Perdido perditum

Finished Perdido Street Station. Conclude that probably I should just leave male writers alone; but still... Mieville does do something really really interesting. He describes squalor and rot and decaying buildings in passage after passage and it never gets old. Even more: all this celebration of decay ought to read purple and overdone and vaguely silly. It doesn't: and that puts him one up, right there, on any decadent aesthete or decadent horror writer I can think of.
( City horrors, horrible civilians )