The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The Amazing Maurice is a young adult novel set in Discworld featuring talking animals. It is also one of the bleakest and most horrifying books I’ve read recently, and that includes such gems as Charles Stross’s latest Laundry novel and Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire.

The book stars a community of rats given speech through magical garbage, their talking cat Maurice, and Keith, a boy. Under Maurice’s urging, they have a good gig: rats cause trouble, Keith pipes them away, Maurice handles the con, splits the cash three ways. No one gets hurt, except the government. When they arrive in the town of Bad Blintz, they discover that a pair of unethical rat-catchers have gotten there first, and are soaking the town while breeding their own rats in a horrific Darwinian experiment. It’s up to the rats to use their relatively newfound intelligence to find a way out of this, for Maurice to figure out whose side he’s on, and for Keith and Malicia (the mayor’s daughter, and a Strange Girl) to Have An Adventure.

Discworld has a dark streak in its humanism, and as I said, this book gets super-dark. This may be because other Discworld characters (notably Susan and Carrot) have the ability to bend the Narrative to their will; they seem to know the rules of the fiction universe that they live in. Malicia believes in the power of stories like a lot of young girls, but they don’t believe in her. Only Terry Pratchett would do horrible truths for children, and about 2/3rds of the way through the book, I was doubtful that anybody was going to make it out alive. Really surprising, in a series that I thought had no more surprises for me.