"I love fantasy," wrote author China Miéville in Locus. "I've never agreed with the idea that there's this rigid distinction between fantasy and science fiction and horror. To me, they are part of the same tradition, which I generally call 'Weird Fiction.'" Weird fiction is what Miéville himself serves up in his three novels: his 1998 King Rat is a mixture of horror, mystery, and murder drawn against a backdrop of London's urban wasteland; the award-winning Perdido Street Station takes readers on a surreal voyage that is part fantasy and part horror of epic size; and his 2002 novel, The Scar, presents a more focused look at the same terrain as his second novel, the quasi-Victorian New Crobuzon. "Miéville's urban worlds are dark, dreary, decayed . . . and utterly magical," wrote Gabriel Chouinard on the Infinity Plus Web site. "From the grimy, seedy underbelly of...