Veniss Underground

Veniss is a city built in layers, and the further down you go the less of it was designed by anyone. On the surface, Nicholas wants to be a Living Artist and cannot make it work, so he goes to Quin, the biotech engineer whose flesh-sculpted creations everybody uses and nobody asks about. The arrangement costs more than he was told.

His twin sister Nicola goes looking for him and finds the city's real machinery instead. When she vanishes in turn, her former lover Shadrach, who came up out of the lowest levels himself, goes back down after her, through districts of grafted meat and engineered servants toward whatever is running the place.

The debut novel of the author of Annihilation, and the first appearance of the New Weird register he would become known for: biotech body-horror written as a descent myth, three narrators shifting from first person to second to third as the city closes over them.