The Meowmorphosis

Gregor Samsa wakes up as an adorable kitten, and Kafka's famously surreal story becomes even more brain breaking. Samsa's fate is especially poignant, and his family's treatment of him is all the more inhumane, now that he's cute and furry. Cook (a pseudonym for a popular fantasy author) creatively draws from Kafka's other works to pad the original short tale to novel length. With a biographical note alleging that Kafka was stalked all his life by sinister cats until he became obsessed with them, and a plot that weaves in a new narrative about a group of formerly human cats who run a nonsensical and arbitrary court, the book seems like an artifact from a peculiar and troubling alternate universe. Jane Austen mashup fans won't know what to do with this one, but it's highly recommended for connoisseurs of the bizarre. (May)