In the fictional modern industrialist Chinese city of Yong’an, an unnamed protagonist hangs out and drinks too much at the Dolphin Bar, lamenting her the loss of her former studies as a cryptozoologist, which she quit because of her professor. She's still fascinated with the strange beasts that live alongside humans and tracks down each breed in turn at the behest of her editor, chronicling her encounters and discoveries for newspaper publication.

Structured as a bestiary, each chapter focuses on one beast at a time. To modern eyes, the collection reads like a series of loosely connected, chronologically-ordered short stories. Typically, each chapter begin with a general description of the beast in question, followed by the narrator's anecdotal and often personal experiences, and ends with a reveal, sometimes a twist about what the beast is really like. But it's the protagonist that holds the book together, and as the stories proceed, her story gains weight as she finds clues to her own past.

Beasts walk among the humans, but most have not successfully intermingled into society, preferring to stay with their own kind. Some are so rare they've never been seen, but all are spectacles of human amusement. Female sorrowful beasts are beautiful creatures, so sought after by rich elites who pay the government large sums of money for a regulated marriage license. The short and ugly Impasse beasts happily work long hours and hard labor so they can afford to buy almost-rotten food, considering themselves lucky because they have enough to eat.

The prose is straightforward, and the dispassionate description of the fantastic beasts is always followed by the phrase, "other than that, they were just like human beings." The narrator's deceased mother imparts her wisdom often, sometimes multiple times each chapter, including, "My mother used to tell me, 'You can't be sure that beasts aren't people, or that people aren't just another type of beast'" or "My mother used to say: never cry, or your tears will water your sorrow and it'll grow."

The tone is quiet, dark, almost noir. The protagonist is a young and reckless soul, frequenting the same bar to get drunk where she's mostly left alone. Over the course of the book, she becomes more and more personally invested in her work. She's beat up in dark alleyways; she loses people; and she almost loses herself. But the book is also surreal and dreamlike, from the physical differences of the beasts—gills and scales and elongated necks—to the twists and turns of who is exploiting whom. It's all so unexpected, and I love reading something I can't predict.

All great scifi and fantasy uses genre to turn a lens back on ourselves, and this is a skillful exploration of complex ideas about identity and who we consider to be different from ourselves. But it's not a simple as you might think. Many of the beasts are violent or immoral, and it's not as clear cut whether the fear and ostracism is warranted. Even the noble beasts intentions are misunderstood or secretly horrifying, which forces the reader to evaluate the worst aspects of our own humanity.

Although I'm sure I'm missing a great deal of the subtleties of modern-day China, the critique also does not shy away from social inequality, environmental and biological destruction, economic disparities, and government control. And the public in the book has no sense of place or history, and their collective memory loses hold of recent atrocities.

Something about the collection seems unpolished or unfinished, including a few grammatical errors. Perhaps its the translation, or  perhaps the distant perspective or the lack of inner thoughts and character motivations. But even so, The Strange Beasts of China is something special, romantic and melancholy, disquieting and rebellious, that facilitates late night readings and lingering thoughts well past the epilogue.

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a new reading experience! Thanks to Netgalley and Melville House Publishing for a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

I do not usually enjoy fantasy books but this one was very good, though a little slow for me at the start by the end I was loving it.

Reading Yan Ge’s “Strange Beasts of China” takes place in the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, where humans live alongside various species of “beasts” - creatures who mostly resemble humans, yet in each case, there are quite a few characteristics both inside and out that set them completely apart. One such human is the narrator, a writer who devotes every chapter to a separate beast. However, this is more than just a field guild made as a creative exercise. With each chapter, a grander story progresses, one that sweeps up both our narrator and those in her orbit.

Reading this felt like both a new experience, yet also a familiar one. The setting, the assorted beasts, and characters are of course all of the author's making. Yet the total work produced similar feelings to those I have had stirred up while reading Gabriel García Márquez or Italo Cavino, where fantastical elements all work together to intrigue the reader yet also to call forth a variety of themes. Now to be perfectly honest, it was hard to decipher exactly what deeper messages the book was trying to get at. While it felt like some beasts and their interactions with the characters were meant to touch upon modern-day urban living, others definitely felt more tied to present-day China, and I could practically feel them going over my head. Still, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out the ideas underlying this unique magical realist setting and the various nearly-human creatures that lived amongst it.

5 stars *may change
TWS: death, self-harm, drugs
I cannot for the life of me believe that I'm giving a perfect score to an under-200 page short story collection. Believe me when I say that this is completely random for me. I went into this thinking it would be a 3 star, like most books I read are, and here I am now.
I thought about it for a bit, and the best comparison I can come up with for this book is Devilman Crybaby. Yes, the 2019 Netflix anime that was completely insane. That being said, just like the anime, this book isn't for everyone. I mean, I don't even like short story collections. There was just something about this that drew me in. It's short (Although I swear some stories felt so long) and completely, unapologetically brutal. I genuinely couldn't believe that certain decisions were made. This book actually made me *cry,* but I'm going to skip over that because it's embarrassing.
Each chapter centers around a specific beast that our unnamed protagonist encounters or writes about at the time. The stories are seemingly in chronological order as we follow a cast of recurring characters. Mostly. It's written in such a way that switches from the history of the creatures to a story and comes back with more history to tie it all together. It's full of all these philosophical ideas that I'm not nearly smart enough to consider and has some really fantastic thoughts I liked highlighting.
"Mutual destruction is the only way to survive. That's the circle of life. That's the truth."
Characters...characters...Yeah. The narrator is so relatable in her completely depressive way. She's a bit cynical, but she has all the right to be. It brings some interesting choices in her storytelling. Zhong Liang was completely loveable from the start. His sidekick nature was cute and I always appreciated him showing up. The beasts that came and went every chapter vary from relevance and importance. Some of them I didn't care for much, and others I completely felt for. There are some narratives that stick with you, and they had them.
I think the only gripe I'd have with this book is that the dialogue often lacks tags for the speakers and is spaced out a bit odd? Like, There'll be text in one paragraph with quotation marks (Actually, they used ' instead of " but for the purposes of simplicity in writing this I'll go with the latter) at the beginning and end to signify stopping. Yet the next paragraph would be the same character speaking in the same breath and it would lack quotation marks at the beginning. To be fair, you can pretty much tell from context clues who's speaking most of the time, and it didn't take away from my overall experience.
Again, this just landed with me. I know it probably won't with most people considering the fact that it's a collection of stories instead of one. I don't really know how this happened. There was something about the overall vibe that just had me hook, line, and sinker. I really did love this.