Review: Leech Girl Lives
Leech Girl Lives
Rick Claypool
307 pages
Space Boy Books (2017)
Read this if you like: Philip K. Dick, high-tech dystopias, creature horror
tl;dr summary: Woman on far-future fungus-infested Earth gets leeches for arms, uses them to save humanity.
If you’re reading reviews to decide whether you should read this book, let me save you some time: yes. This book is as infectious as the fungus wastelands it inhabits. If giant tardigrades, humanoid cyborgs with TV heads, or a heroine whose superpower is having parasitic leeches for arms pique you’re interest, then you’re going to get a kick out of Leech Girl Lives (and if those things don’t pique your interest, I think you’re on the wrong blog).
Allow me to set the scene a bit more fully. Leech Girl Lives opens on Margo Chicago as she's being transformed into the titular leech girl. Margo is from the domed-in Bublinaplex, and has no memory of how she ended up in the wilderness outside the dome or how to get back inside. For the next 150 or so pages, the narrative alternates between “Earlier” sections that show Margo's life as an Art Safety Inspector in the days leading up to the opening scene, and “Later” sections that continue the thread of Margo's efforts to get back to that life.
Surrounding all of this is an impeccably built world. The Bublinaplex is on a far-future earth where humans done fucked things up so badly that nothing but fungus can survive except in the controlled environment under the dome. Just about the only recognizable lifeform that survives are tardigrades, but they've been so mutated by radiation that they now grow to the size of buildings. The parasitic leeches that latch onto Margo's arms in the first scene are actually among the more beneficial of the new wildlife. They consume the limb they're on and sustain themselves on the victim's blood, but they also give their mealticket strength and a heightened will to live.
What I love most about this device is that it becomes both Margo's superpower and her Achilles heel. The leeches let her do things she couldn't before, like climb sheer surfaces or take down massive predators with her bare tentacles. But they're still other beings with minds of their own. They don't like heights, or cold, and won't do anything that they think would cause them or her harm. Sometimes the leeches act on instinct and cause some serious problems for Margo in the process. It's one of those devices that just adds so much—sometimes humor, sometimes tension, sometimes plot movement, depending on what the story needs in the moment.
And, despite the leech arms, Margo still feels like an everyman. She's nothing special before she gets the leeches. She works a boring white collar job and spends her free time crocheting. Her emotional arc is familiar, too: grieving the loss of her partner, Jasper. All of this gives Margo a relatability that serves as a very effective anchor as the reader learns about the Bublinaplex's world, a world that grows richer and more layered the deeper you get into the book.
That layering and gradual expansion of the world is maybe the most valuable takeaway from Leech Girl Lives, from a craft standpoint. Claypool is adept at choosing the exact right details to reveal to the reader at each stage of the narrative. Each new revelation twists the lens slightly, shifting the reader's view. This is a richly build world, complex and detailed from the flora and fauna down to the rules of society, but none of the details the reader gets about any of it feel extraneous. Anyone who writes these kinds of big-scope worlds for their stories I think can benefit from studying how Claypool uses worldbuilding to drive the plot by being selective about which details are revealed when.
Tonally, Leech Girl Lives occupies a delightfully genre-blurring space. There's a Pulp-ish-ness to the humor and language but with more of a literary realism from the characters and deeper themes that weave through it. I would still enjoy this book if it were just a fun story, but I appreciate that it pushes beyond that boundary. It's fairly rare to find a book that has something to say and is still this entertaining to read.
Some of the things I most want to gush about I also don't want to bring up because there are surprises in this book I don't want to spoil for the reader. I'll just wrap things up by saying Leech Girl Lives starts strong and only gets better, and it's a strong recommend whether you're looking for a bizarre dystopian world to escape into or a writer looking to study an impeccably built world.
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