Kraken

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While I originally rated this slightly lower, it grew on me the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to read it again.

I had to tell myself to have faith in the Kraken, but what I really wanted was to pick up the bottle.Recommended for Miéville’s existing fans and those looking for a gritty, darkly comic urban fantasy. Billy Harrow is a biologist and can be forgiven for feeling this way, but everyone else in the London underworld, including everyone who predicted a horrifying apocalypse, has almost no connection with science and seem unlikely to miss it.

There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery.

But here the combined weight of ideas and plot press down on the characters, which struggle to grow beyond entertaining pop-cultural caricatures. A special division of police make Billy an offer, but before he can think twice, events have spiraled out of his control into weirdness.

The inventiveness of some of his creations was just so off the wall that this book had me hooked all the way through.

Unfortunately, Miéville muddies the plot significantly enough that it takes far too long for them to solve the mystery. It's like a nigh-bursting armoury of beloved keepsakes, the doors of which the readers inadevertently opens - getting buried, suffocating under the content for his curiosity. And while the story quickly blurs the line into the fantastic, London is still a place we feel and somehow expect to be real, run along recognisable lines, even if these have utterly oddball explanations.