First published 2005
In this electric collection of urban weird fiction, China Miéville shatters the membrane between reality and nightmare. Each story pulses with strange transformations: criminals mutated beyond recognition, cities that breathe and shift, supernatural entities wrestling with identity and purpose. From streets that vanish to creatures caught between human and impossible states, Miéville's stories explore the razor's edge where the familiar becomes alien. Ordinary spaces become sites of radical metamorphosis, where perception itself becomes unreliable. These are not traditional fantasy tales, but surgical incisions into the soft tissue of everyday existence—each story a precision instrument that reveals the monstrous potential hiding beneath mundane surfaces.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, fantasy, horror, urban-fantasy
Vibes: dark, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: supernatural, unreliable-narrator
303 pages · Hardcover · Macmillan
Content warnings: body-horror, gore, violence