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What it argues
Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus living in the Sowell Bay Aquarium. He observes the staff, the visitors, and the aquarium's systems with the kind of patient, lateral intelligence his species is documented to possess — and, in the novel, narrates chapters from his perspective with dry, precise wit. Tova Sullivan, the overnight cleaning woman, develops a relationship with him. She is seventy-something, recently widowed, methodical, and quietly devastated by the thirty-year-old disappearance of her son Erik. Cameron Cassmore, young and drifting, arrives in Sowell Bay looking for something he can't quite name. These three trajectories converge.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is easier to describe by what it isn't than what it is. It isn't coy about Marcellus's chapters — the octopus narration is played straight and earnestly, with genuine personality behind it. It isn't a mystery novel, though there is a missing person at its center. It isn't grief literature in the heavy, deliberate mode; the grief is present throughout but the book maintains an unlikely lightness that comes partly from Marcellus's perspective and partly from the warmth Shelby Van Pelt clearly feels for her characters.
What it gets right
- 1.
The octopus narrator is the novel's central formal innovation: chapters from Marcellus's perspective are written with genuine specificity about octopus cognition, then extended into personality and observation.
- 2.
Tova's grief for her missing son is the novel's emotional core, and Van Pelt is patient with it — thirty years of quiet devastation rendered with more restraint than sentimentality.
- 3.
The found-family structure, familiar from a lot of contemporary fiction, works here because the unlikely connection between Tova and the aquarium creatures feels earned rather than forced.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Shelby Van Pelt is an American author based in the Chicago suburbs. Remarkably Bright Creatures is her debut novel, published in 2022 after more than a decade of writing while raising her family. It became a major word-of-mouth success and a #1 New York Times bestseller. Van Pelt has cited her fascination with real octopus research as a starting point for the book's central character. She is working on subsequent fiction projects.
