The squid’s been nicked, to begin with.
But curator Billy Harrow has more to worry about than the theft of a 28-foot Architeuthis from London’s Museum of Natural History. He’s being interrogated by members of the extremely unorthodox Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime unit. He’s being followed by squirrels. And then he’s recruited by an underground cult of Kraken worshipers who consider squids to be saints and Billy to be their… John the Baptist?
For Billy the unwilling prophet and Dane Parnell, a renegade Krakenist, there isn’t much time to figure out who’s got the squid. Welcome to the latter days: word on—and under—the streets of London is that the apocalypse is right around the corner. Possibly more than one.
It’s tough to summarize this book without its sounding like a terrible made-for-SyFy movie (“CEPHALOPOCALYPSE*: The Squid… Are… RISING”). Nonetheless, it’s the most fun I’ve had between book covers all year. Miéville has a great ear and enthusiasm for words; his prose is a dictionary set to music. The city of London becomes a character in itself, along with several creepy, memorable villains and one great cop (bad odds, those).
The story is fueled by pure, gleeful invention. Malevolent ink, homicidal origami, strikes in the afterlife, and iPod djinn—the sense of an author brainstorming overtakes the plot at some point, and we move from a fairly normal London, in which the weird is just breaching the surface of the mundane, to a city teeming with more seers, familiars, and dueling magical crime lords than could ever possibly be concealed from public view. But for prose like this, I was glad to go along for the ride—even when it was a ride in the back of a speeding lorry, with a bunch of entrail-reading Londonmancers and a preserved squid in a tank.
*“APOCALOCTOPUS”?
Check the WRL catalog for Kraken.
