Cannonball Read Bingo: Black
This. book. has. everything. Sentient tattoos, supernatural picket lines, spearguns, squid cults, invisible truffle pigs, and human origami. What’s human origami, you ask? It’s that thing of when you use magic to fit an adult man into a envelope and then send him in the mail to one of your enemies.
Kraken is a police procedural, and a horror novel, and a fantasy satire. But mostly it’s about the end of the world. It follows the misadventures of Billy Harrow, a museum curator who becomes falsely implicated in the theft of a giant squid. He soon learns that this squid is more than just a museum specimen; it may be a harbinger of the apocalypse.
This was not the weirdest book I’ve read all year, but that’s only because I read Harrow the Ninth back in the spring. China Mieville has a knack for coming up with the absolutely most insane creatures, characters, and concepts, and then treating them like they’re completely pedestrian. His writing is so grounded that I was genuinely not sure if this was a fantasy at first, because the first few chapters read like a standard crime novel. And then the human origami happened, and the sentient tattoo, and a whole host of other oddities that I will let you discover on your own. There have been parallels drawn between Kraken and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere: both are urban fantasies featuring an unremarkable male protagonist blundering through an alternate version of London. However, I think Kraken is the winner here. Mieville has created a vivid and memorable world that is equal parts hilarious and terrifying. I give Kraken 2 enthusiastic tentacles up.