The Cockroach Hat by Terry Bisson
My rating: 4/5 cats
Sam Gregory woke up one morning and found, to his dismay, that he had turned into a big cockroach. “Oh, no,” he thought. He had some idea of what was happening because of the Kafka story. He hadn’t exactly read it, but he had heard all about it back when he was in college.
fun with surrealism! and metafiction! and…bananas! this is a super-weird, short, breathless piece that is kind of like listening to a child telling a story, all loose in form and block-printed with nouns and verbs, summarizing whole chunks of plot skimmingly to land and dwell on a very specific bit of minutiae. but it’s very funny, and very well done in terms of how consistently the big-picture adventures take a backseat to the trivial details. i imagine it’s hard to write a story shaped like this, while still engaging the reader, but he pulled it off, and even though i have found myself impatient with surrealist stories in the past, when it’s done right, it’s kind of a hoot.
quickie review for a quickie story!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2010/05/26/the-co…
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