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I wasn't expecting to like this book anywhere near as much as I ended up doing! The story as told in the book is much more interesting than the limited image of it that's got in to popular culture, and this was my first encounter with the whole thing. It's so much more about deeply flawed Victor Frankenstein (TLDR: our reading group kept using the term "main character syndrome") than about the mad science process. And while the creature is far from likeable, his portrayal has genuine pathos, even though most of what we hear about him is secondhand through the recounting of someone who hates him.

There are several impressively strong resonances to the modern world, between the general lack of ethics in tech and the current wave of "AI" hype. And of course big self-centred men who think that extreme success in one sphere gives them licence to behave as badly as they like in others.

Between the cover and the scene descriptions the author had trailed on Mastodon, I was expecting this book to be mostly gore. What I actually found on reading is that it's mostly a story of a very relatable character suffering in the isolation of having to be twice as good and still never fitting in due to everyone else's racism. With some very hard-to-read descriptions of just how brutal the competition of a top ballet school is, and frankly easier-to-read interludes of supernatural gore, all of which serve the human story.

It's also beautifully written, with the protagonist's internal conflict carrying through, and a lot of confusion about other characters' relationships and motives that feels like the confusion I would be experiencing in the protagonist/narrator's shoes rather than any flaw in the telling.

As straight storytelling, the climactic scene is preposterous, but as a continuation of the emotional rollercoaster up to that point it works perfectly.

I wasn't expecting this book to be my kind of thing, and now I can't wait for Shea's next one.

So much to love about this book, how it weaves together unanswerable questions about consciousness and computation, together with a much more didactic message about humans' consumptive relationships with, well, everything including each other, and enough of a mystery story to keep the plot moving along. Also some great evocations of places (ahhh, multiple key scenes on Istanbul ferries), and of the ways peoples' reputations misrepresent their selves.

It's not a strongly character driven book - every character that is fleshed out seems to be a variant of "loner who wishes for connection" and largely a vehicle for the author's ideas - but there's enough depth to the characters to keep me reading. My one real criticism is that the ending felt a bit rushed. Not in the sort of too convenient, story-undermining way, but not quite satisfying either. It doesn't feel like a set up for a sequel, but I kind of want Nayler to write a few short stories filling out the characters a bit more and picking up some of the loose ends - perhaps something like Sofia Samatar did with The Winged Histories.