Kraken - China Mieville

A preserved specimen of a giant squid goes missing, somehow. All signs among the spiritually inclined point to this somehow ushering in the end of the world. Which causes a lot of chaos, because this is going to be a real end, nothing emerging from the ashes. Billy Harrow's the employee of the museum who prepared the giant squid, and this leads all concerned parties to believe that he is a figure of some importance. Which he is, but not in the way anybody seems to expect.

This is my first time reading Mieville's prose work, so I don't know if the twists and surprises are typical. Because that's a big part of this, just a seemingly constant string of misdirection and red herrings. Billy insisting there's nothing special about him, but he's wrong. But they're wrong about what's special about him. This person's dead, no they aren't. This person's behind this, no they aren't.

For the most part, it works because Mieville demonstrates that basically everyone is fumbling in the dark. They all suspect someone else is behind it, but all the assumptions keep turning out to be wrong. I think he goes to the well one time too many, though. There's a moment I thought the situation was resolved, the day had been saved, and then the story says, "Nope, not yet," and finally the true threat is revealed. But by then, I was just ready for things to be over. I wanted to exhale, and having to go through one more tense struggle was just too much.

That said, I love the world-building. All the different sorts of magic and belief, the ways of interacting with the world, of finding little loopholes. It's very interesting, in light of the final boss and what he's actually trying to destroy, the way all these characters have found little niches, ways to survive, thrive, or make a living. A place they can operate, a thing they can do that's unique.

Sometimes he leans a little too hard into trying to make the characters unique, at least in the sense that a couple of them really irritate me. I assume the one competent cop really just being a bully, who learned magic because she liked being able to use it to humiliate people, and presumably became a cop for the same reason, is deliberate. But the main hired muscle threat has this incredibly irritating way of speaking where two-thirds of what he says is seemingly random phrases and I just hated it. And Mieville didn't really do a good job of conveying what made him so terrifying to everyone. Goss seems to be a real sadist, but that's hardly unique in the book, and other than that, he's more annoying than impressive.

Outside that, though, most of the characters are interesting in how they're all sort of harried, stressed, and responding to it in different ways. Hunkering down, freaking out, shutting down, snapping at everyone, watching with avid interest. It's a real variety, which felt like a good representation of how people would behave.

'Billy dripped in more bleach and the ink rolled. "We're not going to pour you down the sink. You don't get to dissipate painlessly with rats and turds." He held the pipette over the glass. "I will piss in you and then bleach you so you dissolve. Where is the rest of you?"

He wrote. The penmanship was ragged. FUCKERS.'