Enkii

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Review

Smells fishy, November 5, 2026

by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)

Related reviews: IF Comp 2026

The best thing about Enkii’s opening is the pacing. We start in medias res, having snuck into a facility that’s harming the eponymous fish, ready to blow the whole thing wide open – when suddenly a twist of fate leaves the protagonist trapped, reliant on a walkie-talkie to try to get help from someone, anyone, waiting and waiting for a signal. The shift from thriller-style cliffhanger to the tedium of actually having to sit there until the cliffhanger is resolved is very effective – but not as effective as the aha moment of realizing what it takes to make progress. Those details are spoilery, though, so bring on the blurry-text.

(Spoiler - click to show)Hi! Good to see you again! Well, I’ve already reviewed Enkii, of course, as part of my writeup on Under Loch. So you get two reviews for the price of one. It looks a little lame to just have a single short paragraph of spoiler-text, though, so it’s time for some padding. Maybe just lorem ipsum text, or is there something else we could talk about? Let’s see… Welp, I just swiveled my chair to look around my office to see if anything in there would spark inspiration, and I wound up staring at some of my bookshelves, so maybe that’s the world telling me the path of least resistance is to talk about some books. I’d never say no to that! So first thing on this shelf is Harvest of Sorrow, a scholarly study of the holodomor (the terror-famine inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviet Union) and related attempts by Stalin to quash any separate cultural or linguistic identity for the country. The book is notable for having been written in the mid-80s, when Western scholars didn’t have any access to Russian archives, so my understanding is that it was actually fairly groundbreaking. It’s fairly dry and downbeat, given the subject matter, and even more so than it was before given recent events, but looking at it always makes me smile because a decade or so ago an out-of-town colleague was crashing in my spare room for the night as saw that I had this book; she had a Masters in Russian Studies and told me she’d never heard of anyone not pursuing an advanced degree in that field having the book, much less reading it for fun, and man, when I tell you that basically nothing in my life has left me feeling more flattered, I think that says a lot – little of it good – about my basic character. Anyway, funnily enough skipping down a couple of spines we come to Deus Irae, by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny – yup, it’s the book from which I stole my forum screenname! I must have read it when I was twelve or thirteen; it’s only OK as such things go, a shaggy dog story abandoned by Dick when he realized it was going to be about Christianity, and he only cared about religion if there were aliens involved. Zelazny then picked up the ball and fleshed it out, but though the setup is entertainingly off – a collection of post-apocalyptic weirdos go on a pilgrimage in search of the hallowed weapons-designer who ushered in the nuclear winter – I remember the middle bits as a picaresque holding pattern, while the ending is rushed and left a bad taste in my mouth. The title is badass, though, so when I was a teenager I thought it was a cool thing to type in for my callsign in Wing Commander II, and once I got used to using it as an alias it just stuck. And here we are. What else do we have here… there’s a bunch of Wodehouse on the shelf, though that’s all my wife’s (if you’ve read my postmortem for Eleusinian Miseries, you’ll have seen my confession that I’ve actually read very little of his stuff myself, but my wife is a big fan so I’ve gotten a lot of it by osmosis). Some less-ambitious Ali Smith books, Hotel World and Public Library, which are well-written but mostly just remind me of how amazing How to Be Both was – either my favorite or second-favorite novel of the teens, depending on how I’m feeling about Wolf Hall on any given day. New England Bound, a book about slavery in colonial New England which blew my mind when I read it, since actually there was a reasonable amount of it in the early days, but they mostly enslaved indigenous people rather than importing Africans – in particular, that means that Tituba, an enslaved resident of Salem who was one of the first people to be accused of and brought to trial for witchcraft when the panic struck that town, was probably not Black, despite the popular depictions, but from the Caribbean or Peru. And a biography of John Donne wraps things up. Speaking of wrapping things up, this feels like a reasonable length of padding, so I think we can stop here. Thanks for letting me monologue! And if you haven’t already, for the love of God go read the Under Loch review.

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