King Rat
This week I read King Rat, a “New Weird” novel by China Mieville. The novel is centered around a character named Saul, who is partially human partially rat. In a society of animal-human hybrids, Saul is the main suspect in his father's murder. Alas, Saul is swept into a journey that combines a murder mystery, coming of age story, fairytale elements and an overall sense of horror and strangeness that has a quality that made King Rat a rather interesting read. As a whole, there's a sense of fantasy to King Rat too which, to me, are all elements that can stand alone as their own genres. Because they are all meshed together in a way that made me frequently ask myself, "what am I even reading?". This question leads me to believe that "(new) weird" is defined as a genre made up of the elements of other genres. No one element outshone another, thus creating a type of novel I had never read before. I am not a fan of horror, but in the cont