Shelby Van Pelt wrote the octopus book ‘Bright Creatures,' and it keeps pulling her back

CHICAGO - Shelby Van Pelt lives in Wheaton on an unassuming street, the sort without a gate at the entrance, or fleets of Teslas charging in the driveways, or gaggles of dads jogging in packs. Her neighbors are elderly. Her subdivision was built largely in the 1960s and has not changed much since then. The driveways are fairly short, and at the top of hers, the garage door hangs open. A children's game is spread across the lawn. Nothing about this neighborhood screams blockbuster. You probably don't even recognize her name.

Yet Shelby Van Pelt has had the kind of runaway literary success that every debut novelist dreams about. She's had the kind of word-of-mouth success that seems to spring out of the Chicago area roughly once every decade - think of Audrey Niffenegger and "The Time Traveler's Wife" (2003), or perhaps Gillian Flynn and "Gone Girl" (2012).

It's the kind of success that means, regardless of whatever the future holds for Shelby Van Pelt, she should plan to be known as "the author of that octopus book" for a while.

That octopus book, "Remarkably Bright Creatures," her first novel, is the story of an elderly janitor who bonds with a giant Pacific octopus. It was published four years ago. Since then, it's been a fixture of the New York Times bestseller list, published in 38 countries, and sold more than four million copies in the United States alone. On May 8, the inevitable movie version, with Sally Field as the janitor, premieres on Netflix.

It seemed like a good time to stop by and ask what's next.

What's next, we learned, even four years on, is more octopus, if just slightly more octopus than before. Every time she gets started on a new book - curse you, literary gods - the old one returns to a bestseller list, gets selected for another One Book, One City community read (Mississippi, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, Nebraska) or another reading group somewhere asks her to speak to them. She doesn't like to say no. This new film, which is easygoing, sweet and made us tear up, probably won't help.

"It's been hard for me, I've found, to fully immerse myself in a new book when I still have one foot in this book," she said. "I feel like I need to grow a second brain to continually tend to ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures' while simultaneously creating something fresh."

Octopuses, incidentally, have nine brains.

But they haven't written many bestsellers.

Van Pelt writes in what she calls her "octopuses garden," a small converted storage room a couple of feet from the front door of her home. She works surrounded by octopuses gifted to her at book signings, crocheted octopuses, painted octopuses. Rubber tentacles rise out of a pen cup and gold-colored tentacles serve as a bookshelf. A framed New York Times bestseller list and Publisher's Weekly hangs above. Behind are rows of international editions of "Remarkably Bright Creatures" and the copy she carries to book events, now tattered after hundreds of appearances. There are small Dala horses, the traditional Swedish carved figurines that figure into "Remarkably Bright Creatures" (and her own Swedish background). There are the spines of bestsellers by Chicago authors, Jonathan Eig and Rebecca Makkai and George Saunders, as well as a row of novels by the Swedish author Fredrik Backman ("A Man Called Ove"), whose heartwarming stories about grief and community wouldn't be a bad model for Van Pelt.

Van Pelt, who is 45 and grew up in Tacoma, Washington, writes on a thin slab of lucite, just wide enough to hold a laptop (though "Creatures" was finished at the kitchen table). As small as the office is, she shares it with her husband, who has a much larger desk.

She hasn't done this lately, but for a while, anonymously, she would mail out short stories to literary journals and contests, the kind that don't pay much, just to see what the response would be. She was almost always rejected. She has a pseudonym-sounding name, but that's her actual name; pseudonyms are for those short stories she sends out. She does it because she's wondered about the way success feeds success, how the right name, recognized by the right people, can open doors that tend to stay closed.

She doesn't sound cynical, but probing and still new to this success thing.

She said, "Am I wondering if I am actually good? I don't know. But any book that has had success you have to chalk some of it to right place right time and a little luck. Not that I'm bad. I think I'm pretty good, but not the best writer in the world and ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures' was right place right time. It's funny because when I'm drafting something new now, I try not to think about the marketing piece of this - you don't want to just write what you assume someone wants. But there is a difference to releasing a new book without a name or reputation tied to it, where the work just stands on its own, right? There was marketing behind ("Remarkably Bright Creatures"), and there was the intrigue to this idea of a novel narrated by an octopus. The new book I'm writing will have some name recognition, it will have some readers who buy it regardless of how it is. There is a sense of ‘OK, I can do exactly what I want.' Meanwhile, the other half of my brain is thinking what reviews will say, what Goodreads will say, what people are going to ask me at a book talk. Honestly, if I could do it over, I'd already have a second book."

She worked for years as a litigation consultant, meaning she calculated what the financial damages might be in a lawsuit. She also sold running shoes for a time. Van Pelt and her husband, Andrew, who met as teenagers at a California college, moved around for a while, before settling in Wheaton, next door to his hometown of Geneva.

"Remarkably Bright Creatures" sprang from a prompt in a writing class while they were still in Atlanta. She was asked to write from an unusual perspective. She remembered this internet video she had seen about an octopus who escaped his aquarium. The feedback was good and she wondered if she should write a book. She added Tova to the narrative, a stoic Swedish woman, basing her loosely on her own grandmother, who was also tiny and stubborn and liked to keep herself busy long into old age. She did a lot of research on octopuses. "In my subconscious, I think I was avoiding myself (by choosing to this story). Except I also don't think of myself as a creative person, so the characters came from people I know." Van Pelt would occasionally stop to ask herself if this was OK - she could just dream up something, write a story and make this her job?

She could.

Her octopus was named Marcellus McSquiddles, an aging crank who notes his days of captivity in a Puget Sound aquarium as if on death row, but also recognizes the night janitor, Tova, is lonely and grieving. He thinks stuff like: "As a general rule, I like holes. A hole at the top of my tank gives me freedom. But I do not like the hole in her heart. She has only one, not three, like me. Tova's heart. I will do everything I can to help her fill it." To this, Van Pelt added a probable suicide, and a couple of recent deaths, a trio of women called the Knit-Wits, and a garage rocker searching for the father who left him. When she sent the manuscript to an agent, an assistant read it and wrote in the margin: "This is either bananas or brilliant."

That was six years ago, when Van Pelt was 40. She figures she'll be 47 or 48 by the time the next book is published. She wonders a lot about whether she did the right thing by being practical and going into litigation consulting after school - if not, she might be on her fifth book by now. On the other hand, right place, right time. If she had tried to write a novel when she was 24, it would have been "cringy," she said. Also, Sally Field might not be playing a thinly-veiled version of her grandmother now, and Alfred Molina might not be voicing an octopus she named Marcellus McSquiddles.

She didn't write the screenplay; she said early she wouldn't even know where to start.

Besides, there's a pressure now of following a grand slam in your first at bat with at least a solid double. "I have gone through a whole psychological process. My editor was involved, my agent was involved, we tried crunching the numbers on a new book deal, and I just want to scale it all back. I don't know if this can happen again. It was so beyond expected. There's an idea of constant growth, that the next thing needs to be even bigger. But I think it's OK, for someone in my situation, that the next thing is not bigger. I very much want to go back to a normal definition of what a successful book is."

The options now, though - right?

"To some extent," she said. "It's like when a band I love has a new album and it's something totally different - that can be difficult for a fan. On the other hand, think of the Beatles, Taylor Swift, proof that you can transform a sound without losing fans. I don't know where I will end up. I don't see my (writing) voice changing. But I also don't want to be the person who writes animal books. I doubt I'll be writing octopus novels in 20 years."

She paints a modest portrait of wild success.

Mainly what's changed is the everyday rhythm of her household, she said. Her husband is a stay-at-home dad now, meanwhile she works on a second novel and continues making appearances for the first. They also bought a Japanese message chair. It sits in the living room like a giant metal space egg, like some 1950s conception of the future.

"But really, after the book income started coming in, our primary splurge was travel. We pulled our two kids out of school for a semester and did a world-schooling thing. We went to New Zealand, Japan, Vietnam, Morocco, Egypt, Hong Kong, Turkey. And it all culminated with seeing Taylor Swift in Germany. That's not something we could have done in a previous life. My kids have never known anything else now. My daughter was 5 when I finished writing ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures' in 2020. And my son is younger and he doesn't know a world before all of this happened.

"But I think it's cool to model for them how unlikely this career is and that a lot of people try to do what I did and most of them don't make it but occasionally some do make it. I made it. So I guess take that writing class. There's probably a moral in there, I'm sure."

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This story was originally published May 5, 2026 at 1:03 AM.