‘That octopus book’ unfurls unusual reach
Sales still strong for ’22 release ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’
During the holiday sales rush in 2022, Beth Seufer Buss started getting an unusual request from customers at Bookmarks, the independent bookstore where she works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“It was always, ‘Do you have the book with the octopus?’ ” she said.
She knew exactly which book they meant: Shelby Van Pelt’s “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” a novel that features a cranky, mischievous octopus.
The surge in demand was unexpected because the novel had come out months earlier, in spring 2022. Even more surprising, sales continued to accelerate after the holidays, into winter and spring 2023, and have never died down. “The book with the octopus” was Bookmarks’ top-selling novel of 2023, and requests for it spiked again this holiday season.
The novel has sold
1.4 million copies, an impressive feat for a debut that features an ornery octopus narrator.
The unusual staying power of “Remarkably Bright Creatures” took its publisher, Ecco, by surprise. Typically, book sales are strongest in the weeks just after publication, when there is a blast of media attention and reviews, then taper off. But after a brief lull in summer 2022, sales for “Remarkably Bright Creatures” rebounded, and then snowballed, launching it back onto the bestseller lists in 2023. To date, Ecco has ordered 28 printings of the novel.
“It has all the hallmarks of an organic build,” said Kristen McLean, an industry analyst at Circana BookScan. “We’re back to good old-fashioned word-ofmouth recommendations, from a bookseller, from a friend.”
Van Pelt, a former financial consultant, first had the idea that morphed into the novel in 2013, when she took a fiction writing workshop at Emory University in Atlanta. One of the assignments was to write a short story from an unusual perspective, and she came up with an acerbic octopus who was bored and frustrated by his confinement in an aquarium. Her teacher pulled her aside and suggested she build something larger around the character, and she began writing vignettes about the octopus.
At first, she didn’t worry too much that she was taking a creative risk by having a highly intelligent octopus narrator and protagonist, because she didn’t think her work would ever get published. “I wasn’t thinking too hard about, is this salable?” she said, “because I never thought anybody would read it.”
She kept toying with the character and eventually saw the potential for a novel, but realized it would be difficult to sustain an entire book from an octopus’s perspective. She came up with Tova, a 70-year-old widow with a painful past who works as a cleaner at an aquarium. The story is set in a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest, where Van Pelt grew up; Tova is based on Van Pelt’s stoic Swedish grandmother.
Tova develops a bond with Marcellus, the aquarium’s resident giant Pacific octopus. Over the course of the narrative, Tova confides in Marcellus as she reflects on her past, tormented by her son’s disappearance decades ago, and frets about her uncertain future as an older woman living alone. As their connection grows, she helps Marcellus find some freedom, as he escapes from his tank each night to wander around the aquarium and feast on the inhabitants of other exhibits.
Van Pelt spent several years rewriting the first few chapters, until she and a writing partner made a pact to finish their books. She wrote the bulk of it in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, when she was home with her children, then 4 and 6.
In November 2020, she sent a query to several agents. One of them, Kristin Nelson, wrote back immediately. “My assistant reached out to me and said, ‘This query came in today, and it’s either brilliant or it’s bananas because there’s a talking octopus,’ ” Nelson recalled.
The first chapter opens from Marcellus’ perspective, as he rails against the tedium of his life in captivity, and Helen Atsma, Ecco’s publisher, was immediately won over. Ecco bought the novel in an auction, with a six-figure advance, and positioned it as one of the publisher’s big debuts of 2022.
The novel had a strong start that May, with robust orders from independent stores, Target and Barnes & Noble. It got a boost when Jenna Bush selected it for her “Read with Jenna” book club. It was an Indie Next List pick, a compilation of anticipated new books put out by independent bookstores, and it hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication. The attention was thrilling and nerve-wracking for Van Pelt, who had been a stayat-home mother and was unaccustomed to making public appearances.
Shortly after its release, the momentum died down. The novel fell off the Times list after a week, and sales mostly stagnated over the summer.
Months later, in the approach to the holidays, it landed on several “best of 2022” lists, and demand began to pick up again. It became a favorite among book clubs, and Van Pelt did events with hundreds of book clubs, bookstores and literary festivals.
Hardcover sales have been so strong that Ecco has put off issuing a paperback edition, which is now tentatively scheduled for winter 2025. Booksellers expect that “Remarkably Bright Creatures” will have another sales spike when the paperback is released and if a screen adaptation is made (a movie is in development with Anonymous Content and Clubhouse Pictures).
In the meantime, Van Pelt, who lives outside Chicago, has continued to give talks and meet with book clubs and readers. Often, when she makes a visit to a bookstore or library for an appearance, she is told that readers have been clamoring for “that octopus book.”
“I should have called it ‘that octopus book,’ ” Van Pelt said. “That would have been a better title.”