Matters shuffle along, pressed and steamed by the incessant heat. Each piece in this collection appears more climate controlled, as if penned upon a sofa while listening to The Fall and waiting for delivery Korean barbecue. You can recognize my resentment. I wanted to read Thomas Ligotti last night to no avail. Then early this morning when it was already jungle muggy outside. I read a story Reports of Certain Events in London, and this I was pleased by found documents, amateur societies and phan...

A writer who’s literally able to manifest into words his wealth of imagination. And on that same note, perhaps that imagination also projects what we sometimes relate to as part of our collective imagination, shaped also by stories such as these.Not all the stories worked as well as some of course (in particular the comic strip one - not really sure what’s that all about)The summary on the back of the book succinctly describes what’s in the collection. And the prose of course is nothing short of...

China Mieville is not necessarily known for his work in shorter works, but Looking For Jake, his 2005 collection of shorter fiction is an excellent representation of his narrative skill and for his redoubtable imagination. Mieville sets a mood, creates an emotion that stays with the reader throughout what turns out to be a diverse and dusky eclectic blend of creepy and dark fiction.Looking for Jake – The opening salvo and titular short story is an artfully creepy sketch. An man searches for a fr...

Maybe this says something about me, but so far I haven't found the "New Weird" writers that weird overall. I'm glad that writers are trying to carry on with strangeness of Lovecraft and company without all the blatant racism but what it seems like for me is that too often the writers think having a strange concept is enough to make the story stand out without having to generate the requisite atmosphere to make the situation truly unsettling.Apparently the term was coined by M John Harrison in an...

Looking For Jake: Good post-apocalypse story 8/10Foundation: Haunted buildings who's ghosts are in the foundations... What? 6/10Ball Room: A haunted ball pit in an Ikea. Fuck yea 9/10Reports of Certain Events in London: Meta story about living streets. Didn't do it for me 5/10Familiar: Gross 7.5/10Entry Taken From A Medical Encyclopaedia: Quick and fun fake entry of a parasitic disease. 8/10Details: Really cool. 9/10Go Between: 8/10Different Skies: Good old school horror about a haunted object b...

"People need something, you know, to escape. They do. They need something to make them feel free."- China Miéville, "Jack" from Looking for JakeI'm not going to go into much detail on these stories. But, I'm happy to give them stars: 1. Looking for Jake - ★★★★ 2. Foundation - ★★★★★ 3. The Ball Room* - ★★★★ 4. Reports of Certain Events in London - ★★★★ 5. Familiar - ★★★★★ 6. Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia - ★★★ 7. Details - ★★★★★ 8. Go Between - ★★★★★ 9. Different Skies - ★★★★★10. An En...

A collection of short stories that range from sci-fi, horror, and fantasy all told with a compelling voice that kept me intrigued throughout each tale. The shorts are various lengths, with the longest being a bit under 100 pages. I had never read anything by China Mieville and found this to fulfill my collection of short stories for a challenge. I'd read reviews comparing him to HP Lovecraft, and I can now see how that comparison could be made. The writing style and the subject matter of the sto...

Sometimes short stories are a great way to introduce yourself to an author you haven't read before. I found China Mieville while reading an anthology and was intrigued but not sure if I would like him so I found his collection of short stories.If these are fantasy I would call them dark fantasy for lack of a better word. In all truth I would label them as mostly horror with some science fiction thrown in but it seems that Mieville wants a different label. I'm not saying that I don't like his wri...

I'm only halfway through reading this one, but hell, it might the best single-author short story collection I've ever read.*Now I finished reading and it's official - I'm really not sure if I have read a F/SF collection penned by a single author which would go on par with this one - I liked it even more than the one by Ted Chiang I read earlier this year, and that's something. Surely it had its weaker points - for me, those were particularly "Familiar", "'Tis The Season" and "An End to Hunger" -...

A mixed bag, but mostly good.Highlights: ""Looking for Jake" 4.5 starsClassic Mieville - one long letter to Jake chronicling the breakdown of London, true to form it's difficult to discern of the Breakdown is in the real world or within the author."Go Between" 4.5 starsA truly disturbing story about a man getting strange directives hidden within everyday objects he buys, he ponders about the nature of the directives are they good or evil, do they actually matter in the real world ?, the insight

Something I keep coming back to with China Mieville is how much he trusts his readers to not give up when they get confused. His favorite method of introducing you to ANYTHING is to drop you in the middle of a situation (or a city, or a world), and feed you little tidbits of an explanation until you finally know what's going on. Or don't. And the gaps in the information will stay in your brain so much longer than if he'd gone point-by-point through the story.The short stories don't leave as much...

I’ve hesitated to take the plunge into this collection for quite a while. Despite loving Miéville’s novels, I somehow couldn’t imagine his style working as well in short-story format. Well, his Miévilleness has proved me wrong. I'm not going to delve into plot details in these bullet reviews because part of the fun was going into each story blindly, unaware of what kind of crazy you'd be faced with at each turn of the page.Looking for Jake: A chilling and ominous overture. A low-key atmospheric

One of those rare occasions where I got to borrow a book from my girlfriend. (She has good taste, but since she lives in Belgium, I tend to encounter books first. But this one I kept meaning to pick up and somehow didn't.) I wasn't sure what I thought of the idea of China Miéville doing short stories: his novels are so often so sprawling, so full of gleefully grotesque imagery, that I didn't think he could contain himself within a short story.He can.Some of the stories are more effective than ot...

3.5 stars. Great to revisit New Crobuzon again! Recommended for fans of Perdido Street Station.Merged review:A wonderful, HPL inspired, chilling story.Merged review:Mieville knocks some of these out of the park, proving his talent for creating dark, immersive and wildly imaginative settings like you've never seen, or even dreamed before, in the shortest of stories. Rating based on the following:Details (5.0) - The devil is in the details. Mieville wonderfully channels the spirit of HPL in this c...

Another brilliant, if bleak, effort from Miéville.If I had to choose one word to tie in all of these short stories (and one novella, The Tain), I'd have to say "paranoia". Almost every story involves a character fearful of something — often without obvious cause. Miéville's wordplay is, as always, amazing. The title of  The Tain is hugely obscure, and yet right out of a dictionary: the tain is the reflective silver backing of a mirror. The creatures that come from the tain call t

In this collection, China Mieville let me know very quickly that he is an author that just goes for it, that trusts his skill and creative versatility to tell unusual tales. Most of the time, it works. My favorites include The Tain, Details, Different Skies, and The Ball Room (the best one, IMO). A very good outing by one of weird fiction's most creative authors.

The name China Miéville isn't generally synonymous with short stories, probably because he doesn't write them that often. In the past decade, he's published 10 novels, and in the same span, produced only 16 pieces of short fiction. I mean, whatever. Dude is busy. I think he also became an economics genius, ran for political office, and did about 3 million arm curls during that decade too. Oh, and got a giant squid tattoo. Anyway, it's pretty annoying to discover that he also does short fiction a...

I really enjoyed half of the novels that I've read by Mieville, and rather disliked the other half. Likewise, in this collection of stories, I enjoyed about half of them. The other half were boring. That is why I've rated this book with three out of five stars. Here are some brief summaries of a few of the stories.The first story, titled "Looking for Jake", was one of the boring stories. People in London start disappearing randomly, and the protagonist looks for his friend Jake. There didn't see...

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in this book. Generally I like China Miéville books but this one didn't do it for me. I'm not really a short story fan to begin with but I was hoping such a talented writer could do it. Not this time.A lot of the stories really felt like he was being clever for clevers sake. Lots of vague endings and cryptic meanings. I read a fiction to be entertained, to be told a story. Sometimes a vague ending can be ok but not in almost every single story. Nothing is eve...

This is probably the most uneven collection of short fiction that I’ve ever read. It embodies the “mixed bag” metaphor perfectly. Some stories were good to great and others were either tedious or completely unenjoyable. Mieville is obviously a very skilled writer and when he’s on, he does amazing things with his fiction. I enjoyed the amalgam of literary genres present throughout this collection. The transition from fantasy, horror, science fiction, “weird” fiction, speculative fiction, satire,