KOCKROACH

A frantic, fierce take on Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Kockroach wakes one day in a 1950s Times Square hotel transformed: bug to man. And he’s not thrilled, seeing the “sharp elegance” of his former “face” become something whose “short bristly hairs cover the bottom half, surrounding a thin white rictus, the mandibles bizarrely set horizontally and lined with ghastly white teeth.” It’s one of Knox’s better jokes to see the change as devolution. Soon, Kockroach brandishes an ugly new name, Jerry Blatta, and rises to reign as a gangster kingpin. Boosting him is Mighty Mite, pint-sized penny-ante hood, a Charlie Parker of slang: Here, he’s recalling his corduroy-clad, cheap shoe-shod boyhood self: “I was like a one-man band when I walked down the school hallway, run, squeak, scruff, squeak. Throw in Billie Holiday, I could have played at Minton’s.” Perpetually mourning the premature passing of his epileptic mother, Mite nurses a crush on Celia, a cute, crippled telephone operator and belle of the automat. Blatta’s no such softie: Pure id, he pounces on prostitutes (his mind reeling from insect-sex memories—a passage wherein Knox achieves entomological poetry) and then pimps them out. He’s a powerhouse, smacking rival thugs with his former feelers, and a nihilist philosopher: Despite pop songs, he can’t dig human love, but is convinced the two-legged run on two fuels—greed and fear. Yet he’s not without charm, strutting Broadway “like a jazz band throwing out a syncopated rhythm.” The plot has the memorable clarity of fable, but it’s the creepy-mythic atmospherics—imagine a hybrid of Ted Hughes’s Crow poems and pulp-noir film fare like the Candyman series—that make this one cook.

Surreal, standout debut fiction.