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Cover of Kraken

Kraken

an anatomy

China Miéville

770 pages

A darkly hilarious, wildly inventive plunge into a secret, grimy London where warring cults and sentient tattoos battle over the apocalypse.

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What it feels like

Reading this feels like stumbling into a secret, subterranean London where the absurd is treated with deadly, terrifying seriousness. The narrative moves at a brisk, frantic clip, dragging you through a grimy, chaotic underworld populated by warring cults, sentient tattoos, and magical familiars. The prose is dense and aggressively imaginative, throwing baroque occult concepts and sharp street slang at you with dizzying speed. It is a deeply weird experience, balancing pitch-black comedy with genuine apocalyptic dread. You are constantly off-balance, laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the premise one moment and shivering at the grotesque body horror the next. It will absolutely delight readers who want their urban fantasy to be wildly inventive, unapologetically bizarre, and steeped in the strange magic of the city.

Mood
  • surreal
  • grimy
  • chaotic
  • occult
  • frenetic
Tone
  • darkly comedic
  • deadpan
  • absurd
  • erudite
  • gritty
Pace
brisk
Themes
the absurdity of belief · hidden urban ecosystems · apocalyptic dread · the power of obsession
The writing
Dense, hyper-imaginative, and aggressively verbose, blending London street slang with baroque, occult terminology.
The arc
The journey shifts from bewildered, mundane skepticism to a frantic, desperate navigation of an utterly bizarre and apocalyptic reality.
Who it's for
Readers who crave urban fantasy that leans heavily into the weird, the grotesque, and the philosophical, preferring their magic systems chaotic and their humor pitch-black.
Content notes
  • body horror
  • violence
  • gore
  • cult dynamics
  • animal death

About the book

Kraken is a fantasy novel by British author China Miéville. It is published in the UK by Macmillan, and in the US by Del Rey Books. The book bears the subtitle "An Anatomy" on the title page. It was the winner for the 2011 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Miéville has described the book as "a dark comedy about a squid-worshipping cult and the end of the world. It takes the idea of the squid cult very seriously. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd."

Description from Open Library.

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