Some of my favorite stories in the book are straight-up horror tales reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe or the recent movie “The Babadook.” “Sacken” is a sharp little tale about a young woman subjected for an unknown reason to a horrible ancient punishment, first laid out in Justinian law, involving a sack, a bunch of animals and a body of water.

In “The Rabbet,” an empty picture frame curdles and poisons everything placed inside it: “Goodnight Moon” becomes a story about “the universe closing on a sick void,” three smiley girls in a toothpaste ad suddenly want “to do something bad,” Mr. Miéville writes. “The one on the right would hit a woman with a brick. The last, in a bright zigzag jumper, would put spikes in strangers’ shoes and fly through the night over her small town with her teeth dripping spit.”

A chilling story called “The 9th Technique” — the title is a reference to the 10 techniques laid out as acceptable forms of interrogation in a United States government memo on torture in 2002 — imagines that a black market has arisen in objects that were used to question suspects during the Iraq war. (The most precious is the cloth used in the first recorded waterboarding.) Somehow these artifacts have acquired magical powers that can be animated if the conjurer recites the memo.

“You do not list 10 techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation,” Mr. Miéville writes.

I did not love all the stories. Some were so abstruse, so erudite, that I had a hard time keeping up. Mr. Miéville knows high culture, low culture, history, how to spell “anagnorisis” and “integument,” how to use phrases like “radical aesthetic democracy” in a sentence and what the Book of Thoth is. It’s not that he’s trying to show off — if anything, it feels as if he has so much to say that he is limited by the words and forms of thinking available to him — but occasionally I thought he was too smart for me.

He can’t help impressing, though. There are things to admire in every story, even the ones you can’t quite grasp. The book left me feeling unsettled, uneasy, nervous, and I think that is Mr. Miéville’s point. He wants to draw attention to the scratching under the floorboards, the panic in our heads, the rebellion of nature and inanimate objects. As he says, “These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city.”