A review by lordenglishssbm
King Rat by China Miéville

3.0

The building blocks of Mieville's style are all here: Characters whose development happens in the background until he brings it all together at the very end, the repetition of somewhat unusual words (that nevertheless fit the situation) for no real reason beyond he seems to like them, and the mashup of horror imagery with left-wing politics. It's all done much more sloppily here than in The Scar, though. His prose in particular has some rather memorable misfires, though I at least got a laugh out of the description "like a cartoon villain on speed."

It's not a bad first book. It moves at a clip and the villain is memorable, but I'm happy that he kept refining his craft after writing it.