RaveThe Washington Post... luminous and beguiling ... The nine beasts are delightfully drawn ... melds the fable-like haze of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities with a heady drag of noir. The narrator, in her effort to humanize the beasts, turns their lives into romantic melodramas for her tales. Despite the restless shifts in tone, the style never feels disjointed, in large part due to Tiang’s tremendous, fine-drawn translation ... Yan is a deft and engaging storyteller, with a proclivity for dramatic revelations, often to a fault. Strange Beasts lacks the wit and control of her later writing. Yet, though each chapter follows a similar, repetitive structure — perhaps reflecting the book’s initial serialization —Yan’s rare versatility and inventiveness keeps the narrative continuously surprising ... At its best, Strange Beasts transfixes you like a vivid dream, offering glimpses of the waking world contorted into uncanny forms. Though it never becomes a neat allegory, beneath the fantastical elements is a blatant critique of anthropocentrism and state control, and a keen concern for the way power is wielded against the marginalized. The world of Strange Beasts is more familiar than it initially seems.
