Great idea! Hopefully caladanbrood, rune Jay, and anyone else who plans to read this book will join in too, as and when.
Here are my first impressions of the stories I've read so far:
Looking for Jake
Set firmly in a real-world location - London - I was thrilled to see Mieville continuing to mine the vein of urban horror first quarried in King Rat. Some vaguely defined yet all-encompassing event has damaged the fabric of reality in some fundamental way, and the narrator wanders through a changed city, attempting to find a friend and winding up by choosing to plunge into the heart of the mystery that has changed his city. What I liked best was the narrator's decription of the crowds in a Tube station, where the usual chaos, with its underlying fractal patterns, had broken down into something far more random, and therefore terrifying. The story seems to hinge so much on the fact that even the most random aspects of our lives have some sort of underyling patterns - and the removal of those deep patterns cna be a source of real horror.
Foundation
The idea of a 'house whisperer', a man who communicates with buildings to find out their condition, is pretty intriguing, and drew me in. The reason why he can talk to buildings unlocks a horrific progression that left me as shaken as the protagonist.
The Ball Room
This story is really creepy. A chain of furniture stores provides playrooms for their customers' young children. A nicely thoughtful bit of company policy or a sinister ploy? The narrator's voice is wonderfuly well realised and the sense of indistinct foreboding that seems to drive most of Mieville's horrific short fiction is highyl effective here.
Reports of certain events in London
This story is told in the form of excerpts from documents that the narrator (Mieville himself in a rather neat fictional device) recieves mistakenly, together with his comments and observations on them. I found the unusual form engaging and well handled. Again, there's a thrill in watching the transition from a very normal, modern city to something bizzare and threatening at loose within it. The concept of 'feral streets' is both silly and fascinating, and something only someone as obsessed with the city as a fictional character as Mieville is could have thought up or used this well. The story also has the element of 'secret history' that other stories (The Ball Room for one) in this collection share - where the story, and the horror in it, hinge on the revelation of something absolutely strange and anomalous going on just beneath the surface of mundane reality.
Familiar
This story seemed very slight to me - apart from describing a rather loathsome little arcane beastie, it didn't have much point. Perhaps a re-read is required?
Entry taken from a medical encyclopędia
This is Mieville's contribution to Jeff VanderMeer's
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases and possibly works best in the original context.
Details
This was very close to the sort of modern horror that I associate with Ramsey Campbell's short fiction, for example. Another tale where the surface of everyday life - literally in this case - conceals great horrors. One of those stories that makes you look around yourself with new trepidation and dismay after reading it. The atmosphere or urban (or small-town) decay is well suggested, rather than explicitly detailed.
Go Between
I'd have to agree with Thadlerian in that this is my favourite in the book so far. Another 'secret history', and containing the most effective paranoia and alternating delusions of grandeur, illusions of infamy and fears of insignificance outside of PKD.
Overall thoughts: I'm pleased to see that Mieville's definite flair for urban horror is on display here. Like HP Lovecraft, Mieville specialises in horrors that are vague and nebulous in some way. While HPL's 'terrors too terrible to describe' may seem like a literary cop-out at times, Mieville skilfully leaves our own imaginations to fill in the blanks, while keeping us just confused enough to feel the full force of the distortions he inflicts on superficially familiar reality in these stories. These are stories that disturb reality - and me!