Looking for Jake (with spoliers)

[Thadlerian]

So, here is a thread in which we can discuss the short stories in Miéville's Looking for Jake - and other stories.
I'll start out with my personal opinions of each of the stories. Needless to say, they all have in common being rather strange and disturbing, every one of them.

Looking for Jake
The title story. I liked it. It has a melancholic feel, and it seems rather diffuse on what's really going on. But there's quite some emotion in it.

Foundation
Utilizing a classic and dear title to tell a story that's certainly not nice at all. Some political motivation. Rather eerie.

The Ball Room
The most down-to-earth of them all, I think. Lots of good observation, and then there's the strange element. I'll have to read it twice, as I didn't really get it. Who was that girl in the ball room at night? Who was that woman? What really happent?

Reports of certain events in London
Very interesting, this one. Feels a little Gaiman-ish. But it is the first of several stories with a "hidden ending", so to speak. We never find out in detail what that incident in Varmin Way (though the picture descriptions give some sort of clues) was. Sometimes a good plot element, other it just feels cheap and annoying.

Familiar
Somehow, very familiar, so to speak. Very reminiscent about that construct subplot in Perdido Street Station. Rather linear, though. The whole substance is based on the inventiveness in the descriptions of the Familiar's actions.

Entry taken from a medical encyclopædia
Short and bizzarre, not really a story.

Details
I liked this one. I feel it works pretty well, both in concept, plot and execution.

Go Between
My personal favourite in the book. Excellent and mysterious, without really touching any supernatural elements. Gleefully paranoid.

Different Skies
Okay, this one verges on scariness. No, I really thought it was frightening. With the light in that window, and the kids "outside". And the ending, open as all the other endings, was nice and ambiguous.

An end to hunger
Mixed feelings about this one. Akyan is most certainly a hilarious character, not least because of his colorful language. But being a story concerning internet in 2000, it is of course very dated, and doesn't feel as strange as Miéville perhaps may have hoped. And the ending was very frustrating. Here I just felt cheated; it was so open that practically anything may have happent. So tell me, you others who have read it, is it possible to extract some more meaning from the rest of the story? What happent to Akyan? What was that big thing he planned to do? Can I find this out by rereading?

Tis the season
I think this one was published for free somewhere. OK story, felt a little demonstrative.

Jack
Return to New Crobuzon. Like Encyclopædia, not really a story, it just floats on descriptions and statements.

On the way to the front
I didn't understand squat of it. Will have to reread a couple of times.

The Tain
The main story, a novella. Will have to reread this one too, had big problems trying to visualise stuff like the imagos and their world.

So what are your opinions?

[knivesout]

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 encyclopædia
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!

[GOLLUM]

GRRR.....this sounds really good. Sadly I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive by post and now after reading these comments I'm growing ever less patient...

[knivesout]

Always glad to help out in spreading tension, dissension and strife.

[GOLLUM]

[Jay]

I'm writing a review this as we speak (along with Sean Wright book) - so forgive me I haven't read any of the breakdowns I saw - as I hate being influenced by what I read when in the process of writing - but will be back in a couple of days to both agree and haggle!

Always good to have new Mieville material to discuss!

[knivesout]

Read a few moe last night:

Different Skies
Mieville channels Lovecraft and meditates on old age as well. The ending seemed a little forced - I wasn't at all certain that the alternative courses of action the protagonist dismissed were so untenable - but I think that confronting those eerie kids had become an obsessive need by that point. Great character study.

An end to hunger
A very political piece, possibly spurred by Lefty (he prefers the term Marxist) Mieville's distrust of corporate-sponsored charities. It falls into the trap that the essential point is debatable (even if you agree with the writer's position, which in this case I largely do), which makes immersion into the story a little hard. The ending is vague, but I thought that was part of the overall pattern here of leaving the really scary stuff up to our imagination. Still, the topicality made the story feel relatively minor.

Tis the season
I read this when it was published in the Socialist Review, and it was a fun satire on the commercialisation of Christmas. Another one that's very transparently politicised, but with a willingness to keep tonge firmly planted in cheek. Mieville does have a decent hand at comedy.

[GOLLUM]

GRR......time to shoot the Postman...

[Thadlerian]

Originally Posted by knivesout

The ending is vague, but I thought that was part of the overall pattern here of leaving the really scary stuff up to our imagination.

This is what I hastily abbreviate into A.T.S.S.I.W.T.Y.W.I.I. (A Thing So Scary I Won't Tell You What It Is). Sure they are nice, but you must agree having read several stories in a row using this for the ending can get a little tiresome. After all, Miéville had already used it in Reports, and I think it's being used in The Tain too.

[knivesout]

Yes, it's best not to try and read the whole collection in one sitting (assuming you have a day and most of a night to spare) because of that. I've noticed the same thing with Clark Ashton Smith, who worked in a very definite horrific/fantastic vein - the stories work best if taken in metered doses rather than all at once.

[Spiral Jacobs]

Hi, I have been looking for info on Mr Mieville on the net and have found very little that is recent. I found this place noticed a few fans of his work and thought I may aswell join in. Just got Looking for jake Yesterday, after a months of waiting. So far I am loving it as I recently got into his books I have only read his Bas Lag stuff, I picked up King Rat yesterday aswell and had to deceide which to read first.

[Oxman]

I got this for christmas and I've been reading each story in between other stuff. This is my first taste of Mieville and I've read up to "Go Between".
Thus far I've been pretty impressed. Some of his writing has massive potential and is thoroughly enjoyable and original, but other bits leave me a little cold.
On the evidence of this collection of stories, I'll certainly be investigating his work further, delving into his novels. I think his style is better suited to a longer tale and "King Rat" sounds ever-so intriguing.

[rune]

Ive not got a copy yet, but will add my thoughts once I get one

[littlemissattitude]

I got this a couple of months ago and haven't had time to read it yet. I guess I'm going to have to make time.

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by littlemissattitude

I got this a couple of months ago and haven't had time to read it yet. I guess I'm going to have to make time.

I've recently got hold of the book and so far so good. I was tryting to get this passed as a Book Club discussion but maybe no need with this thread now...