A Tale of Two 'Vermin'

So, I’ve got a special treat for you all today.  While I was clearing out some junk from the garage yesterday, I found a children's book I used to love titled Beetle Boy, a children’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Leafing through it, I found that it had its own type of horror regarding a sudden and dramatic transformation, that can be very interestingly compared to the original work.  Because it turns out, a kid’s book can be crammed full of high-octane nightmare fuel!   I guess kids really can handle more than we thought they could.

The two stories start off the same, with our main characters awakening one morning to find themselves transformed, but in the kid’s version, Gregory (ha) is explicitly a beetle, whereas Gregor is just some vaguely defined ‘vermin’.   Both our protagonists are disturbed by what has happened to them, but our two narratives begin to diverge at this point, and begin to make their statements regarding fear and ‘otherness’.   When Gregor is called to begin his day, his family immediately notices this change, and uniformly reacts with fear, anger and revulsion.  Gregor’s change is incredibly noticeable, and the world reacts with anger and violence, which is Kafka’s statement about fear and otherness in a nutshell. Gregory, on the other hand, scuttles downstairs to find his family totally unaware of his sudden change.   All his protestations and pleas for attention are met with bland platitudes and brushoffs, exposing that primal childhood fear and/or worry of being totally ignored.  No matter how much Gregory tries to prove something has changed, he is totally ignored by all the authority figures that are nominally meant to pay attention to him and his troubles.   

Beetle Boy creates a world driven by blind ignorance and inertia, in which things keep going on as usual because they have always gone on as usual, no matter the circumstances. It doesn’t matter that your child now has a coffee colored carapace and 50% more limbs than they had when you tucked them in the night before, all that matters is that he likes his sandwiches cut into triangles, and his little sister likes them cut into rectangles, and God help you if you mess them up again, and the world can continue spinning like it always has.  Gregory spends the entire story trying to get people to notice his new look, and using the surprising new advantages that being a child-sized beetle comes with.   The final scene of the story begins with Gregory’s family at last discovering what has happened to their son, but instead of flinging fruit at him and shouting, as what happens in Metamorphosis, the children’s book ends with the kid-friendly moral that ‘your parents will love you, no matter what’ and the story ends with our protagonist happily drifting off to sleep, secure in the love of his family.   The last image in the book is of a boy standing on his bed, excitedly greeting the new day, and the future it represents, which is weirdly evocative of the end of Kafka’s original work, only this version doesn’t have our protagonist dying alone and unloved, so it’s overall a much happier read.