The plot itself is an almost pointless contrivance that simply serves to hold the weirdness together. None really seemed sympathetic, and while I’m mentioning it, Billy was more than a bit Arthur Dentish in the beginning, wandering around and saying, “what? And Mieville both mentions the criminally unknown Hugh Cook (of the delightful The Walrus and the Warwolf) in the forward and includes one of his poems, The Kraken Wakes, within the pages.

On another note, it's easy to compare Kraken to the Ben Aaronovitch "Rivers of London" series, which I read before I found Kraken, but Kraken for me conjured up more of a gritty atmosphere, whereas the RoL series are a bit lighter, though still very good. Like Frankenstein's monster it seems conceived and created with the best of intentions, but ultimately a failure, a mimickry of the intended goal and spectacular near-miss. Please, dear reader, get used to phrases like this, because they lurk everywhere and creep up on the reader sometimes alone or in small packs, often leaving entire passages alone only to mug the unsuspcting reader when he turns a page.It’s not that I didn’t know what was going on, but I think a lot of lines intended to be humorous fell flat for me because I was spending too much time decoding the slang. 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. I mean, it sounds cool, but a stolen squid god macguffin is still a macguffin, and a bland hero is still a bland hero.

The language was the biggest thorn, though in my other frames of mind, I also really enjoyed it at the same time. Like, literal entrails: they cut through and pry apart pavement and the city has literal blood and organs and stuff. This pacing leaves little room for introspection, psychological progression, or denouement, but Mieville's quirky melodrama is no place for psychological sketches, he's writing characters, not people. WPC Kath Collingswood, a police officer of the FSRC who is aided in her investigations by an " aetherial animal companion.Comienzo muy prometedor pero luego pasa a convertirse en un camino que simplemente no pude entender ni seguir. The police are part of the real police force, the organized crime seems like it’s supposed to be like mundane criminal organizations, and everyone else just uses the occasional glamor to prevent anyone from noticing their unusual activities. Since there seem to be no rules to the operation of this magic, everyone accepts that virtually anything is possible if someone is powerful or clever enough. In Kraken, he takes the conspiracy thriller and infuses it with so much new weirdness that green goo is oozing from between the pages.

Like any classic movie monster, it works its fascinating magic only as long as we don't care to inspect the structure that supports the illusion, or questions its premises.

Chapters 200-299: Well at least now we're getting somewhere, and it's mostly interesting, though there are still way too many characters and weird things about the universe to remember. Mieville keeps his plot aloft, and there's never a dull moment, though there are a number of artificially dramatic moments, his short chapters often ending in sudden twists and evoking the cliffhangers of a radio melodrama "Will Abigail survive?