The Meowmorphosis
Year: 2011
Author: Coleridge Cook and Franz Kafka
Length: 208 pages
The Quirk Classics have been an amusing experiment of mashing together a public domain classic and a vastly different genre to create something new. Most people know about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and my favorite from the set was definitely Android Karenina. The only one I hadn’t read yet was The Meowmorphosis, an adaptation that uses Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as its base. Unfortunately, the fundamental aspect of the Quirk Classics mashups doesn’t work with such a bizarre novella like The Metamorphosis.
Part of what makes the other books in this series click is how the original text remains mostly unchanged in a way that the addition of zombies or sea monsters enhances the narrative. With the primary change in this book being that the main character changes into an enormous fluffy kitten instead of a cockroach, it’s hard to keep most of the original text intact and still benefit from the amusing addition. That most of the Quirk Classics went in darker directions and this one tried to go lighter is perhaps the biggest reason it didn’t work as well as the others.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate when authors try to fuse these public domain works with new genres (like Steampunk Jane Eyre). It’s just that there still needs to be something new added to the original work to make it worth reading. If you’re just slightly changing the genre to something that would be feasible with the original book, it’s not really adding much. And if you’re basically doing a find-and-replace for all the instances of “cockroach” or “bug” into “kitten” or “cat,” it doesn’t feel as inspired as when English ladies are trained in the ninja arts.
The one failed Quirk Classic, I give The Meowmorphosis 2.0 stars out of 5.
