Review: Perdido Street Station

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I remember a long time ago, the first time I read through the 3rd and 4th Harry Potter books, being really afraid of dementors, particularly after a certain scene in the 4th book that made me realize what they were capable of.

This book basically took that same fear impulse and elevated it to a level I didn't know was possible. It wasn't so much a particular scene at first (the one that makes you realize, "oh crap things are getting real now"), as it was processing the explanation that came after the fact of what had just happened, that made me do a double-take and suddenly grow deathly terrified of whatever was going on in this book. And it just grew worse from there.

They might as well straight up call this fantasy-horror, although the New Weird fits perfectly well too as it's plenty just straight up weird. The setting is much stranger than the generic Tolkien-esque or even modern day fantasy you might be used to- it hit me about ten pages in when I realized the main character was in love with an anthropomorphic scarab beetle. I think the most apt comparison would be some unholy mixture of Lovecraftian horror and steampunk, and I'm also reminded of the Planescape campaign setting, but it's unique enough outside of those influences such that I wouldn't limit it to those descriptors.

The story takes a while to pick up; the first 20% is really just acclimating you to the strangeness of this new world, and the premise seems just like a decent excuse to introduce the setting before the real plot takes over. But once it does, the city itself starts to open up in layers unseen, and you realize that it's really more about New Crobuzon than anything else, because the setting really is that fascinating (if not also terrifying).

If anything, this book makes me realize that I need to read more Weird stuff, because I just can't get enough of it (although I probably should've figured that by now after Planescape: Torment).