Leech (book review)

Overall rating: 5 stars out of 5

Ohhhh my god this book was so good. I went in expecting it to be only alright, and it absolutely blew me away. Leech follows a haunted house style horror plot, where the main character is the thing haunting the house (a parasite)--and the house is the human bodies it inhabits. But, it also takes place in a literal house haunted by an unknown contagious disease, generational trauma, and how we understand who and what we are. I don't want to spoil too much of it, so I won't go too into detail, but the story unfolds as the parasite's world begins to unravel, from it being a pilot of the body it's inhabiting, to it's desperate struggle to survive in a body that wants it out. It's also unabashedly and casually queer, which pushed it to that 5/5 for me, personally. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in sci-fi, gothic lit, body horror, medical horror, and queer horror.