Skip to main content

Urban Vermin

King Rat, a “New Weird” fantasy-horror novel by China Mieville, is quite the tale. The story is centered around a man who is half human, half rat that gets accused of killing his father. When King Rat comes to break the man - Saul - out of jail, Saul is introduced to a secret version of London, including monarch-based animal societies, a relentless pied piper, and a unique view of the city itself. With his superhuman abilities, or rather super-rat abilities, Saul usurps the throne from King Rat and helps the birds, rats, and spiders of London take down the malicious Piper.

The story is simultaneously familiar and original. There’s the typical coming-of-age plot used when introducing Saul to the world of the rats mixed with a detective mystery from the point of view of Mr. Crowley. Old folktales and fables are recycled into new renditions of themselves, such as Anansi the Spider and the Pied Piper. However, mixing the worlds of fantastical animal societies with urban, Jungle music obsessed London is unique and intriguing. There’s an odd balance created through that combination of fantasy and modern day, not to mention the added subgenres of horror and mystery bring an extra level of depth to the narrative. I feel that, even though this book belongs to the “New Weird” horror category, the horror acts as an undertone. Yes, the violence is graphic and gratuitous, but that’s it. No other typical horror aspects.

The genre “New Weird” is ill-defined, meaning that a wide variety of stories could fall under that label without being obviously horror. I felt that because of the fantasy elements, horror takes a backseat during the story, used to spice up battles rather than move the plot along. Overall, I really enjoyed reading King Rat! I’ve always loved fables, and seeing those show up in this story was a pleasant surprise. Well-written and entertaining, King Rat is a good type of new weird.

Comments

  1. Maude's Mad Monster MashOctober 10, 2017 at 3:22 PM

    You've really made me want to read this book! :) It sure sounds "weird" enough!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Bloodchild" Assessment

"Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler My first reaction to Octavia Butler’s   Bloodchild is a mix of interest and disgust. Using humans as a subservient society to the Tlic rather than having humans assert power over the aliens is a fresh twist on the usual sci-fi story. I’ve never read or watched a story that had humans as powerless as they are here- there’s no way for them to fight back, really. The human race has been completely taken over, and they’re generally okay with it, which is unsettling. It was an interesting read, that's for sure. Such a unique story gets the mind wondering about a world where humans aren't the superior species and don’t come out on top after an invasion, a concept far less explored in the sci-fi genre. The disgust I felt is, of course, for the humans’ role in the Tlics’ lives. Parasites are a big fear of mine personally, so reading a story where humans exist solely to be hosts to the worm-like children of the Tlic is absolutely terrif...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Johnny Mnemonic"

“Johnny Mnemonic,” by William Gibson, is a dystopian short story about a man named Johnny who acts as a living database, storing information for others. After a violent mix-up at a club, he and the girl who caused the death of his client run off and escape to Nighttown, where she and her partners take the information and end up battling in the ruinous town over the Floor. The storyline was a bit hard to follow, and I wasn’t always clear on what was happening or who the characters were. Parts of it felt random, and the chaotic vibe was difficult to unravel. Something that stuck with me, though, is that the scariest part of this short story wasn’t the blood or the augmented humans and dystopian ruins of society, but the empty shell that Johnny Mnemonic has made his mind. He collects information for others and spits it back out with no memory of what he said. Of course, at the end he decides to stop being a traveling flashdrive of a human being, but to live a life where your brain can...
Post a Comment
Read more

"The Fiction of Ideas," or How Changing One Part of the Human Race Changes The World

“The Fiction of Ideas” is an interesting topic; change one thing about the human race, and an entirely new world is created. Such a wide variety of stories can come from this subgenre, each taking wildly different paths. Two short stories I read that fall under this broad category are “The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard and “Come To Venus Melancholy” by Thomas M. Disch (I read a third story, “And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill,” that falls under this genre which is discussed in the previous blog post). “The Drowned Giant” is quite short, but in its few pages it tells a unique story. In this tale, we see what happens when a group of miniature humans find a drowned man washed upon the shore. The townspeople proceed to not only examine the giant body but crawl over it, kids using the nose as a rock to climb and the arms as stairs. The casualness with which the people treat the body is almost disconcerting, as if it’s just a large collection of rocks. Then, the scientists ...
Post a Comment
Read more