I wonder what percentage of AHMM's readers got a few pages into this story and said "What the hell?" Maybe five percent? Ten?
I, on the other hand, eat this sort of thing up.
Unless you are in that undefined percentage, the title should give a good hint as to what you are in for. Havel, a police detective in present-day Prague is assigned to investigate the apparent murder by poisoning of a young man named Gregor Samsa. Except - surprise! - Gregor had somehow transformed into a giant cockroach.
This is sort of reverse steampunk, transforming a Victorian plot -- Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, of course -- into the modern era, and a modern genre, the police procedural. Weikart even offers something that Kafka had no interest in, an explanation for Samsa's transformation.
Of all the stories I have read so far this year, this one is probably the one I most wish I had written.
