This set of short stories admirably shows why Miéville's work has been called "weird fiction." Most of these are very strange indeed.

In some of them, though, the strangeness feels like incompleteness. They should be longer, go into more detail, or just have an ending. Several of the pieces are less true stories than vignettes, scenes. Not itself a bad thing, but it slightly belies the subtitle.

None of which to say I didn’t enjoy this. I very much did. Still, I think he’s stronger as a novelist than as a short-story writer.