Review: How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub
Story title: How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub
Author: Phenderson Djèlí Clark
Link to story: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/
(Spoiler-free)
Ambition is what drives a man to ignore sane advice and attempt the unspeakable, just so one can eventually savour the tempting promise of success that is nothing but a hollow illusion. It is exactly ambition that pushed Trevor, our protagonist who was unsatisfied with the cards life has dealt to him, to engage in a crazy idea: raising a kraken at home. It started out smooth, an innocent creature, small, harmless, breaking free from its egg and entering a new world that is Trevor's bathtub. But krakens grow quickly. And they grow to great sizes. And Trevor finds himself dealing with something much more than his ambitious can swallow...
This was not the first story of Clark I have read. "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" was one explosive whirlpool of a story and I consider it to be one of my favourites. A plethora of creative elements but without any cheap cliches nor tricks; a story of many worlds done right. So needless to say, I read Clark's kraken story with high hopes...
...And it was not bad.
I cannot say it wields the same powerful swing as his previous work, but at the end, I did not find myself plagued by boredom as I had reading many other similar modern fiction. It is fun, imaginative, and the plot did go into a direction that tickled my brain in a way and made me smile and go, "oh, that's interesting". Was it groundbreaking? No. But I would not in a million worlds consider faulting it for being a lazy, sad, talent-less piece of writing only to satisfy the new mindless generation.
One thing that bothered me throughout reading it, was how Clark hinted on various elements on discrimination in his world-building. Trevor was a bully to his wife and made distasteful jokes about the possibility of a matriarchal society. Various races were considered inferior to humans and could only afford labour jobs, if lucky. Yet these characteristics were nothing more but gimmicks in Clark's universe for they only played a minor role in the story, if one even argues to be any. I cannot say whether it could have been done better though. After all, with a short story, your ammunition volume is strictly hindered and the range of ideas you can flesh out in detail is limited, so maybe what Clark did was the best anyone could have done. Still, I am a firm believer that someone has got to get their face sprayed with bullets once you present a machine gun hanging in the living room.
If someone asks me to recommend a modern short story, this would not come to my mind, but I could imagine it being a nice collection to some fantasy fiction anthology.