I will never kill another cockroach. Neither will anyone who reads Marc Estrin's brilliant debut novel about Gregor Samsa. And that's just the beginning of this book's audacious intentions.

Jumping off from Franz Kafka's famous novella, "Insect Dreams" describes an even stranger metamorphosis. In the original, poor Gregor, a salesman in Prague, found himself transformed one day into an enormous bug. In Estrin's continuation, that bug mutates into the savior of humanity.

The story opens as the fires of World War I begin licking the timbers of European despair. Anna Marie and three ex-boarders from the Samsa household deliver the carcass of a man-sized roach to a freak show in Vienna. Remarkably, he's still alive, though an apple protrudes from a wound in his back. In the weeks that follow, Gregor recovers: "He was a bit awkward, somewhat tentative in his gait, but vertically, he could function well at cocktail parties, or at meetings, seated in a chair."

Tiring quickly of the standard freak-show venue, Gregor begins giving advice - "The Advisor from the Early Carboniferous" - and then naturally moves into book reviewing and conducting seminars on issues of the day. In the smoldering embers of the war, Vienna is a hotbed of conversation about the meaning of such devastation, the nature of man, and the fate of civilization. One of the renowned participants in his seminar is the German writer Robert Musil, who sees in "Herr Cockroach" a being of incomplete metamorphosis who can "lead us back to a larval state from which we may rechart our course."

For Gregor, this is a heavy burden to consider. For us, of course, it's absurd to consider, but such is Estrin's genius that we're quickly caught up in the compelling quest of a human cockroach to raise mankind above its destructive instincts.

Unbeknownst to Gregor, he becomes the inspiration for a dance craze in America - something like the Charleston, but with three dancers (six legs). When adoring fans send him a ticket to the States, he can't imagine leaving his job and his freaky friends. But Wittgenstein, on a field trip with his grade-school students, advises him to flee the rising prejudice in Europe.

It's not easy for a six-foot cockroach to start over in a strange place, particularly with a German accent, but he gets a job as an elevator operator in a fancy New York hotel where he rubs elbows (or legs) with America's rich and famous. "A cockroach in New York City," the narrator exclaims, "a home as welcoming as Rome to the Pope!"

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