My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Perhaps the most successful "modern gods and magic" book I've read (although actually I experienced it as an audiobook). This is the quality that I thought "American Gods" was going to achieve (when in fact I thought that book was quite over-rated). Miéville does an exceptional job establishing the relative power of the various players and, although the climax involves universe-altering forces, there's the strong sense that the author got to that point in a fair way. There's a good deal of absurdity (that Star Trek is worshipped leads to some key capabilities) but in general the author plays it straight, with the protagonists trying to forestall the apocalypse, and appropriately dreadful antagonists menacing them. The narrator of the audiobook, John Lee, does a great job with a text that's filled with neologisms, parentheticals, and interrupted dialog.