I don't remember Dr Miéville's prose being as dense and impacted as this. This is a millennial-apocalypse novel set in his beloved London (I haven't read any of China's since the Bas-Lag-set "Scar"). Giant squids - he will need to work hard to keep the novel out of the path of Jeff Vandermeer who has written several stories featuring squid cults and . There is also a feeling of Tim Powers here, especially "The Anubis Gates" with its dodgy London criminals who not only seem to have been around forever, backing themselves into the fabric of the city, they really have. These crims' dwelling place is a mythical one which has been touched on by other writers from Mervyn Peake onward and I am not sure how much it is genuinely a London myth or one that proceeds inevitably from the incessantly built-over nature of London.

His characters are quirky and individual - even the police officers; given China's politics you might expect the cops to be onedimensional brutes but they aren't. And cheers for a novel that can mention the Cthulhu Mythos as part of popular culture without actually being a Cthulhu novel (although the giant tentacled dreamer who awakes when the stars are right ... yeah, go figure).

This novel is less serious than some of his and this shows in a renewed playfulness in the character and event (even while people are being killed in horrible ways including a new and unlikely use for an old fad.

although he does have 'WPC's, a rank which hasn't existed since 1983, in a novel set in the early 21stC.