Kraken

Kraken is a fantasy novel by the British writer China Mieville, published in 2010 in the UK by Macmillan and in the US by Del Rey Books. It carries the subtitle An Anatomy on the title page.

At the Natural History Museum in London, a forty-foot specimen of giant squid in formalin vanishes in a single night, an event the novel treats as inexplicable, and a murder victim is found folded into a glass bottle. Several different groups want the specimen recovered, among them a member of the museum's own staff who is out of his depth, a secret squad of the London police, and people who have been waiting for something to happen around it. Mieville has described the book as a dark comedy about a squid-worshipping cult and the end of the world, and he has said that he chose to take the idea of the squid cult very seriously. The novel unfolds across a version of London in which the departments, cults and rivalries have their own rules and hierarchies.

Mieville wrote The City & the City at the same time as this novel, and the two were published separately so that the other could have room to itself. His fiction tends to build a complete invented logic around a single improbable premise.