Novella Readathon #14: Werecockroach

This book has been sitting on my TBR mostly because I was curious what a book with this title would be about. I’ve seen lots of odd shapeshifter characters, but this one really takes the cake. I knew a few things about the book (such as this having aromantic and asexual representation), but not much else. I certainly did not expect this book to feature an alien’s arriving on Earth. I’m glad I read this book, but I don’t think I enjoyed it enough to pick up the sequel, which is coming out later this year.

Elevator Pitch:
After a fire at his old place, Rin is hunting down a new apartment. He’s broke, meaning his new spot is as cramped as you can get while still having your own room. His new roommates are unorthodox, and it later revealed that both can turn into cockroaches. Mix all of this in with an alien ship that has appeared over London, and Rin is in for a very unusual week.

What Worked for Me
I hadn’t read the official blurb or any real reviews for Werecockroach, so the whole alien invasion took me by surprise, especially since that was established  in the very first sentence. I actually kind of loved how the beginning of the book was focused on how normal life is going to be. Yes aliens arrived, and yes it features on the news. There is extreme bread stockpiling trip by one of Rin’s new roommates, and public transportation is suspended. However, TV shows still air, bosses are still assholes about you not coming in to work, and board game nights to get to know new flatmates must proceed. This marriage of  normalcy and absurdity is the type of writing that you only really see in self-published works, where there is freedom to explore stories that don’t have traditional plotlines. This tone shifts as the characters eventually venture out into a London  where almost all humans have been kidnapped by the aliens; even then, Werecockroach remains committed to avoiding traditional pacing and plot structures.

I also quite enjoyed our core cast of three characters. I don’t think they’re the most nuanced in the world, but fun. Rin is a sarcastic brat, and is trying to temper those urges a bit as he gets to know his new roommates. Pete is a conspiracy theorist, a delightful little stereotype that gets played for an appropriate amount of laughs, especially in the times where he feels vindicated by the otherworldly events happening. Sanjay is the everyperson, grappling with relationship problems and generally trying to keep the whole situation as normal as possible. I think I probably would have enjoyed this book more had they stayed in their apartment, with the book focusing on a more slice-of-life approach to what it’s like to live with two werecockroaches. The dynamic between the three is delightful, with the right balance of oddness, serious moments, and authentic interactions. We also see a focus on the working class that actually embraces their normal lives, instead of seeing them trying to ascend into the nobility (or bring down the nobility). They’re just people. As it stands, I had a bunch of fun with the opening third of the novel, which I thought was head and shoulders above the latter parts of the story.

What Didn’t Work for Me
I couldn’t shake the feeling that this book couldn’t figure out whether or not it wanted to be about intersectionality, or whether characters happened to have multiple marginalized identities. There was a decent page count where Rin’s agender, aromantic, and asexual identities were mentioned and discussed, and more focusing on his tinnitus and dyslexia. Most other characters were queer in some respect, many of which also had a disability. However, I didn’t feel like Blake ended up saying much that went deeper than ‘these people exist.’ That message is valuable in and of itself, but didn’t require the higher word count, especially when it felt fairly heavy handed for a more casual style of representation. I don’t want to say that Werecockroach was performative, because I strongly get the feeling that the author and story wanted to create deep and three dimensional characters. However, it evoked a similar feeling in me as driving past billboards while on the highway, rather than writing that felt lived-in and natural.

I think my feelings on this got magnified by a style of writing that became more and more twee. The aliens are obsessed with hats – one of which chose a traffic cone – and have an  unrelenting ‘goodness’ about them. What starts as something that feels a bit more grounded  morphs into a silly story about how crazy it is that humans are so horrible to each other. The aliens don’t understand racism or murder or … well anything bad. To convey how bad some exterminators (who hunt werecockroaches with flamethrowers) are, they have to use the word ‘unfashionable’ with the aliens. Ideas like violence and hatred simply do not compute with how aliens think. There’s a version of all these ideas that I could enjoy, but the overall effect was off putting to me, as I can be a bit averse to unrelenting positivity, especially when I feel like it’s getting laid on a bit thick.

Conclusion: The tone and vibes of this book didn’t quite work for me, but I enjoyed our cast of characters and a portrait of normalcy during an apocalypse