Remarkably Bright Creatures

by Shelby Van Pelt

Genres: General, Mystery
Pages: 362
Rating:

Synopsis:

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who sees everything, but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors - until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late...

Although I found Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures in the SF/F section of Waterstones, I think people picking it up with that kind of perspective are quite likely to be disappointed. Sure, one of the protagonists is an octopus, who solves a long-standing mystery, but… it doesn’t really reckon with what that might mean, how an octopus might really think and communicate. Marcellus sounds like a human, and in many ways acts like one (the author being constrained mostly by the fact that the octopus doesn’t have a voice).

Really, it’s much more literary fiction, following a couple of main characters: the octopus, an old lady who lost her son mysteriously, and a deadbeat as he gets dumped and decides to try to find his unknown father, on the grounds he should be able to extort something out of him in order to fix his own shitty life.

It comes together fairly predictably, right down to the character who actually says something about “remarkably bright creatures”, and relies pretty heavily on coincidence. I was sort of curious about how it’d all turn out, but it just didn’t feel like my genre, or like it was really about the incredibly cool concept of an octopus solving a mystery.

In the end, a solid not-for-me.

Rating: 2/5