Krewson
Saul Garamond comes home to his London apartment to find his father murdered and himself under arrest. While grieving in his jail cell, he is broken out by the stinking, shadowy King Rat, who takes Saul to the world beneath London's streets before revealing to him his own half-rat heritage. King Rat means to enlist Saul's aid against their oldest enemy, the Piper, who long ago embarrassed the King and stole the children in Hamelin, and has come again to do the same in London. This time, however, the rats have half-human rat-prince Saul--who is immune to the Piper's tune--on their side. If King Rat sounds a little too cute, it's because the book takes its cues from two of fantasy's most sugarcoated themes, the Lost Prince and the x. But it's somewhat grittier than that; the Prince doesn't usually eat garbage every few pages or spend most of his day wading through sewage. China Miéville blends a lot of good, solid folkloric material with a good deal of contemporary urban paranoia and drum-and-bass music, the multi-layered richness of which the Piper seeks to use for his own ends. It's ambitious, to be sure, and involved at times--it would help to know something about Cockney rhyming slang, the layout of London and its environs, and jungle music--but the book can easily be enjoyed by anyone with a love of good, gritty make-believe. King Rat is a strong first novel in the quirky sub-sub-genre of subterranean fairy tales that, with such recent good books as Lisa Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, looks less cute and more promising by the minute.
— Onion.com
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
In the past decade, contemporary renderings of traditional fairy tales have become a staple of fantasy fiction. This flashy riff on the Pied Piper theme marks a notable extension of the trend and an auspicious debut for its author. Saul Garamond is a restless young Londoner, aimlessly adrift, when he is wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his father. Saul is snatched from the authorities by a mysterious savior named King Rat, who claims to be both the deposed leader of the rodent army driven out of Hamelin 700 years before and Saul's real father. Raised as a human, Saul has much to unlearn before King can teach him to become a worthy opponent of the Rat Catcher, who framed Saul for murder and is still pursuing King. Meanwhile, the Rat Catcher forces his friendship on Saul's composer friend, Natasha, by posing as a flautist who hopes to work his melodies into her "drum `n' bass" dance music and turn London's hip-hop underground into his unwitting stormtroopers. Though the plot is predictable and Saul's efforts to get in touch with his inner rat are clearly patterned on the Star Wars school of messiah-making, Mi ville pulls the reader into the story through the kinetic energy of his prose. From the novel's opening image ("The trains that enter London arrive like ships sailing across the roofs"), the narrative crackles with a mesmerizing melange of impressionistic description and street slang that powerfully limns the squalid London cityscape. Paced at the rhythm of the Jungle music it evokes, this dark urban fantasy proves nearly as irresistible as the Pied Piper's tunes. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Charleston Post & Courier
A fine meld of the exotic and rare, dark and mysterious that becomes a wholly mesmerizing and original voice that's impossible to ignore.
Kirkus Reviews
Distinctive grunge fantasy from a British newcomer. Saul Garamond, bewilderingly arrested for the murder of his father, is spirited out of jail by an oddball who claims to be the King of the Rats. Saul's mother, apparently, was King Rat's sister. She fled rat-kind, preferring to join humanity, and married Saul's father. As King Rat conducts him through London's reeking underbelly, Saul finds latent rat-abilities stirring: he can eat garbage, move soundlessly and unseen, squeeze through impossibly tiny openings, and climb vertical walls. One individual alone daunts King Rat: the Piper of Hamelin, who, playing his flute, can force all rats, even King Rat, to dance to his tune. The Piper murdered Saul's father, mistaking him for Saul. But why? Saul, being half-rat, half-human, is immune to the Piper's summons—so the Piper must kill him. King Rat was the sole survivor of the debacle at Hamelin, and the rats have refused to obey him since. Saul encounters and barely escapes the stronger, quicker Piper, but he does learn that King Rat lied: he raped Saul's mother, and he is Saul's father. (Problem is, Saul's therefore all rat—so why is he immune to the Piper's call?) Having enslaved Saul's musician friends Natasha and Fabian, the Piper forces them to record new and irresistible music—and challenges Saul and King Rat to a showdown. Provided you can ignore the troublesome flaw: a bold, pounding, down-and-dirty debut. A working knowledge of Cockney rhyming slang helps.
