Kraken: A Novel

China Mieville's "Kraken" (2010) is one of the most confounding, unique and intriguing books I've ever read. This story is a whirlwind of whacked out mystical conception, impious religious imagery all mashed against a pop cultural smorgasbord and leavened with the exotic spice of an uncommon police procedural.

A large preserved kraken simply disappears from the London's Natural History Museum - the container, the kraken everything. Police investigate to no apparent avail. Multiple cults portend the disappearance as a clear sign of the end of the world or worst. The line from science to fantasy (if one in fact ever existed) is definitely breached in this novel. The search for "THE KRAKEN" ramps up into a fevered freak show involving various gang types, cult leaders and mystical entities tugging at each others vitals to sheer delight of the readers.

On a personal note this is the first book I've read by China Mieville much to my chagrin. I plan to remedy this regrettable omission in the very near future

This book was a fun and absorbing read. The world feels alive and developed, and the characters are interesting. My biggest complaint is that we don't get to spend enough time with most of them. There are a variety of intriguing actions and characters, any of whom could have filled their own book, and they are all crammed into one. It feels like the author tried to fit too many good ideas into one book. I suppose it's not such a bad thing if you are left wanting more.

It was also a bit odd how neither of the main villains make much of a direct appearance in the story, which left me feeling a bit disengaged with them as antagonists.

I read this book twice in a row, and the first time it was a little hard to keep track of all that was going on between the number of characters and factions and the British slang.

This was my first book from this author, and I'm left wanting to read more by him. I'd also like to read more books in this setting that expand on some of the other characters involved, either prequels or sequels.

Overall, a good read that I would recommend to fantasy enthusiasts.

I knew nothing about China Mielville when I picked up this book from my library. I knew very little about the book, except that it was urban fantasy. I was pretty much blown away by it. I won't go over the plot, that's been done before. It's complicated, dizzying, sometimes very confusing. I'm American, and sometimes had minor difficulty understanding the British slang, but I got through it. I was quite glad that I had borrowed this using my kindle, because I was looking up words fairly regularly in the provided dictionary, and I'm not exactly illiterate, I have a graduate degree. I DO know a fair amount about squid, since my degree happens to be in oceanography, and I share a deep love and respect for these enigmatic animals. I could relate to the krakenists, though not to that extreme. The book is long, but I never once lost interest, and often put aside chores that really needed to get done in order to keep reading. I became deeply attached to multiple characters, including people who weren't even people (or even corporeal). There were many plot twists, and even when I wasn't quite sure what the plot actually was, I totally enjoyed the ride. It was frenzied, fascinating, frightening, funny, and sometimes totally gut-wrenching. I haven't enjoyed a book this much since "American Gods" by Gaiman.

The word “inventive” describes China Miéville’s Kraken the way “okay-looking” describes Halle Berry or Charlize Theron. Mr. Miéville turns London into a living creature whose viscera can be read, and every character within it has some magical power or other (“knack”), including the cops. The inventions continue and continue: once the dead giant squid is beamed out of the science museum, tank and all, the action ratchets ever upward, leading to talking tattoos, a London embassy belonging to and occupied by the sea, a haruspex who reads London’s future when part of its pavement is dug up (and the city bleeds), and much, much more.

We view these strange events through the eyes of Billy Harrow, a curator at the museum where the giant squid (the “kraken”) had been on display. He finds himself allied to Dane, one of the true believers of the kraken cult. While hunting down the missing animal (one god among a panoply in this wild premise), they snoop for clues, run for their lives, gain powers, and interact with all manner of creative peril. At length, all understand that the end of the world threatens, and Billy has to try to save the day.

This is truly a tour de force of invention by Miéville, that most inventive of novelists. This particular alternate universe features powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men – and everyone has them. The interest comes from the utterly endless variety the author has conjured up, and I’ll tell you, I was exhausted by it at the end. The breathless climax is a rewarding bit, consistently far-fetched and outré as all that has gone before. This is a highly ambitious piece, exceeding 500 pages, and never once are you allowed to catch your breath. Mr. Miéville charges through it all, and keeps us following along, wondering what impossible thing will happen next, and how it will be accomplished. Charge in, and get ready to have your mind stretched.

Brief summary and review.

This is a very difficult book to summarize because it is so utterly imaginative and almost dreamlike.

At the very start we are introduced to our main protagonist/hero, a young man named Billy Harrow. He is giving a tour at the London Natural History Museum and is about to wow the crowd with the giant squid exhibit but instead he is met with a surprise - the squid and the tank it came in are gone. It makes no sense logically and Billy cannot figure out what happened.

And that's sort of when the logic and world we know of disappear and we enter the imagination of China Mieville.

In the many pages that follow we are introduced to a series of bizarre and sometimes magical creatures as Billy and a man named Dane - who is part of a religion that worships squids - are on a mission to save London from an impending apocalypse. Billy finds out that the city of London is teeming with magic and mayhem and he must help prevent the end of the world - as different gods and powers compete for their interests.

This is an amazing book on many levels and I read it in two long sessions. The author is not only able to give us a page-turning thriller, but he manages to make us care a lot about the very human characters that inhabit the story. And did I mention that it's funny? Laugh out loud funny at times.

What I do want to add though is that this book is very dense and at times you can find yourself feeling a little dazed as various religious beliefs and cultures are mashed together. For example, from the latter part of the book:

"Jesus Buddhists," Dane said. "Nasty." Dharmapalite supremacists, worshippers of Christos Siddhartha, amalgamed Jesus and Buddha of very particular shapes into one saviour, accentuating brutal identitarianism, a martial syncrex. Billy could hear a rhythm, a little chant as the figures came.

And no, no typos there. So the reading can twist your brain a bit in circles but I still enjoyed this book quite a bit and I really loved the ending.

Recommended.

China Miéville burst on the scene with the wonderful "Perdido Street Station" in 2002, and though the next two in the series were quite good, they were variations on the same theme. And then the horde of imitators that followed in Miéville's footsteps soured me on the whole steampunk enterprise, and I wound up finding excuses to not read his latest works.

"Kraken" (Del Rey, $26, 528 pages), in fact, languished on my to-read bookshelf for some time until I finally gave in and decided I should really try to keep up with what the talented Miéville is up to.

And that was a fortunate choice. On the surface, "Kraken" is right in the pocket of the trendy urban fantasies, in which a world full of magic and strange beasts lurks just below the surface of ordinary reality. Here, Miéville uses the theft of a tank holding a preserved giant squid as the trigger point, and what follows are a series of magical adventures as the protagonists do their best to save the world from Armageddon.

But Miéville is after bigger fish, and "Kraken" is, no mistake, a literary work. The hint is in the subtitle, "An Anatomy," because Miéville is exploring the gap between the prosaic squid and the mythic Kraken, between the mundane ground of everyday life and the sacred. What precisely turns a fish into a god? What is the anatomy of a legend? And how do gods manifest themselves in our world?

Miéville digs deep, deeper than his very professional writing style would suggest, as he explores the powers and ways of gods, religions and human beings, and how we shield ourselves from forces we both desire and fear.

All that said, however, one of the most surprising things about "Kraken" is its relatively light tone. Miéville's first three books were heavy meals, but "Kraken" is leavened with humor, and it makes it more digestible, even freighted with his weighty concerns - and helps it rank as Miéville's best work since "Perdido Street Station."

I think Chine Mieville must be the most creative writer alive today. Each of his books is completely unique. Most writers seem to have a theme they keep coming back to again and again. Even if the characters and plots are different, their books seem to have as many similarities as differences. That doesn't mean they don't create compelling fiction, it just means they have something they do well, and keep coming back to it.

Not Mieville. The only thing his book have in common is how different they are. From each other, and from anyone else. Although Kraken has, perhaps, some similarity to an extremely popular series of books from another British author. Think Harry Potter without the bratty kids and smarmy, do-gooder teachers. And Rowling writing the story while on LSD.

This book starts in ordinary, present day London and, like Harry Potter, rapidly segues into a world of fantasy. Rapid, as in being hit by a bus going 60 mph and catapulted into a parallel world. Forget everything you though you knew about how the world works.

Mieville's works can be challenging reads, however. He makes up words, which you figure out the meaning of as you go along. And he doesn't start with pages of expository material: he plunks you down right in the middle of things, and you discover the world around you just as you would if you had suddenly woken up in it, not knowing where you were. In the end, it's worth the effort.

China really is my favorite author. I haven't read everything he's written (he writes faster than I read) but just "Perdido Street Station" and "Iron Council" are enough to promote him to God-like status. Kraken showed some of that greatness - Goss and Subby were great, Wati was great, the Londonmancers were cool, the final revealed plot was cool and not easily guessable, all the cults, the magic mp3 players was funny. But for some reason it all didn't really gel for me.

I can't really say what I didn't like about it. Maybe I expected too much, got my hopes up. I did get lost in a lot of the British jargon. Collingsworth left me confused about 80% of the time. I guess I didn't really like the main character. He reminded me of the main character in "Neverwhere" whom I didn't care for at all. I'd much rather have an asskicker like Dane be the main character instead of a reluctant bungler. That usually gives a completely different tone (a tone I like more).

So I would probably give it 3.5 stars because of all the cool ideas and if it sounds like your kind of thing I would definitely recommend reading it. Just didn't blow my mind like his other stuff.

A pickled and jarred giant squid has been stolen from the Natural History Museum of London and so begins the wild, tangent-ridden, and utterly delectable Kraken. Seers of London are predicting a fiery end of the world and to avert this the squid must be rescued. Gods of all stripes make appearances while the local police just muck everything up.

Kraken is quite a divergence from Mieville's last effort The City & The City, which was more of a somber and masterfully plotted police procedural. Word on the street is Mieville wrote both at the same time, which boggles the mind a little given how each feel like they weren't written on the same world let alone the same Universe. Kraken is a mad mix of China Mieville at his most weird with a pinch of Alan Moore on his a normal daily dose of acid with a healthy influence of Lovecraft to boot.

Kraken evokes the feel of a caper as the main characters are eluding many while in search of the missing squid and people responsibility for its disappearance. Given what I expect from Mieville nowadays I was actually quite bored for the first 70 pages and then all of a sudden Mieville brings the Weird in force and never lets up from there on introducing grotesqueries, out-there gods, wild concepts, and an inordinate amount of religious fanatics to the fray. Oh, and there are phasers! Can't forget the phasers. And yes they make sense as much as anything does in this story.

In Kraken nothing is true and everything is pure fact. Don't ponder that thought too much or you'll get lost in it. Mieville wants to create a sense of discomfort and surrealism from his readers, but with a bite of humor and satire about religion, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy in general. He also does cooler things with origami than even the best master out there. Kraken often reads as Mieville's bedside dream diary with constant apocalypses and flights of fancy taking off to dark, weird corners to bring his vision of London to light.

Everything boils to a fever pitch that doesn't disappoint, but will still leave you scratching your head weeks later wondering how the hell did Mieville pull that off? Kraken is Mieville's most accessible and fun adult work to-date even if it is a mess, but what a beautiful mess it is to behold. He wants us to wonder: Where the heck is this going? Then he'll change his mind and bring us along for the ride. The get is that he more than succeeds on that front. Mieville is still a master of his craft, he just melts that craft to fit whatever fiendish mold his mind comes up with. Man, now I feel like some calamari.

Kraken is China Mieville kicking back and letting all the weirdness in his brain and his love of the city of London pour out onto the page. It's urban fantasy turned sideways.

Um, plot: First the giant squid Billy Harrow helped preserve at the Museum of Natural History goes missing, tank and all. Then the police come knocking, only they're not the police, they're some sort of special cult task force. They think a squid cult might have taken the squid. Or any cult, really, as London apparently has a seamy underside of cults/criminal enterprises which worship pretty much anything you can worship, and some things you can't.

Things really heat up when Billy is attacked by a fat man who belches smoke and eats people and his silent, well-dressed boy sidekick (Goss and Subby, instantly catapulting into the ranks of classic fictional villains). Then Billy is kidnapped and dragged before a criminal mastermind who is actually a tattoo on someone's back. THEN things start getting weird.

See, every good cult has its end-of-the-world scenario, but one of those apocolyptae is really about to happen and nobody is sure whose apocalypse it is. So then the cults and god-thingies are battling it out to have the One True End of the World. Meanwhile, Billy Harrow is on the lam with an excommunicated squid-worshipper and the cult squad is trying to figure out what the heck is turning their city inside out and upside down.

That's the plot, more or less. It's pretty fast-paced, full of breathless escapes and monsters and bounty-hunters; but really, this is an idea book, with every mind-bending figment of Mieville's imagination getting crammed onto the page. These ideas are always interesting, sometimes funny, but often hard to follow. Not helping is the intentionally broken and backwards style of prose the book is written in. It's like Yoda-meets-post-apocalyptic-London-slang, at least at times. Parsing densely weird sentences to make sense of the densely weird plot is what what keeps me from dealing out the ultimate fifth star for this book.

But if you like Mieville or if you like monsters and mayhem and if you have a little bit of patience for puzzling out the twisty prose, you'll probably enjoy the heck out of this book.

This book is about 300 pages too long. Nothing relevant happens over and over. I kept waiting for everything to tie together in a shining ah-ha moment... that moment never comes. The writing itself is a struggle, I'm wondering if the author was paid by the word. "China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read" It is not funny (I didn't even crack a smile I think), certainly isn't scary in any way, but it is definitely strange, though not in a good way. This is my first and last China Mieville book.

I found this fantastical romp enjoyable for its imagination and inventiveness but problematic for two reasons: it was hard to follow and the main character, Billy, lacked agency.

For me, the confusing story line was the biggest detractor. Multiple factions kept popping up throughout the novel, and the time was not always devoted to truly understand the various powers and motivations of these dark forces. Occasionally, important plot points transpired with such speed and lack of explanation that I wasn’t even sure what had happened. (I listened to the audiobook, so no thumbing back for understanding for me).
Miéville nearly anthropomorphizes London, a tact which I liked for the most part. Yet it began to grow a bit tiresome because the descriptions remained too frequently in tell mode, failing to give me a visceral sense of the sentience of the city.

For me, Billy was problematic as a main character. He just seemed a victim of circumstances for much of the book, and I didn’t know why his goal, find the squid, was particularly important to him. Billy began to show more initiative after he goes through a trope-filled training regimen that felt lifted from a Hero’s Journey plot check list.

On a positive note, I especially enjoyed Miéville’s creativity in crafting a kraken-centric language, e.g. “squid pro quo,” for his lunatic Krakenists. Also, the villain who appeared in the form of a tattoo painted onto an unwilling host was brilliant. Finally, I loved the feuding dooms-dayers who couldn’t agree on the nature of the imminent apocalypse. Lots of brain candy here.

Ultimately, however, the story gets bogged down in a plot reminiscent of a squid: many tentacles, arching in frenzied directions, presumably united by some core but shrouded in an inky cloud.

Four starts because it's a bit frenetic - it seems like China is trying to compete in print with an action movie, switching from one crazier-than-the-next scene to another in the blink of a chapter. I'd have preferred a few moments to dig in to the characters and ambiance, rather than the tagline shorthand he uses here, expecting us to just keep up. Not that it isn't entertaining - it is - but, like the last Avengers' film, I found the constant switch-ups annoying and irrelevant over time, and actually found myself scanning rather then reading at times. Shocking, for a Mieville. I have to admit I prefer his earlier works, which moved at a more breathable pace.

A preserved specimen of a giant sea squid, also known as the kraken, suddenly disappears, tank and all, from a London Natural History Museum. There is no way the tank could have been removed unnoticed. Yes, this is the story of a squidnapping!

That should give you a big clue about the nature of this novel: it is a seemingly tongue-in-cheek blend of a Dashiell Hammett-style detective novel (with red herrings and much random bloodshed), a Harry Potter-style alternate magical sub-culture (with a struggle to save the world from a dire consequence), and Alice in Wonderland (with ordinary people suddenly thrown into a somewhat whimsical, illogical world).

Museum curator Billy Harrow (some echoes of Billy Pilgrim here) is hijacked into the search, accompanied by Dane, a member of a cult which worships the kraken, and Wati, a disembodied soul who can only speak when he enters a statue or human figurine. (There is much referencing to Star Trek here, including the fact that Wati speaks much of the time through an action-figure of Captain Kirk.) Also searching are a trio of London detectives, including the foul-mouthed Colleywood, who seems to be modeled upon Amy Winehouse. Competing with them to find the kraken is Tattoo, a crime boss of the magical underworld, whose essence is imprisoned in a tattoo on the back of a hapless captive.

Other participants include such Alice-like characters as the knuckleheads, who have giant fists in place of heads; witch and wizard familiars, such as cats and birds, who are on strike; and gunfarmers, who "grow" guns. And that's not all.

This is grand romp through a hodge-podge of genres and cultural references, and it was much fun to read for the first 250 pages. Then it got a little old and too much piled up, but the need to know the solution to the mystery kept me reading for the next 250.It was just a little too much and went on way too long.

I would recommend this book to people who like to read really weird stuff!

Kraken follows a fairly predictable storyline: A giant squid carcass that could possibly be the body of a god disappears from a museum and there is a mystery involving how and why the Kraken was stolen. The how becomes apparent very early on: by magic (big surprise). The why is simply to jump-start the apocalypse...which was very disappointing because I was hoping for a more interesting plot. Sure, the magical side of London is interesting, but Mieville obscures this with vague esoteric references and vocabulary that jolted me out of the story every time I encountered it. I consider myself a Mieville fan, and I have read all his Bas-Lag novels multiple times, but Kraken was a chaotic mess. The book is overlong and boring to the point where I put it down for several months, only coming back to it because of a sliver of hope that it might redeem itself somewhere along the line. Being a Mieville fan I simply refused to see what was right in front of my eyes until my patience ran out - that this is a very bad book by a great writer.

Classic Weird Pulp occultism meets modern British gangsters in a convoluted mystery/caper of apocalyptic proportions. The plot is insanely complex & action-packed, and kept me guessing right up to the end. Imagine "Call of Cthulhu" mixed with "Snatch." If you like Lovecraft's stories and Guy Ritchie's movies .. if you think "Cast a Deadly Spell" is the only truly watchable screen rendition of the Cthulhu mythos, then this book will push all your buttons. It pushed mine, HARD. It's got spellcasting cops, quasi-real crime lords, man/machine punks, mysterious gods and angels, portable souls, and a barrage of insane magickal invention. Mieville has a keen grasp of magical logic. The book is full of startling ideas, casually tossed out - things I would never have thought of, but upon reading them I go "Yeah, the way that works makes complete sense." A wizard in his own right, Mieville makes the English language do delightful tricks. The whole thing pops with energy and sardonic humor. It's not quite a parody or a "send-up" of the Weird Tales genre (more of a tribute) but this novel obviously does not take itself too seriously. Which is not to say there isn't palpable menace. There's suspense and a nice bit of horror, but I spent most of my time with this book cackling, grinning like a fool, and turning pages to see what would happen next. The ending was a bit .. off .. vaguely unsatisfying, but that may just be a symptom of my disappointment that the book was over. I wanted more. It's been years since I had so much FUN reading a book. There were times I was literally jumping out of my seat and yelling "YES THIS IS BLOODY FANTASTIC!!" and that has to count for something. I'm giving five stars not because the book was perfect but because it entertained me like I haven't been entertained in a long time. Superb.

A preserved specimen of a giant sea squid, also known as the kraken, suddenly disappears, tank and all, from a London Natural History Museum. There is no way the tank could have been removed unnoticed. Yes, this is the story of a squidnapping!

That should give you a big clue about the nature of this novel: it is a seemingly tongue-in-cheek blend of a Dashiell Hammett-style detective novel (with red herrings and much random bloodshed), a Harry Potter-style alternate magical sub-culture (with a struggle to save the world from a dire consequence), and Alice in Wonderland (with ordinary people suddenly thrown into a somewhat whimsical, illogical world).

Museum curator Billy Harrow (some echoes of Billy Pilgrim here) is hijacked into the search, accompanied by Dane, a member of a cult which worships the kraken, and Wati, a disembodied soul who can only speak when he enters a statue or human figurine. (There is much referencing to Star Trek here, including the fact that Wati speaks much of the time through an action-figure of Captain Kirk.) Also searching are a trio of London detectives, including the foul-mouthed Colleywood, who seems to be modeled upon Amy Winehouse. Competing with them to find the kraken is Tattoo, a crime boss of the magical underworld, whose essence is imprisoned in a tattoo on the back of a hapless captive.

Other participants include such Alice-like characters as the knuckleheads, who have giant fists in place of heads; witch and wizard familiars, such as cats and birds, who are on strike; and gunfarmers, who "grow" guns. And that's not all.

This is grand romp through a hodge-podge of genres and cultural references, and it was much fun to read for the first 250 pages. Then it got a little old and too much piled up, but the need to know the solution to the mystery kept me reading for the next 250.It was just a little too much and went on way too long.

I would recommend this book to people who like to read really weird stuff!

Kraken follows a fairly predictable storyline: A giant squid carcass that could possibly be the body of a god disappears from a museum and there is a mystery involving how and why the Kraken was stolen. The how becomes apparent very early on: by magic (big surprise). The why is simply to jump-start the apocalypse...which was very disappointing because I was hoping for a more interesting plot. Sure, the magical side of London is interesting, but Mieville obscures this with vague esoteric references and vocabulary that jolted me out of the story every time I encountered it. I consider myself a Mieville fan, and I have read all his Bas-Lag novels multiple times, but Kraken was a chaotic mess. The book is overlong and boring to the point where I put it down for several months, only coming back to it because of a sliver of hope that it might redeem itself somewhere along the line. Being a Mieville fan I simply refused to see what was right in front of my eyes until my patience ran out - that this is a very bad book by a great writer.

Classic Weird Pulp occultism meets modern British gangsters in a convoluted mystery/caper of apocalyptic proportions. The plot is insanely complex & action-packed, and kept me guessing right up to the end. Imagine "Call of Cthulhu" mixed with "Snatch." If you like Lovecraft's stories and Guy Ritchie's movies .. if you think "Cast a Deadly Spell" is the only truly watchable screen rendition of the Cthulhu mythos, then this book will push all your buttons. It pushed mine, HARD. It's got spellcasting cops, quasi-real crime lords, man/machine punks, mysterious gods and angels, portable souls, and a barrage of insane magickal invention. Mieville has a keen grasp of magical logic. The book is full of startling ideas, casually tossed out - things I would never have thought of, but upon reading them I go "Yeah, the way that works makes complete sense." A wizard in his own right, Mieville makes the English language do delightful tricks. The whole thing pops with energy and sardonic humor. It's not quite a parody or a "send-up" of the Weird Tales genre (more of a tribute) but this novel obviously does not take itself too seriously. Which is not to say there isn't palpable menace. There's suspense and a nice bit of horror, but I spent most of my time with this book cackling, grinning like a fool, and turning pages to see what would happen next. The ending was a bit .. off .. vaguely unsatisfying, but that may just be a symptom of my disappointment that the book was over. I wanted more. It's been years since I had so much FUN reading a book. There were times I was literally jumping out of my seat and yelling "YES THIS IS BLOODY FANTASTIC!!" and that has to count for something. I'm giving five stars not because the book was perfect but because it entertained me like I haven't been entertained in a long time. Superb.

Last year, finally picked up my first China Miéville book, The City and The City, and was blown away by the story and world building that set the story in such an interesting location. At the same time, I'd picked up his latest book, Kraken, which had promptly been picked up by my girlfriend, who's urged me to read it since. Kraken turns out to have been a very different book from Miéville's prior work, and was one that sucked me in with his elegant prose and fascinating take on an alternate, hidden London.

Kraken opens with the theft of a museum specimen, a Giant Squid, from London's Natural History Museum, pulling Billy Harrow into a hidden and dangerous world of magic, cults, special police units and evil, all the while he's chased down by several groups, all with different intentions towards him. Approached by a police force that specializes in the paranormal and cults, Harrow goes on the run, sees his best friend eaten by a creepy pair of characters known as Goss and Stubby, before rescued by Dane, one of the museum's security guards, and a member of a Kraken cult. And that's just in the first 50 pages. The story continues onwards, and we dive deeper down the rabbit's hole into a brilliant, wonderful London that is both vibrant and menacing.

Kraken is a rich, dense read, and finishing it left me wondering what I might have missed as I read through it, and I suspect that it's one of the novels that I'll have to reread somewhere down the line to take it all in again. In a very strange way, the book reminded me most of Neil Gaiman's fantastic novel, American Gods, dealing with some very similar issues, but with a similar environment surrounding the characters throughout the story.

This book is all about faith: faith in wonderfully fractured world, where belief in the unbelievable brings out some interesting things. Throughout the story, the center plot point is the stolen Kraken, sought by a number of people: the Krakenists who want to keep their sacred object safe, or properly destroyed, a magician seeking to hold onto his own immortality and power, with various story lines weaving in and out in a complicated manner. The story lags through the middle, but it's not until the end that the really interesting stuff happens: magic and faith in this setting are essentially products of people's actions: understanding the significance of what you've done is just as important as what you're trying to do. It's difficult to explain without ruining several plot points, but the ending left me rather breathless.

In addition to the dense core story that Miéville has set up, he's put together a spectacular London that pulls in elements from all types of mythology , the fantastic and even things like Star Trek. Several perspectives follow the action, taking a number of characters through a number of locations throughout the city: hidden streets and pubs, places erased from London's memory, all the while coming across a series of weirder and more fascinating characters. Frequently, I thought that Miéville just unleashed his imagination on the page, and there's parts where the book could be slimmed down, straightened out a bit, but I also can't help but think that that would take out some of the fun in the story and the journey that we're taken through. Kraken, while it has its flaws, is a fantastic book, in every sense of the word.

Originally posted to my blog.

China Mieville scratches the surface of London and finds underneath a world of competing religious cults, sympathetic magic, and other-worldly conflict. Normal city-dwellers fade into background. The reader's immersion is total in this fantastic but gradually-understandable new reality.

An embalmed kraken, a forty-foot-long giant squid, disappears from a London museum where Billy Harrow is a curator. There is no imaginable way that the kraken and its tank of preserving fluid could have fit through any of the too-small exits. The theft is investigated, first by the London police, then by a secret police squad that deals with the occult, and finally by Billy and a member of the underground cult that worships the missing kraken.

The story begins slowly, but picks up as readers encounter odd characters with odd motives and oddly-constrained magical powers. The memorable cast includes:

Dane, a devout member of the Church of Kraken Almighty, carries a spear gun because a regular gun isn't "squiddy" enough.

Wati, the ghost of an ancient Egyptian slave, organized a modern labor movement among the other ghost slaves. He can only see and speak through statues, large or small.

Tattoo, an oversized face tattooed on another man's back. A ruthless crime lord, he rages because he's always facing the other way when interesting things happen.

Grisamentum, a departed mage, is the best off-stage character since Godot. His menacing, unseen presence brings the story's ink to life.

Strangest of all is the villainous, man-and-boy presence of Goss and Subby. There's no stopping or understanding Goss and Subby. Once contracted, the job is always finished. Messily.

There are other characters, less central but no less colorful. They include gun farmers, who hatch and raise their own weapons; knuckleheads, strangely-transformed henchmen wearing black motorcycle helmets; memory ghosts, who inhabit and protect museums; and the Sea itself, dealing impartially through its embassy on a magically-concealed side street. These richly-imagined persons all make sense, each in their way.

I've yet to read a bad China Mieville book. Dismiss me as a fan, but maybe a fanatical mindset helps understand the intense, inter-cult conflicts of Mieville's London. There's much to digest after you wolf it all down. What's this thing the author has for embassies, for example? Perdido Street Station, here, then in Embassytown in a big way. One more oddity among many.

I got an advanced reading copy of this book through the the store Vine program. I have previously read Mieville's King Rat (loved it), Un Lun Dun (liked it), and The City & The City (tough read, but interesting). I have mixed feelings about this book. Some of it is quite funny and creative, but a lot of it is just annoying.

You follow a number of different characters throughout this book. The main character is Billy, who is a curator at the Darwin Center. He runs tours of the facility in addition to other duties and the main draw on his tour is a giant squid that has been preserved in a large tank. Only on his current tour, something is wrong, the squid is missing. How does a giant squid just "go missing" from a giant tank? Well two police officers that specialize in a rather abnormal branch of the police force suspect it may all be the fault of that silly religious squid group. They pull Billy into a crazy underground world in London that's full of magic, mayhem, and numerous religious cults. Billy will find that it may be up to him to stop the apocalypse itself.

I liked the first couple chapters of this book and enjoyed the ending. The concept behind this novel is quirky and interesting and definitely creative. All of the characters are completely off the wall. You have Tattoo, the gangster-like character that exists only as a tattoo on a catatonic man's back. Collingsworth, a slight female police officer who has a bad case of tourette's. And a billion other incredibly crazy characters. The overall concept behind this story is very thoughtful. Basically Mieville is exploring the concept of people making things happen because that is what they believe to be true.

There are also a ton of things I did not like about this novel. It is a difficult and time-consuming read. The chapters are erratic in length and the viewpoint switches between numerous characters. There are about a million plot lines with as many characters going on at once. Then there is the Brit-speak, this is especially bad in the beginning of the novel but gets better as it goes on.

Mieville also just throws so many random facts at the reader that after a while (between all the Brit-speak and random junk) my eyes would just glaze over and my thoughts start to wander. Next thing I would be yawning and cursing this stupid book because it never really sticks to the story or gets to the point in any but the most meandering of ways. This was a book I constantly had to push myself through, I had to concentrate to get it to hold my interest. Which is really a pity because between all the extraneous junk, there is an interesting and darkly humorous story in here.

The other bothersome thing is a similarity to other works already out there. The setting reminded me of Neverwhere by Gaiman or The Haunting of Alaizabel Crane by Chris Wooding (I know different time period). The deal with all the gods reminded some of Gaiman's American Gods. The crazy wackiness with which random events and different deities popped up reminded me of Simon Green's Nightside series. And in my opinion all the aforementioned works are much more well done. Anyone who compares Mieville's writing style to Gaiman is on crack, Gaiman writes an absolutely wonderful story and Mieville, while creative and innovative, tends to not focus on the story itself. The setting between Neverwhere and this book are somewhat similar though.

So should you read it? If you liked The City and The City this book is written in the same somewhat fractured and strange style, so you may enjoy it. Just know that this book will require a lot of patience to get through. You will have to struggle through Brit Speak and weed out all the random excess of data Mieville throws at you. It is creative and darkly funny but a tough read. Personally it just wasn't my thing and put me off picking up any of Mieville's future works.

Ups and downs. I listened to the audiobook version. John Lee (reader) is amazing. I depended heavily on Mr. Lee's great reading. Here's why. Mr. Mieville's vernacular, intelligence, and effortless style are so superior to mine that half of the plot would be unfathomable if not for the immersive drama brought by John Lee's voices. I just finished the book but I could only half-explain what I think I understand happened. The gist: scientist meets magic, brushes heels with the vilest evil ever, war and tears, and somewhere about a mystery solved. Overall impression: Amazing. It's like I was hit by a literary truck and am not sure what just happened, except that I am satisfied ... in the way of waking from a nightmare adventure that is fun to watch from a distance, the relief of not actually being there a palpable emotion. The reason for a loss of a star: there was an subliminal agenda there. So as not to spoil the plot or prematurely give away the author's bias which became painfully obvious (if illogical) by the end of the book, compare to Avatar (James Cameron's film); Cameron's bias became a conspicuous counterbalance to the thrill of the adventure. Same with Mieville in this book. His bias amounts to me respecting him a smidgen less, but only a smidgen. His prose and vocabulary are singularly stunning. I will continue to read Mieville books if only for that. Kraken: mesmerizing.

This is an odd, odd book. Mieville overflows with ideas and some supremely brilliant ideas make their way into this book, but the plot develops slowly and meanders in and out of coherence. I occasionally loved it and I occasionally got phenomenally annoyed with it. It looks, at the beginning, like it's going to be an odd riff on a kind of supernatural police procedural. Then, it turns out not to be that kind of book at all (so, not at all like Aaronovitch, if you're wondering). Then we follow the sort of protagonist -- our museum naturalist -- and see how his character develops as he eases into his understanding of the supernatural present in Krakenish London. He and his companion try to work out what's going on with the Kraken. That's where things just get rather odd: they are really quire awful and working out what's going on. To some extent that's refreshing in a novel, but it also gets darn annoying. Why on earth are they unable to work out what's going on and why does the plot move so laboriously? I don't know. I championed onwards and enjoyed how Mieville concluded the book, but that wasn't without having gotten rather annoyed with his plotting. Also, read this on kindle & not in hardcopy (unless you keep your dictionary close). Mieville loves obscure words. Fun for an exercise in vocabulary expansion, occasionally frustrating otherwise. 3 1/2 Stars

While Perdido and Council were long and involved, they had plenty of story to support Mieville's style. This doesn't. At least 20 chapters end with a vague, ambiguous warning that "something was coming," or the "apocalypse was suddenly closer." Fans of Meiville's writing prowess will love the first couple hundred pages, despite the constant double and often triple compounding of descriptions of a single thing, as if he couldn't decide which analogy to go with so he just piles them on needlessly. He heaps them redundantly on top of each other. He slathers them over each other with frequent repetitions of what he just said, then says it again; meanwhile, something is looming nearer.
At 350 pages this would have been a tight little masterpiece. At 509, there's just not enough weight, character development, or consistency to sustain such a far fetched and ungrounded concept.

If you have read China Mieville before and enjoyed his works, you won't be disappointed with this novel. As the story opens, the reader is introduced to Billy Harrow, a curator at London's Natural History Museum. Billy is guiding a tour of visitors that are primarily there to see the museum's prized exhibit: the body of a Giant Squid, Architeuthis dux. However, as Billy opens the door to the exhibit, the squid and the tank holding it have vanished. This starts a journey where the seedy occult world hidden in the shadows of London is exposed.

Mieville also creates some very memorable characters in work. The duo of Goss & Subby is particularly disturbing and goes on my a list of all-time best literary villains. When you are eventually introduced to the character of Simon, science fiction and magic meet and the reader is treated to a fascinating, though brief, discussion of the religious/mystical implications of being "beamed up" a la Star Trek. The reader is also treated to the character of Kath Collingswood. She is a member of the "cult unit" of the London police and Mieville describes her as follows:

"She had on a blue Metropolitan Police uniform, but it was worn more informally than he would have expected her to get away with. It was not buttoned up, was a bit thrown-on. Clean, but rucked, hitched, and tweaked. She had on more makeup than he would have thought permissible, too, and her blonde hair was messilly fancily style. She looked like a pupil obeying the letter but straining against the spirit of school uniform rules."

I love that last sentence and Mieville's work is peppered with such gems.

Unfortunately, some of the important characters and relationships in the book seem a little unfinished. As if Mieville wrote a novel 100 pages longer but had to cut the length and those elements suffered as a result. That's the only reason I didn't give it 5 stars.

I was very disappointed with City & City, but because of my love for his previous books (except King Rat) I thought maybe he just was taking a break and will be back ... Kranken is so poorly written, boring, dragged out... there is no trace form that incredible creativity and brilliance that China had.
I am 100% convinced now that it's not the same author. Style, language and structural thinking is way too different. This is simply fraud.
Don't waste your money.

Mieville writes weird fiction, in the sense of the old pre-science fiction genre, weird fiction. For this reason a lot of readers find it hard to pidgeonhole him. Think Gormenghast, Lord Dunsany, The House On The Borderlands, Lovecraft.

Kraken is a tale of another London, in which things exist in the shadows and just because you pave over older things as you develop a city, it doesn’t mean they go away. Add a strong dash of otherworldly police precedural and there’s your story.

Kracken is chock-full of magick, mystical creatures and just plain strangness. Taking place in a (literally) living London, a complete society of magic, deities and cultists exisit side-by-side with the visible, typical life of you and me. The world is richly populated by Mieville, too richly in fact. Side plots and characters that add little to the main story are tacked on as if afraid to let any idea go to waste (e.g. the Familiar Strike). Despite dragging in spots, the strength of the characters kept me turning the pages until I approached the end of the book. It seems Mieville was unable to come up with resolutions on par with the strong buildup. All three of the climax/resolution scenes were completely flat and anti-climatic, I literally blurted "That's it!?" as the second climax flopped into place.
I still recommend Kracken with the caveat not to expect much in the end. The book is a great trip that leads to nowhere.

I'll start off by saying that China Mieville sure knows his stuff. Kraken is a well researched book, blending religion, cults, mysticism and the weird together into a story. It has an interesting premise, a giant squid disappears from the Natural History Museum and this seemingly nobody is suddenly thrust into this world where magic exists and must help recover the squid before the prophesied end of the world comes.

This book had so much going for it. I enjoyed the way Mieville described all the different cults and the secret wars that go on behind the scenes of everyday London. Despite all this, the book just felt bloated and unevenly paced with the story jumping all over the place. There were unnecessary storylines that lead to nowhere but what's worse was that they caused more confusion and created more questions than answers.

I really had a hard time trying to finish reading this. After maybe halfway through the book I didn't care about any of the characters at all except wanting to get to the end as quickly as possible. To this day I still don't understand what special abilities Collingswood possessed and how he can so easily dismiss Dane who had been one of the key characters in the book. The ending also seemed rushed and too convenient, a little too "Deus ex Machina" for me. Everything just wrapped up so nicely even after all the chaos and weirdness that occurred in the book.

You can tell that Mieville has a lot of ideas for this book but at the same time it felt like he was writing for his own enjoyment and that he is too cool to share his thoughts with his readers. Some say you have to read this book with the humour that Mieville possesses and you will see the contradictory nature of religion and the farce in the story. To me, this means you are either with him or you're not. While reading this book, I felt as if I was on an express train, only getting glimpses of the outside but never in detail.

Kraken was my book club's read for June and many people struggled through it too or gave up before reaching the end. This is a book that I ought to like but just couldn't bring myself to liking it. People tell me that his Bas Lag books are better and I hope that they are right.

An interesting and witty journey through a London where magic both major and minor rules and where religion has fractured into thousands of competing sects. I'd heard a lot about this author but had never read anything of his before (in fact I was under the impression that he was a she!) so I was curious to see if the author could live up to the buzz. I'd say he comes close. The book is written in a headlong style that grabs you and pulls you right in. The London he portrays is gritty and takes us through parts of the city that would, in British terms, be full of "gangs of yobs." There are indeed lots of yobs in here; the author has created some really frightening villains who are policed by officers who seem dangerously close to being thugs themselves. The precipitating event for all the action is the theft, by magical means, of a giant squid and its tank of preservative liquid from a museum.

The book hummed right along until about page 300, where the author began to lose me. I have always felt that if an author wants me to wade through more than 300 pages then there had better be something really special in every page past that 300 mark. There wasn't, and I found myself longing for one of the magical "knacks" the author describes, namely the ability to do "quantum origami" by folding things smaller without harming them. I was about to do a Dorothy Parker ("This book should not merely be tossed from the reader, it should be flung with great force") when finally, at page 495, the author completely redeemed himself with an ending that made me laugh out loud. It was witty, scary, thought provoking, believable and I should have seen it coming but didn't.

You'll love this if you like the fantasy genre and have a good sense of humor about religion. You'll hate this if you thought the Harry Potter books were satanic; the concepts of, among other things, squids worshipped as gods and unionized magical familiars will give fanatics an apoplexy.

If you belong to a book group and aren't daunted by the idea of reading two really long books, I'd suggest reading this one and contrasting it with "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." The worlds the two authors create are very different but the themes--magic, beliefs and their consequences--are similar enough that some stimulating discussions could result.

For me, China Mieville's writing has many features to recommend it, but the two most prominent are his leftist politics, which he wears on his sleeve, and his skill at worldbuilding. When Mieville creates a setting, he doesn't settle for interesting surface features; there always seems to be a greater depth, one populated with tantalizing glimpses at potential characters, settings and stories. This is, I think, the primary draw of his novels; it's always quite clear that he's leaving so much to the imagination, and one wonders, or hopes to find, what else he's leaving in store. And the absence of this feeling was why Mieville's newest novel, Kraken, just doesn't work.

It's the tale of a museum attendant who, conducting a tour, discovers that a specimen of the titular creature has been stolen. He quickly becomes involved with a supernatural branch of the London police, who believe that the theft of the Kraken foreshadows weighty consequences for the city and the world beyond it. Much like other works in the urban fantasy genre (especially those by Gaiman), the protagonist discovers a world beyond that which we perceive, one where Londonmancers pierce the concrete of the city to read the entrails below, where cults wage silent warfare beneath the radar of the majority of London's habitants.

I could regale you with cool anecdata from the story. There are tons of neat characters and asides in Kraken, more than enough to satiate one's appetite for tertiary detail. The problem for me was that none of this seemed to coalesce into a concrete world. When reading Mieville's other novels, especially the New Crobuzon series but also including The City and the City, there really did seem to be a deeper setting beyond what he was describing. Everything seemed a bit more vast, a bit more wrought with meaning. In contrast, Kraken feels like Mieville threw together a bunch of interesting concepts, but it just doesn't meld together the way I'd expected. Even his standard leftist cant, which I've grown to expect and even appreciate, seemed rather by-the-numbers.

Kraken isn't a terrible novel, and if you're a fan of Mieville I'd still recommend that you read it. But I'd be thankful that he's maintaining such a prolific writing/publishing schedule, with his next novel Embassytown almost ready for edits. Although the concept is interesting, Kraken just doesn't mesh in the way that most of his work seems to. For Mieville, this novel is definitely a swing and a miss.

We are not short of good fantasy writers nowadays, but even among the best, China Mieville stands out -for his strength as a storyteller, his use of words, and -never more than in this bizarre comedy-drama--his skewed sense of what's funny.

Kraken starts with the theft of a giant squid, which has disappeared along with the vat it's been preserved in from the research wing of London's Museum of Natural History. Curator Billy Harrow prepared the dead animal initially and it's Billy who discovers the theft. Billy doesn't have a clue what's going on, but soon he is being investigated by members of an obscure unit of the London police, the FSRC (Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit). They suspect that Billy knows something but doesn't yet know what. When Billy returns to work, he finds a man's dead body stuffed in a glass container: the container is smaller than the body is. No one has a clue what is happening but the FSRC suspects why: there's been a run on apocalypse by the sects. "It`s a buyer's market in apocalypse," the head of the unit tells Billy, "What's hot in heresy's Armageddon." Events run speedily downhill. An incredibly creepy pair of villains appears, Goss and Subby, who work for Tattoo, a master criminal who's doesn't have a body. He's just a tattoo of a man's face on the back of another man who's been coerced to carry him. Goss and Subby pressure Billy. When Billy's friend Leon protests, Goss takes a deep breath and swallows him in and Leon's gone for good. Billy escapes from Goss and Subby but where can he go in a world where nothing is quite what it seems and the warring parties possess arcane powers? One adventure follows another, each wilder and slightly more bizarre than the last. (At one point, Billy talks the sea into spying for him. The book comes together in an enjoyable but slapdash ending.

I can think of only one other book I know that exhibits the same sensibility as Mieville's --G. K. Chesterton's classic spy story, The Man Who Was Thursday, which was published a hundred and two years before Kraken. The stories the authors tell are worlds apart but there is a commonality of tone and theme that transcends the differences.

To start with, both books deal with gods, real or not, who are indifferent to us. One worships them but doesn't implore them - pray to but not for. They don't care about us. Any involvement on their part is the result of whim, not compassion.

Then there is the utter strangeness of the quests in these two books. Both protagonists -the anti-anarchist secret policeman Gabriel Syme in Thursday, Billy Harrow in Kraken--uncover one surprise and then another. At each step, reality is rewritten, and then another enigma discovered, waiting to be deciphered in its turn, and it too opens a new reality. Reality -or the meaning of it--subtly shifts time and again, all the way to the end of the book. Mieville's Kraken isn't as tidily written as Chesterton's Thursday but the books are brothers beneath the skin.
Both also are mysteries that are also comedies. The comic and the mysterious are never far apart in these two wondrous novels. Granted, the scary moments in Kraken are creepier and scarier than anything in Thursday but both books are detective stories which are also broad comedy, and in Mieville's case, out and out, hit-`em-over-the-head-with-a-pig-bladder farce. Mieville's sense of humor is broader and more pop than Chesterton's.

There are the riffs on pop culture. In one scene, Billy tries to enter the British Museum Library and finds people standing outside rather than entering. They are watching "a little group of cats, walking in a complicated quadrille, languidly purposeful. Four were black, one tortoise-shell. They circled and circled. They were not scattering, nor squabbling. They described their routes in dignified fashion. Far enough away to be safe but still startlingly close were three pigeons. They strutted in their own circle. The paths of the two groups of animals almost overlapped." A page later, the scene is explained by another character: "You see what's going on. ... That is a picket line...." "A picket? The cats and the birds?" He nodded. "The familiars are on strike."

One character, Marge -short for Marginalia: she has "renamed" herself-- is given an iPod to protect her from the bad guys. As long as she plays the songs its resident genie likes, the genie will teleport her away from danger whenever it appears. Later, Marge runs into two old friends, her associates in an out-there artists' circle called the Exhausteds. Her friend Diane "ma[kes art] pieces from melted plastic pens."
For fun, try reading Chesterton's Thursday alongside a more normal spy thriller of the era -say, John Buchan's The 39 Steps. Then read Kraken side by side with one of the more macabre nineteenth century thrillers. You'll find that Mieville riffs on the Gothic all the time! One example, a short one: Billy meets a doll god who agrees to help him. But the god has to leave because "he had his own war to attend to, too. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish." A pretty example of the pathetic fallacy, isn't it?

I've been intimidated by China Mieville for years. I keep buying his books, but I don't read them. In part, it's because I'm not a big fan of one of his primary genres, science fiction. Of course, trying to pigeonhole a writer like Mieville is futile, as his novels are a jumble of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, humor, and God knows what else. No, mostly I'm intimidated by his intelligence and literacy. I've met the man several times. He's lovely. But you can tell right away: Dude is wicked smart. I'm no light-weight, but when it comes to Mieville I've just wimped out.

Well, I'm a wimp no more! I've read Kraken, and guess what? I LOVED it! In fact, it made my top ten list for 2010. This is one of those times when you just want to kick yourself for not getting around to something earlier. Happily, Mr. Mieville's backlisted titles are sitting on my shelf waiting for me.

It helped that this latest novel was essentially written for me. Who else but the world's foremost collector of "trashy underwater fiction" would gravitate to a novel about squid worshippers? But I'm getting ahead of myself... The protagonist of this novel is biologist Billy Harrow who, as the novel is opening, is leading a tour though the museum where he works. The highlight and finale of the tour is the preserved architeuthis dux, the giant squid. When Billy and his tour enter the room where it's kept, the immense creature and its 25-foot tank are, impossibly, nowhere in evidence.

So begins a bizarre tale. Billy is as flummoxed as the average reader. Early on in the novel he is told, "How could you possibly understand what is going on? Even if you wanted to. Which, as I say, dot dot dot." Not all of the dialog is quite so enigmatic, but a good deal of it is as funny. At least if you have an appreciation for British humor.

I honestly don't know what else to say about this novel. The plot is impossible to summarize. It's been incredibly polarizing among readers. Elements of Kraken were reminiscent of authors like Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Barnes--high praise in my book. There's a limit to how much weird I can take, and Kraken is weird, but it was fantastic, too! I suspect that this is one of those "love it" or "hate it" novels. Based on that assessment alone, it's worth giving a try. Like me, you just might surprise yourself by falling into the "love it" camp.

The action starts off slowly but when it gets going it goes and goes. plenty of twists and turns in plot and character development.
The author keeps you guessing, not only who did it but who's on who's side and how many sides are there. Throw in a heavy dose of
magic underworld (a lot like Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere") and you have a great read. Not being from London I did have a bit of trouble with some cockney slang once in a while but, it added to the feel of the story rather than detract from it.

China Miéville's star continues to rise and burn a little brighter with each new release. With 2009's THE CITY & THE CITY, he landed critical raves and recognition and earned himself some nice awards. He's been a growing presence in the middle of the list of the science fiction/fantasy world, his name getting more whispers and a growing interest. Now, with his latest book, KRAKEN, Miéville unleashes a novel that is pure fun to take up.

Young scientist Billy Harrow works at London's Natural History Museum, specifically in the Darwin Centre. His latest task is to embalm the most recent acquisition of the Museum: Architeuthis, Kraken, an enormous squid. The exhibit is stolen, and in order to regain the prize, Harrow must plunge himself headlong into an alternate-universe London, one full of magic and mystery, and a squid cult that believes he is a prophet.

While some seem more one-dimensional than living entities, the cast of characters is an exhilarating assortment: a Wiccan police constable, a gang known as the Knuckleheads, a father-and-son assassin team, and a host of others. Miéville does a complete 180 from the grit and somber tone of THE CITY & THE CITY, and instead brings forth a more playful tone such as he exhibited with his children's book, UN LUN DUN. This may put some people off, but what it does is show that he is no one-dimensional craftsman. Rather, Miéville is a gifted visionary and one of the better imaginative wordsmiths of our time.

One of the standout characters, the one most full of life and wonder, is London. Miéville adores London, and his mythical and magical take on the city is a true joy. His alternate city is startlingly intricate and brilliantly devised, leaping to life from the page and clearly visible in your mind's eye. I imagine that, were a reader familiar with the actual London of our world, they may find "easter eggs," of a sort, hidden in Miéville's version.

KRAKEN is fun, exciting and filled with a playful energy that is quite infectious. That said, it doesn't quite land the emotional punches as he did in his previous work, or of another mythic tome, Neil Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS. In some ways, though, this is Miéville spreading his wings or, rather, his tentacles. He is still quite clearly China Miéville, though a bit more playful and, dare I say, Pratchett-esque in some of his witticisms.

THE CITY & THE CITY was an incredible book that deserved all of the adulation heaped upon it. KRAKEN is equally deserving but for so many different reasons. It is refreshing to see a writer so adeptly re-imagine themselves in the span of one book's time, and in the process continue to climb the rungs of the ladder of what deserves to be a wider audience.

--- Reviewed by Stephen Hubbard

China Mieville's Kraken is a rollicking head-spinning comic novel set in an alternate London where gods and cults and magic are so interwoven into the daily fabric that there is an entire squad in the London police to deal with those elements, and it is that squad which is called in to investigate when the eponymous Kraken is stolen from the Natural History Museum.

They're not alone in their desire to find out what happened to the giant squid, however, which also happens to be considered a god by many. Its disappearance has its most direct impact on the employee who preserved it--Billy Harrow--who finds himself thrown into the London underworld and caught in a crossfire of warring goals, including those of the Kraken cult, the aforementioned special police squad, an underworld boss known as The Tattoo, and an ancient Egyptian spirit and labor leader in the midst of organizing a strike by the city's familiars, who feel they've been abused by the local magic users. Throw in sundry other cults beyond the Krakenists, a pair of broadly horrific villains for hire, a host of oddball minor characters, such as the one who practices "extreme origami" and a group of picketing pigeons, and not one but two scheduled apocalypses, and you've got yourself a wildly exuberant ride.

To be honest, perhaps a bit too much so. Kraken reminded me of an adult Un Lun Don, Mieville's YA novel, in that there were so many great concepts and ideas flying off the page that I wished he were a bit more selective and we could slow down and visit with a few of them a bit longer. I found that more than his other books, I needed to let the many, many strange words wash over me and just act as unfocused filler that created a sense of a London submerged in magic and religion (lots of cults, lots of gangs, lots of acronyms and names of magical acts). If you stopped to ask yourself just what he was talking about at any given point, you'd just give up the way you would listening to a conversation between two quantum physicists discussing math issues.

While the jargon can at times make for a bumpy ride, and while I'd say the book comes in a bit tool long, say 75 pages or so too long, the sheer inventiveness and boisterous wittiness of it sweeps you along through most of what is basically a big book-long chase scene, filled with gleeful stopovers to poke fun at various genre elements (Star Trek gets a few choice cameos on the comic stage). This is Mieville, though, so while you get great bursts of broad humor and quieter moments of chortling wit, you also get some serious sub layers--the most obvious of course being the labor issues but the role of religion underlies quite a bit of the plot as well.

Characters probably take a back role to setting and plot here; I can't say there's much of an emotional attachment. Billy and his partner, a renegade Krakenist, carry just about all of the plot but mostly serve as vehicles for it. It's really not until the girlfriend of Billy's best friend becomes involved that I think we really get a character to care much about. When characters do stick in the mind, it's more for their weirdness/originality than a sense of connection to them: his two villains Goss and Subby are utterly compelling (they've terrorized the city for centuries) when on stage and Wati grows on you by the end. I don't, however, think that the lack of attachment to the characters detracts from the book; it just isn't that kind of book.

Kraken isn't an easy read thanks to the sheer flood of strangeness, but if you just ride the wave and let it carry you forward, it's an exhilarating trip. Recommended

China Mieville continues to explore the nature of our disordered universe by focusing on a dysfunctional city. In his latest novel the writer returns to London as his proxy for all of reality. Mieville's fascination with cities is well known and no writer can bring the complexities of a modern city to life better than he does. In Kraken Mieville explores the nature of faith by positing a Kraken-based religion that explodes into turmoil when a (dead) giant squid mysteriously vanishes from a museum. The theft sets a series of strange events into motion that ultimately lead to the possible destruction of our universe. These events are wonderfully depicted because of Mieville's uncanny ability to make the oddest events seem entirely plausible. The characters that the author creates along the way are memorable, especially a terrifying pair who are the embodiment of evil: Goss and Subby. A punkish young woman detective named Collingswood is another spot-on creation. Her luminous combination of nastiness and humor are the essence of bad attitude and provide much of the novel's quotient of fun. Kraken is an entertaining read, always inventive and often probing as Mieville examines the nature of belief and reality. As our world is fractured the reality that results is disturbing and instructive. This is a novel that adds luster to Mieville's already strong reputation. I enjoyed reading it and hated to see it end.

I remember being so excited after the first chapter of Perdido Street Station. It was so different and literate. I bought The Scar as soon as it came out and loved it too. However, I got bogged down in Iron Council and had a hard time finishing it. I moved on to other authors and kind of forgot about Mieville. I recently was needing something to read and stumbled across Kraken and I'm again reminded of the feeling I had when reading Perdido. Mieville is so inventive! I do have to pay attention, and occasionally look up a word, but what a pleasure to be so surprised by an urban fantasy. Now I'm looking forward to catching up on the rest of his books I've missed in the past few years. A pile of well written, challenging, engrossing, fantasy books waiting to be read, it kind of feels like having money in the bank.

Title Kraken
Author China Mieville
Rating ****
Tags fiction, adventure, paranormal, religion, cults, fantasy

This was my first experience reading Mieville, and I feel like I've been on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - but that ride is far too tame a comparison.

Billy Harrow is a curator at the Darwin Center in London. His greatest accomplishment is preserving the Center's giant squid specimen. So he is astonished to find one day, while leading a tour of the Center, that the squid and its tank have vanished.

Soon thereafter he finds a body in a bottle, and his best friend disappears, swallowed whole by a supernatural hit man named Goss and his sidekick Subby. The police who deal with the supernatural become involved, and Billy finds out that London is awash with cults, all of them certain that Apocalypse is coming. Very soon. One of the cults is the Teuthies, worshipers of the giant squid known as Architeuthis. One of the Teuthies, whom Billy had known as a guard in the Center named Dane, becomes Billy's protector, though he goes rogue from the cult in order to do so. Everyone is searching for the squid, some of them with harm in mind, including the criminal mastermind who lives as a tattoo on another man's back.

Meanwhile, Billy and Dane are aided by Wati, a spirit that moves from figure to figure and inspires dog and cat familiars and other servant spirits to go out on strike for better working conditions.

Mieville writes about a lot of cults in Kraken, but I suspect that if he belongs to one it is Discordianism, which worships chaos. The author bludgeons the reader's ability to suspend disbelief until it gives way with a whimper, and after that the reading is easier. One doesn't so much read this book as wrestle it to the ground, to emerge victorious on the last page. Do I recommend it? Yes, if you want an unusual experience. It definitely makes most books seem tame by comparison.

Publication Del Rey (2010), Hardcover, 528 pages
Publication date 2010
ISBN 034549749X / 9780345497499

China Mieville is one of the more maddening and erratic science fiction/fantasy writers out there. When he is good he is very very good, and when he is bad he is so-so.

There are so many bits that could have come together: a giant preserved squid in the middle of a museum that has mysterious links to higher powers, memory angels, Chaos Nazis, you name it. It just never quite jells, and despite the initial promise fails to deliver. I still enjoyed reading it, just be warned that it is far from his best.

Kraken is a surreal story about London and the end of the world. A giant squid gets stolen from the Darwin Institute,
without any trace. One of the curators, Billy, and a man who belongs to a church that worships the giant squid, try to
recover the squid. As they do so, Billy discovers a weird, bizarre London, one populated by different gods, magicians of different sorts, gangsters, half-dead creatures, and creatures that never lived.
The story has a definite plot and is almost endlessly inventive in creating a very different world.
China Mieville puts to shame most other imaginative writers, at times creating in a way that can hardly be surpassed.
It's a pleasant read, one that pulls you in deep (sorry for the bad pun). I gave it only four stars because I feel that, at
times, the story is too baroque, too flamboyant: simplicity sacrificed to an almost orgiastic desire to elaborate, to create.
Overall, there is too much there, a sense of being rushed and overwhelmed, without being given too much time to think.
Even with these flaws, it is still quite an interesting experience to read: not as good as Perdido Street Station, but worth a read (PS. I'm now reading "The City and the City", and I find that to be at a higher level).

Kraken is one of the latest works shelved under the moniker or "weird fiction" or "urban fantasy." Author and professor China Miéville animates the very city of London, the ocean, and even a dead, preserved squid along with a hoard of strange characters, some clearly good or at least well-intended, some vile and evil, and many somewhere in-between hedging their bets or shifting alliances in this homage to weirdness and magic.

He weaves a tale where squid worshiping, squidnapping, occult detectives, cults and religions of all manner, and a lot of villains that call to mind some of the weird hybridized creatures from the Star Wars movies, divinations, teleportation, and so forth all coexist, but certainly not harmoniously. Apocalyptic backdrops fan the action to a fever pitch, and anyone without a pretty strong willingness to suspend disbelief will likely toss this novel aside pretty early.

Kraken's twisted complexities and endless exotic flourishes nearly exhausted my patience about two-thirds of the way through the novel. Although Dr. Miéville has stated his dislike of Tolkien's fiction, I find it is much easier to stay engaged when the conceits of the imagined world are grounded to some inner consistency as is typical in classic fantasy (starting with William Morris's novels in the 1890s) than trying to keep my bearings as the outlandish, weird, and bizarre characters, events, and settings pile on. Sometimes the character development seems stilted but given the breakneck speed at which the plot unfurls, that's not so much a fault as a given.

I certainly appreciate the work, imagination, and discipline in creating Kraken, but my thought is that the author had more fun writing this novel than I did reading it.

China Mieville is an excellent writer, one of the best and most original fantasists writing today. KRAKEN is an amazing novel: humorous, rich, and an amazing read. But if you have never read his work before, I suggest you start with one of his earlier novels because KRAKEN will come as a shock to your system. Mieville's style is linguistically rich, so thick with words and ideas that it can be difficult to keep up with him. And if you are an American with little to no knowledge of British slang and culture, KRAKEN may take a little extra effort.

But this book is worth it. The story centers on the theft of a giant squid (the titular Kraken) which young Billy Harrow has been preserving at the British Museum of Natural History. As Billy sets about trying to find who stole his specimin, he discovers a fantastic underworld of wierd, abstruse cults, a frightening duo who work as magical hitmen for a thug who is literally a tattoo, a division of the police that investigates magical crimes, and an ancient spirit that can occupy figurines of human beings. Soon, Billy finds himself on the run with one of the Kraken's worshippers trying to recover the squid and prevent an impending apocalypse. KRAKEN is a brilliantly imagined story, as rich as a cheesecake.

When a gigantic preserved squid goes missing from London's natural history museum, it's obvious this is no ordinary heist. Billy Harrow, the curator who arrived on the scene of the crime and had also been the one to preserve this particular specimen, is questioned by a special police squad, which suspects that the culprit may have been a local underground cult devoted to kraken worship. It turns out they aren't the only ones with the motive and means to perpetrate such an impossible crime, and the cult and occult police squad aren't the only ones who'd like to know what Billy may or may not know about what went down. This oddball heist may just turn out to be the beginning of the end, or of the many competing ends envisioned by the various bizarre religions that populate the London deep-underground.

Mieville is a fascinating and inventive writer, whose stories are intricate and convoluted puzzles that always manage to come together in a satisfying way, even if it feels like it takes time for the outlines to become clear and in the end there may be a couple pieces missing, whose contours you must supply with imagination. He does like to keep his readers guessing, and sometimes throws you in headfirst into a situation, where you have to take your bearings in bewilderment in much the same way as the hapless characters whose misadventures you follow into mystery upon mystification. He's not one to lay it all out at once, and next to never lets his characters explain to each other what's what as if they didn't already know. Happily, he does let us sit in on the lives of a couple of characters who need to figure things out, and do, gradually, along with us, even as we share their frustration as the folks they're with tend not to lay it all out neatly but only piecemeal. This approach may trouble some readers. It drew me in, engaged me, and kept me hooked.

What also kept me on were the fascinating and unpredictable twists, whose sense became clear only in their aftermath, and the clever and often quite amusing subplots, such as that of a statue named Wati, who'd freed himself from bondage to some dead Egyptian nobleman, and wound up, eventually, in London where he was forming a union of enslaved magical artifacts and animals, insisting they demand better pay for their services. These weren't just digressions. Even the oddest detour almost always turned out to be relevant to understanding the endgame.

The prose, throughout, is playful and inventive. Mieville finds new ways to say old things and precise ways to express the unheard of and unusual. He draws effortlessly upon a wide range of sources, from pop culture to philosophy, science and history, handles and exploits technical terms (like "autopoiesis") with a playful ease, and creates rich allusions and inventive puns (e.g. "squid pro quo") that had me laughing out loud or grinning nearly every other page. It's a fun and funny book, that nevertheless demands attention because he's not going to fill you in on what's just happened every few pages and sometimes you have to infer. It's also, underneath, a big ideas book, about the magic of belief and the power of truth, about religion and science, about accident and fate. It works in the same vein as Gaiman's Neverwhere and American Gods, with its approach to a magical underground London and to the vitality of myth, but creates its own world and in a style and approach that is unique and feels fresh. I couldn't put it down and loved it every minute. This is fantasy fiction at its finest. Highly recommended.

This book was pretty mediocre, the whole premise is a little interesting, but it just didn't deliver. Part of the problem may have come from the fact that the author is very British, and there were many times where I didn't understand the slang. So the flow of the writing just didn't work for me. The other big problem with the book, is that I couldn't find the world believable, which made the whole reading experience annoying. I'm sure there's some great things about this book other people might love, but it just wasn't for me.

China Mieville's Kraken is absolutely brilliant, his greatest imaginative opus since Perdido Street Station. It's a Noir-Weird thriller drowning in murky atmosphere, where arcane and techno-magic fly fast and furious, and dark, dead-end streets lead to doors of dreams and terror. The mystery uncoils around the corpse of a giant squid. Relic to some, god to others, the Kraken is destined to blot out the world in a cloud of inky chaos. The double-London Mieville creates, like most of his cities, is a front-and-center character as much as the cast. His word/magic/world-building thrilled me to no end.

Charged with finding the missing Kraken and preventing the apocalypse, are squid-embalmer and museum curator, Billy Harrow, and the knack-detective, Kath Collingswood. Kath, with her cool distain and bag of urban magic tricks, is Mieville's best female character yet. What impressed me most is the way he combines her snarky remarks, with vivid body language that speaks volumes on its own. If only Betty Davis was alive and in her prime to play her! Along the way, Billy hooks up with squid-enforcer, Dane, who sees Billy as a prophet for his tentacled god.

With its terrible beauty, beautiful terror, and bizarre cast of characters, Kraken brings to mind Clive Barker's epic, urban fantasies, but it's not only Mieville's scariest book, it's his funniest, the humor ranging from lampblack to laugh-out-loud absurd. Goss and Subby, two of the villains, are carved from the same rotten meat; killers-for-hire and horrifying, sociopathic clowns. Goss' dialogue, with its dissociative, cockney-thick wordplay, gave me the feeling I was trapped in an echo chamber with a madman. The clowns are hired by The Tattoo, a living snarl of ink, trapped on the skin of a punk-boy slave who can't escape his skin. The Tattoo celebrates that wonderful, subversive body-horror that you find in the older films of David Cronenberg.

I loved Mieville's Lovecraftian themes, the descriptions of the Krakenists and their tentacular temple, his nods to Michael Moorcock, and hilarious Star Trek geekdom, which, who knew, could serve as a major plot device? Mieville has such a gift for finding the perfect blend of the absurd, grotesque, and the beautiful. I plunged in and wallowed like a squid in a pool of chum.

Aside from the sinister humor and baroque phantasmagoria, the book has surprising compassion for faith in diversity, and at the same time is a dark mirror to the horror and pettiness perpetrated in the name of God(s). Best of all, the inkblot climax elevated the book with Mieville's deep philosophy: Art and the Word can build the world, burn it down, and resurrect it. History is a scab on the skin of ideology, and imagination the philosopher's stone of reality.

What a great book. It kept making me angry, because there were enough interesting ideas in it for about two dozen books, and I don't think it's fair for anyone to be able to track all that not just as a reader but as a creator. I've got writer-envy, see.

Also I love the playful tone and how EXCESSIVELY British it is.

There. Zero spoiler review, just read it, ok?

the world mieville presents here unfolds in an enthralling way. the mix between storyline, worldbuilding and clever wordplay was close to perfect in my opinion, and the characters, cults and pieces of fantasy have a feeling of novelty that I enjoyed. the prose flows more quickly than it does in some of mieville's other books, which makes it a more dynamic story in my view. some of the ideas are familiar, sometimes reminding me of anansi boys, American gods, and a bit of illuminatus trilogy, but the world is vividly engaging, making me want to read more.

Kraken was supposed to be amazing. It would have been amazing given the hype, the awesome premise and an author is renowned for being able to take weird and make it mind-blowing. Yet, somehow, Kraken failed abysmally.

I think the major problem with Kraken was that it was all over the place. In trying to take so many different ideas and themes and bring them together into one plot, it was hard to tell what mattered. The book started off in a promising manner. Billy conducts tours at a museum that houses a rare (and dead) giant squid. During a tour, the squid is found to be missing. This starts off a mystery that has potential. Who would want the squid? How would someone get it out of the museum? It's too big to fit through the doors.

We learn that the squid may have been taken by a cult that worships it. Fantastic - a mystery with a potential sci-fi twist that has a cult of squid worshipers. I can get behind that. Except, then Mieville throws in the supernatural. We aren't looking at a sci-fi twist at all, but rather many different people with many different abilities. The bad guys have abilities. The good guys have abilities. The cops have abilities. Hell, even Billy ends up having an ability. Try keeping that all straight.

Now I'm lost. I can barely keep the plot or the characters straight. Kraken quickly went from entertaining to utterly dreadful in the matter of a few chapters. Somehow, the squid factors into an apocalypse, but don't ask me how. It was a complete blur as I just wanted to get finish this book and forget I ever picked it up in the first place.

Kraken was an extreme disappointment. I was very excited to read this book and wound up just sort of disgusted by the entire mess. I've disliked books before, but never one that held so much promise and potential. Kraken was a complete letdown.

The writing in this book was like bad driving. Stops and starts, all over the place, speed up, slow down. Jerky. Lost, and not asking for directions. I couldn't get past it, and ultimately I gave up.

I was really looking forward to this book. I love weird! I thought I couldn't get enough of weird, but this felt weird for the sake of being weird with no real point. Words for the sake of adding words with no real point. I simply didn't get it.

The humor and creativity was appreciated, but I didn't find a single character I could like or get behind.

It's too bad. I really thought Mieville would be an author I'd rush to read all of, but after this, I can't see picking up another.

I had a strange relationship with this book. Sometimes I would read it and be thoroughly impressed with the imaginative settings and story line. I would be captured by a vividly painted scene. I would laugh out loud at the British humor. The complexity of the writing was stimulating.

Then I would become mired in the same things I was previously enjoying. The imagery and setting would become overdone. The storyline would become strained, or feel distracted to me. The complexity of the writing became laborious and distracting. I ended up starting and stopping the book three times. It was good enough that I wanted to be engaged. Mievelle is a very talented writer. But in the end, I gave up after slightly less than 300 pages in. Kraken gets my personal "book I most wanted to love" vote.

Iron Council rocks and Kraken is even better as for me. I haven't find a digital book in Russian, bought the paper copy. The plot is intriguing, the detective line rather confusing and something becomes clear at the 500th page. Severity, and the gloomy atmosphere of the Iron Council successfully replaced the humor, skepticis, absurd and completely surprising scientific realism. High denationalisation, not too easy to read.

I enjoyed Kraken more than I have enjoyed any fantasy novel in years - perhaps since American Gods. It is messy and complicated, full of silly flights of fantasy and fanboy geekiness but the pace is unrelenting, the end of the world plot believable and the characters were all lots of fun. One point however, and this is not meant as a criticism at all, but did anybody else think it was too similar to Gaiman's Neverwhere. It's a better book no doubt but the plot and characters and even some of the incidental colour where skating very close. Neverwhere was a story that grew out of an awful TV series and never got the treatment it deserved in novel form so in a sense Kraken is a fulfilment of that desire. Still five stars - a rip roaring good read.

The other two-star reviews here say it better than I can, so I'll just chime in and say yeah, read them, they're right. Mieville definitely has an art for exquisite details and delicious rendering, but too many things just seem there just to show off how weird they are, and far too many omg-weird threads are introduced that don't really lead anywhere. This is just showing off, with nothing to really say.

Even in the beginning, it just didn't seem to have the juice, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and kept with it. About halfway through I started to get very annoyed and just wanted it over, but it's kind of hard to just stop reading a book so I just bulled through it. With 100 pages left, I was just groaning for it to be done and gone. Here and there I got caught up in it for a few pages, but never for long. And like far too many grand fantasy yarns, the endings come as offhand nothings, like a bottle falling over and draining into a rug, and that's it. Vast things manifest and then just dribble away, coughing and dried.

And when it ended, there was no great aha moment, just me walking across the room and tossing the book in a box, and I will be giving it away, or perhaps just throwing it out to spare someone else the burden.

Somebody needs to get away from his love with the sound of his own voice, clear away all the admirers, and go live a little until he has something to say again.

Overview:
This book has generated a surprising amount of complaints. Even in the groups of people who enjoyed it and gave it a high rating complained about the amount of information that they perceived as necessary, the oddity of the characters, and the plot, etc.

In short, I think that they all missed a point somewhere. Yeah, the idea of a baby giant squid being used to fuel an apocalypse is downright weird. Moreover it, admittedly, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So, why is the squid so powerful? Because the people THINK that it will. This concept of self-fulfilling power is essential theme of the book, and it creates a lot of interesting moments.

A. Plot
The plot here is a whirlwind. Many others have covered it already, so I will do so very briefly.

In essence, Billy Harrow, a museum curator, stumbles into a room where a giant squid has disappeared. Before he knows what is going on (especially since he doesn't figure out what is going on until the very end of the book), he ends up in the middle of a police investigation by the Cult Squad, then kidnapped by the Congregation of God Kraken. Yep, you guessed it. Squid worshippers. They are worried that the squid will be used to trigger an apocalypse that will wipe London out forever.

This is where the book goes from "Huh", to "What just happened?" So long as you can retain your grip on the plot, and you aren't too demanding about knowing exactly what is going on and why, at least instantly. If you are patient for long enough, it all makes sense by the end. SIn some perverted version of sense at least. In the end, it is obviously worth it, or I wouldn't give it five stars.

B. Characters
Characters are a place where this novel really shines. So often, we are given the perspective of people who are special. For this novel, that would probably have been Dane's perspective. But that isn't the one that we get. Instead we get Billy Harrow.

Billy is a normal person who has just been dumped into the land of the confused. He has just been dumped into a land of bizarre religions (including the Chaos Nazi's, the Londonmancers (who are a neutral party who attempt to guard London), the aforementioned squid worshippers, and others). There are the dangerous people who abound, including Goss and Subby, a pair of mischief makers and enforcers that are working for the criminal mastermind Tattoo, a sentient being that has been magically encased in the flesh of a poor, poor bystander, Paul.

Dane, Billy's co-conspirator in trying to find and rescue the squid is an ex-communicant of the Congregation of God Kraken. He is an enforcer for the cult, and, as such, has military training and skills. Moreover, he has some understanding of the mystical side of London that we have been dumped into. As I said, he would normally get the nod for protagonist. However, Dr. Mieville has chosen to go another route. We get to join Billy in being confused, instead. This is a motif repeated when Marginalia, a friend of Billy's, similarly gets dumped into situations that she doesn't understand. (Also, I love her name.)

Goss and Subby are interesting villains, and they are the boringest ones. The others, Tattoo, the Teuthex, along with the other good guys (Baron, Vardy, Collingswood, etc.), are all interesting characters, and there's no one here, except Byrne, who isn't an interesting character.

C. Setting
The novel is set in contemporary London. While I am sure that it could have been any city, really, China Mieville KNOWS London. So, it was a good choice.

D. Themes
There are a number of themes here. They include the pervasive presence of the mysterious under the familiar. The power of the imagination to give power to the things that we believe. The NEED to BELIEVE. And other universal and important themes.

E. Point of View
The point of view is generally third-person omniscient. For the beginning of the book, it centers mainly on Billy Harrow's perspective. In bits and pieces, we watch Goss and Subby, Paul, and Marginalia. It's workman, but it works. A second-person point-of-view, from the perspectives of Billy and Marginalia would have been interesting choice as well, if only provoking more annoyance on the part of many readers.

F. Aesthetics
With a single exception, to be mentioned, the story's aesthetic is beautiful. That one exception? The Brit speak in the beginning of the book. It DOES cut down later in the novel, but during the first hundred pages or so, where introducing the setting and the novel's development is so critical, it was a hindrance that was just at the wrong time. Unfortunate.

Conclusion:
Many, many, many people have complained about the detail worked into this novel. Way too many, actually, since the detail is perfect. I am a person who easily gets lost and/or bored with excessive detail. And I thought that it was great.

If you have ever wondered what it would be like to read Alice in Wonderland, without the cultural milieu of already knowing what happened and all of the bizarre things that are there, then this book is for you. If you've ever wondered about doing origami with living things, then this book is for you. If you have ever wondered about squid cults, well...that should be obvious. Buy it, read it, enjoy it, share it. It's a bucket of squiddly fun.

A

Harkius