I had a similar feeling to playing Gloom card game, like the family that our parasitic doctor is working for looks straight out of that game. The story has that same chaotic, bizarre and miserable feel to it, and just like that game, the family in the question is... not fine and it gets progressively worse.

Mostly, I loved that it's obvious that Hiron Ennes knows what they're talking about regarding to parasites and doctors. You can always tell when author tries to write a character that is supposedly an expert in a field author knows nothing about. This was not the case and I was not remotely surprised by what I found in their author bio.

My only complaint is that the ending was a bit too long. It had a perfect moment where it should've end with eventually epilogue to circle back to the beginning, but instead we had this long-ish scene that just... fizzle out with tension, and that's just a shame.

In the end, I also want to shout that you should read it in the form of audiobook because it's narrated by the amazing Abigail Thorn. She does such a great job with voice acting it made me: laugh out loud with her performance of our stuck-up parasite, chilled me to the core with the visceral scenes, and I really loved how she differentianed two important characters but I can't get into the details because spoilers.