It feels wrong to rate a book this crazily original three stars outta five but part of its paradox is that it’s a very conventional novel despite its tardigrade-human hybrids, its meat-mangling cloned hotel maids, its subaqueous megastructures. Suddain’s hyperactive puppyish prose is so exuberant it’s hard to keep track of, and liable to bite your ankles, and though his plot is mercifully more or less linear it takes a fair bit of unkinking. It’s like Douglas Adams and Vonnegut on uppers making cutups out of old detective novels and Michelin guides and P.K. Dick manuscripts. The sanguinary set pieces are surpassingly well conceived — the lurching reanimation of the broom-impaled cleaning boy will live with me eternally. Fuck it, four stars — we need more of this kind of madness in the world.