|New Weird| - China Miéville's "Three Moments of an Explosion" - Book Review

Should I be worried for how I actually liked some of these stories?

They’re… weirrrrrd… but I liked them…

Not all of them. Definitely.

That’s the complicated thing about collections of short stories. I will not necessarily like all 28 stories. But some of them were intensely scary. This is one of those times were maybe visual imagery should be taken down a notch. I was able to handle the visuals, but I know that someone with a weak stomach would have to put the book down more than a couple of times.

What. Am. I. Reading?

It felt so surrealist to me. Like something that is not understood at first but then the more you look at it and contemplate it you’re latched into wanting to know more.

I loved how Mieville’s starts off most of his stories with almost normal concepts and gives them twists. Unpredictable, eerie twists. Even though all of these 28 stories are different in their intensity of weird concepts, there is a pattern: All of these are very, very sad to think about. That does not stop you, however, to keep on reading. Sometimes you’re reading from the perspective of a regular person, sometimes you’re reading from the personification of oil rigs, of all things. It can be present time or a future that could never be but can scare the crap out of you. Concepts that I could never think off if I were to come up with them on my own. I don’t know how he does it, and I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of these stories are, but there’s no denying it leads to lots of thinking and an interest for the mysterious unknown.

One of my favorite stories was “The Crawl”. I could envision it so vividly. The time changes, the flashes of chaos and the apocalypse coming down upon the poor survivors. The terrifying zombie-like beings eating out someone’s face. I also liked how he doesn’t necessarily care about the usual writing compositions and how he can actually make an entire fictional trailer with his great writing. Sometimes you won’t even know if he’s going to be ambiguous or very, very descriptive.

Oooh, the mystery!