Perdido Street Station - an informal poll

[kitchen_kink]

1. Has anyone else here read Perdido Street Station by China Miéville?

2. If so, are you finding it as BLINDINGLY FUCKING OMG NIGHTMARE-INDUCING CREEPY as I am??

Comments

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

1. Yes.
2. OH DEAR GOD YES. Have you met the Weaver? Or the Handlingers?

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

2. Yes and yes. I actually loooooove the Weaver, he's my favorite. The fucking handlingers, though. Auuuuggggghhhhh!!

It's like, just as soon as I think he can't come up with one more horrible creepy thing, THERE'S ANOTHER HORRIBLE CREEPY THING THAT'S EVEN WORSE.

But I actually dig the Weaver in a weird way.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah!

(Do a Google Image on "slake moth". I dares ya.)

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Fuuuuuuuck.

That's pretty creepy, but nobody seems to have yet gotten it quite the way I think of it, though.

Which is probably good, because I don't think I want to see a fully realized image of that thing that flails around in my head.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Wow, holy crap though:

http://www.curufea.com/games/crobuzon/6205.jpg

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Yes. I believe that is a feature, not a bug. (So to speak, ahem.)

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Ay yi. Ahem, indeed. :)

I guess it's just that I haven't read anything that affected me this way since...oh I don't know...reading early Clive Barker stuff probably 15 years ago now. And this is worse.

("Or, better??")

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

I'm voting "better". And you haven't even met Mr. Motley yet. *chuckle*

(And just wait until you get to "The Scar".)

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhohohoho yes I have met Mr. Motley. I'm about...2/3 of the way through?

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

I do not read for pleasure.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Who's talking about pleasure? :)

[goat.livejournal.com]

1. Yes, twice.

2. No, not at all...but then I read Clive Barker for fun.

[perseph12.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it, but I consider this a recommendation of the highest order ;)!

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I don't know if creepy would be how I would describe it? The moths are terrifying, but the overall ambiance of New Crobuzon was to me a weird mixture of repugnant/exhilirating to read. I guess the concept of people being Remade is creepy but I would probably describe it as viscerally disturbing before creepy.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

"Viscerally disturbing" is a great way of putting it. At first I joked that it was so visceral and deliberately out-grossing that it was like reading Chuck Palahniuk without the sense of humor. As I got further in I was hooked and started to feel the overall disturbing ambience and was enjoying it. But when the slake moths arrived, then the Weaver, then the fucking Handlingers, it started to get into creepy for me - as in, giving me the serious creeps.

[sen-no-ongaku.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Dude has issues; beautiful, beautiful issues.

[omnia-mutantur.livejournal.com]

1. Yes
2. Oh holy hell, yes.

Though really it was Mieville's Lovecraft homage that fucked me up for days.

[queenofhalves]

i finished it but found it overly gruesome for my taste.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

I can totally see that. I tend to enjoy horror, though.

[queenofhalves]

psychological horror is more my bad. for whatever reason, perdido didn't creep me out, just grossed me out. :)

i love his YA novel, though: un lun dun.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he does love the viscerally gross, dunne.

[queenofhalves]

BAG, not BAD. :>

[squibbon.livejournal.com]

I loved it. I found it creepy, but not in a nightmare-inducing kind of of way.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

I recently finished 'The City and the City' and thought it was brilliant. Now I guess I have a new book to read. ;-)

[number42.livejournal.com]

Totally different series. The City And The City had a mere whiff of otherworldlyness. Perdido Street Station and the sequels are an unholy alliance of Lovecraft with steampunk and other wonderful things.

[oonh.livejournal.com]

I sort of found Jasper Fforde's /Shades of Grey/ creepier than /Perdido Street Station/. I can deal with mutated humans or bizarre admixtures of humans and insects without batting an antennae, but when you introduce things that are not quite people in the way that Fforde does it, I find it disturbing.

[sunstealer.livejournal.com]

I loved the City and the City and have read most of Mieville's stuff, except Looking for Jake and Embassytown, which came out a few weeks ago.

Read Kraken too. It's gloriously f**ked up. All about umm. Punk rock eschatology and squid cults. And stuff.

[dpolicar]

I've read it, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, but no I didn't find it particularly nightmare-inducing creepy. Almost all of Mieville's creepy is in the worldbuilding rather than the people; my nightmares tend to be primarily populated by the latter.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

This makes sense.

[mangosteen]

1. Kinda. I stopped 186 pages through. I didn't like Dickens when Dickens was Dickens.

2. I must have stopped before the really icky stuff.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

I fail to understand your first comment. Are you talking about length, grim urban detail, what?

[mangosteen]

"Yes."

I found Perdido Street Station to be excessively wordy. There's a fine line between "grim urban detail" and "gratuitous thesaurus- diving to pad out a description." Dickens was paid by the word; Mieville has no such excuse.

To be fair, I found "The City and The City" to be a really fun read, contrasted with Perdido, which was just an irritating slog.

[concrete.livejournal.com]

Yes and yes. Although I wouldn't bother reading the next books in the series.

[sunstealer.livejournal.com]

Heh. I loved it and my dreams are similar in tone to the things he describes. Did I ever tell you the dream I had about a little girl in a homespun shift walking through a barren wasteland while she was followed by a capering quasi-shapeless red demon? At one point she found a dead bird on the ground, tied a string to it...and it flew behind her like a kite while the demon pranced and she sang.

The next book in that world is the Scar, which I found equally wonderful, though Iron Council was nowhere near as gloriously weird.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

I heart your dream.

[roozle.livejournal.com]

The only thing by Mieville that I've ever been able to get more than a chapter or two into has been his YA book UnLunDun -- which is remarkable and fun.

I do keep trying. I'm sure its a personal flaw.

[coraline]

me too me too!
i just don't have any patience for "unrelentingly grim." a book needs to have at least a character who i like and care about who has some chance of making it to the end of the book undestroyed.
i don't get the feeling mieville is into that sort of thing :)

(his writing is gorgeous, but... meh. not for me. i can't read iain banks either.)

[roozle.livejournal.com]

Ah, I don't think of Iain Banks as grim in the same kind of way. Baroque sometimes yes, and requiring precise attention to detail, but I very much like the Culture books. Not sure about his other works.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, yeah, I had that "unrelentingly grim" feeling early on, but I'm still waiting to see if this book gets to the end with any of our "heroes" still alive. I've come to really like some of the people, horribly flawed as they are.

[coraline]

i can't remember which book of his i read, but i found it very difficult going, and eric said that the other ones were worse, so i desisted.
i THINK it was banks that he described as "horrible things happening to unsympathetic people for no good reason" which pretty much describes the type of book i do not enjoy.

[number42.livejournal.com]

After reading it, I can't see ads for Lunestra without getting creeped out :-)

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhh, do those ads have moths in 'em?? Hahahaha!

[number42.livejournal.com]

They specifically have a large moth that comes in through the bedroom window and hovers over people in bed.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

1) I have not. Because:
2) People whose opinions I respect told me it would freak me the fuck out.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

That is a really good reason not to. :)

[infinitehotel.livejournal.com]

Yep! When Mieville is on, he's brilliant. I second the recommendation for "Kraken"; he throws away more interesting ideas in one chapter than most of his contemporaries do during their entire careers.

[missionista.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, before reading that, I liked moths. No more.