[4] Kockroach is a re-imagining of Franz Kafka's 1915 novella the Metamorphosis:[5][1][2][6] instead of having human Gregor Samsa wake up and find that he has been transformed into an enormous insect, Kockroach begins with a cockroach waking up in a hotel room in New York City in the mid-1950s, and finding that he has been transformed into a human.

Since cockroaches are "awesome coping machines" which do not possess significant capacity for angst, despair, or introspection, "Jerry Blatta" (as he becomes known) quickly learns to walk on two legs instead of six, to recognize himself in a mirror, to dress and feed himself, to ward off predators by constantly showing his teeth, to play chess, and, Chauncey Gardiner-like,[2] to fake his way through conversations.

The Seattle Times described Kockroach as "Damon Runyon meets Kafka,"[7] while the San Francisco Chronicle compared it to Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.

[5] Kit Reed praised Lashner (as Knox)'s portrayal of the transformed cockroach, but criticized him for having anachronisms in the setting, saying that "(p)eriod details tend to slide around as though the author has done his homework, just not quite enough of it.

"[9] The New York Times similarly observed the presence of anachronisms, and found that Mite's voice "sounds more like Bugs Bunny than Bugsy Siegel", assessing that the story "feels like the basis for a fine B movie rather than a novel".