\nThis is Miéville’s first short story collection. I’ve read all his novels: both King Rat<\/i> which takes place in London, and the three Bas-Lag books. The stories in this book were closer to King Rat<\/i> in style, except the last story (“The Tain”) which, even though it is set in London, reminded me of the gothic-spooky feeling of the Bas-Lag books.\n<\/p>\n
\nMost of the stories turned out to be quite simple horror stories, which was a real disappointment to me. They’re not bad, as such, but neither are they anything special. I had expected the wild flights of fantasy, the strange worlds and strange ideas he has shown himself capable of. I thought King Rat<\/i> was a first work, and that he’d left that style behind because he’d learned to write more interesting stuff. Apparently not.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd when I say “simple horror stories”, I really mean “simple”. Several of them were so predictable that the idea, the horrible thing, was obvious already after a few pages. (“Different Skies”: Man buys an antique stained-glass window. It starts scaring him. So of course it is a window onto a different time or world.) Some seemed to be written with the aim of being unpleasant, and nothing else. (“Familiar”: Witch makes a familiar out of scraps of his own flesh. The familiar scares and disgusts him, he throws it out, and it starts growing.)\n<\/p>\n
\nAbout halfway through I gave up and started skimming through the stories, just to make sure that I didn’t miss any hidden gem among them. And it’s a good thing I didn’t put down the book before the end, because the one story that I read with real interest was the last and longest one, a novella titled “The Tain” that has also been published separately. Here, the mirrors of the world have opened and let through the things that were on the other side – the things we thought were our mirror images turn out to have lives of their own, and they really didn’t like being our slaves.\n<\/p>\n
\nI get the impression that Miéville simply needs space in order to properly develop an idea, to really let loose his talent. The short story as a literary form is too short for this: he ends up reporting the idea, and nothing else.\n<\/p>\n
\nLots of reviews on the web disagree, and find the stories here diverse, deep, unsettling, and mysterious.\n<\/p>\n
\nAmazon UK<\/a>, Amazon US<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is Miéville’s first short story collection. I’ve read all his novels: both King Rat which takes place in London, and the three Bas-Lag books. The stories in this book were closer to King Rat in style, except the last story (“The Tain”) which, even though it is set in London, reminded me of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}