Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.

"[1] An inexplicable event has occurred at the Natural History Museum, London—a forty-foot specimen of giant squid in formalin has disappeared overnight.

Various groups are interested in getting the squid back, including a naive staff member, a secret squad of the London Metropolitan Police, assorted religious cults, and various supernatural and mostly dead criminal elements.

[2] In a review for The Guardian, Damien G Walter says: "Kraken seems as though Miéville is taking a step back from the artistic agenda that has previously informed his writing, perhaps to flex creative muscles grown stiff in the constraining seriousness of the New Weird.

"[3] Similarly, in a review originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald, James Bradley observes, "[Kraken is] Miéville’s most stylistically exuberant work to date, not just gloriously adjectival ... but wildly creative as well, marrying a marvellous ear for the rhythms of London English to the cracked semi-scientific jargon of occult literature.