Aside from some mild name-dropping (in the case of Grisamenthum), Miéville doesn’t spend much time introducing the major players and the history of this aspect to the city. Well, as classic said once there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy .

You've probably read the blurbs: The impending apocalypse is kicked off when a giant squid is abducted from the Natural History Museum in London. But here the combined weight of ideas and plot press down on the characters, which struggle to grow beyond entertaining pop-cultural caricatures. Kraken is about the end of the world and the feelings of unease and eventually despair that precede it, but despite this it is the least serious of Miéville’s novels (at least of those I’ve read, namely all of them except Un Lun Dun, although King Rat was quite a long time ago at this point). The multi-award winning author has reflected the city's surreal side in Un Lun Dun, set it to a drum'n'bass beat in King Rat, and inundated it with vampire imagoes in The Tain. The absurdity of an upper middle class Londoner kneeling before a giant squid beak is humorous, but it’s humorous because it’s out of place.On the other side, the language is something else, something that makes me enjoy it and yet makes my brain work a bit too, because not only does he flat out improve my vocabulary, he takes a rather deconstructionist approach to structure at times. Billy's last girlfriend had in fact made repeated attempts to get him to read both books, but without success. I actually felt the horror of the Goss/Subby characters like very few other characters in other horror stories I've read.

The cast includes a devout squid worshipper, a foul-mouthed Wiccan police constable styled on Amy Winehouse, and a transcendental union leader who spends much of the plot incarnated in a Captain Kirk action toy. Kraken by China Mieville is about as predictable and formulaic as a book about a squid sect amidst a London underground teaming with competing cults and all under the shadow of the end of the world can be. On his latest tour, he walks into the room on which the centre’s giant squid specimen is displayed … only to find it missing, stolen.Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that a book that features an undersea leviathan and “the sea” as a character also includes an abundance of red herrings. Yet we are still waiting for a novelist who can use the strengths of their medium to revolutionize the original vision of the comic book authors who have defined this subgenre for thirty years. We are overwhelmed with events and actions, we seem to be lost in the jumble of ideas and characters. Neverwhere‘s London Below was safely out of sight and its interactions with the mundane world were mediated by homeless people, whereas there’s no metaphysical division between Miéville’s two Londons. I had to tell myself to have faith in the Kraken, but what I really wanted was to pick up the bottle.