NPR described the novella as "a beautiful chocolate that you bite into and find filled with blood",[1] and The Scotsman found its unresolved nature tantalising, while The New York Times termed it "an exercise in haunting, lovely frustration".

[5] In a 2017 interview, Miéville felt he was entering a "middle period" in his writing and spoke of a new interest in novellas, which he found well-suited to explore trauma and "the unrepresentable".

[6] He expressed his enjoyment of fiction that is difficult to interpret, such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis,[7] and of "uneasy endings" that disorient readers.

Three of his novels, King Rat, Kraken and Un Lun Dun, are set in a fictional version of London; The City and the City in a fictional Eastern Europe; Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council in a secondary world known as Bas-Lag; and Embassytown on a planet at the outskirts of the known universe.

[10] Some reviewers theorise that the town is part of Bas-Lag,[11] a world with plant-like and aquatic inhabitants that the magazine Strange Horizons sees in the background of the novella.

The relationship between the boy's parents was tense, and he occasionally witnesses the father killing animals and throwing the corpses into a crevasse in a nearby cave.

This Census-Taker is told in a sparse, minimalist style that extends from its characters to its world: the protagonist is unnamed and his memories fractured, the setting bleak and spare.

The scholar Carl Freedman sees the influences of Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino in the story,[14] while Eric Sandberg feels that it highlights a general trend towards minimalism in Miéville's career.

At the same time, Sandberg remarks that a love of language and wordplay is a key element of Miéville's writing, warning that "even his most restrained work can be (mis)characterized as 'dictionary‐drunk'".

The narrator fluctuates between first- and third-person from the beginning of the story, his perception shaken by the violent event he has witnessed (the supposed death of his mother).

[19] Much of the town is dilapidated and filled with ruined machinery and buildings; there are hints that this is not a natural occurrence, but a result of war and military violence.

In her view, when the boy jumps over the hole at the end of the story, he accepts that his past trauma will never be explained; he moves on and thus comes of age.

[5] In a related motif, the boy's father is a key-maker whose keys do not open physical locks, but unlock desires, money and travel.

[26] Describing it as an exploration of trauma and narrative strategy, the Los Angeles Review of Books stated that the story had "moments of extreme and visceral violence" yet was evocative and haunting.

The Spectator criticised the ending of the book as abrupt and confusing,[27] while The New York Times termed it "an exercise in haunting, lovely frustration" due to the story's open-endedness.

[2] Finding the plot "maddeningly vague", The Millions faulted the novella as "a bad book by a very fine writer", and admired Miéville for venturing outside his comfort zone, if only to fail.

[30] In a similar viewpoint, Locus suggested that the ending would be haunting and provocative for the right reader,[31] as did HuffPost, which said the novella was not for "the 'Inception'-averse", but that others would find it a "moody, ethereal read".