China Miéville’s new novel is 1,264 pages long. Following his breakthrough ‘New Weird’ masterpiece Perdido Street Station (2000), Miéville was a productive writer: eight big novels in a decade. Then after 2011’s Embassytown he seemed to fall quiet: a couple of novellas, a history of the Russian Revolution, little else. There were rumours that he had retired from authorship altogether. But not so. We can now see what he’s been doing over the past decade and a half: writing a very, very long novel.

The first 190 pages of The Rouse tells the story of Maur (short for Maureen: though why she doesn’t go by ‘Mo’ like every other Maureen in history isn’t made clear), who gets pregnant as a teenager. Her life as a single mother through the 1970s-80s is well narrated: something like Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone via Annie Ernaux. Maur’s son Ewan, an on-the-spectrum child, grows to adulthood, joins the military and dies of what the RAF says is a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Maur doubts this is what happened.

Miéville could have published this as a standalone novel to plaudits and credit. Instead, he continues. For the next 100 pages the tone shifts. Maur’s search for the truth – hers is not the only child whose death on British military bases is suspicious – is intercut with the life of a British soldier from a generation earlier, Trooper Allardyce, fighting in the ‘Malayan Emergency’ of the 1950s. As a war novel this element is, again, vividly written: the vagaries and violence of military life, and Allardyce’s mix of canny brutality and humanity, are well rendered. This second novel segues into a third, a ghost story, in which it seems that Maur’s son has returned to life, along with others of the prematurely dead, all soldiers. The Ministry of Defence calls these ‘REs’, ‘Revenance Events’, and this third novel essays more heated writing, straining for vibes of terror and uncanniness.

The novel continues, by turns an adventure–thriller, a spy story, a quest tale. But the ghost story persists, expands, swallows the narrative. The Rouse grows vaster than empires and more slow, a creep that drags the narrative momentum. Allardyce is in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion, and Miéville stints none of the torturous horrors the British inflicted upon the native population. We move past Vietnam and the Falklands war. Characters are introduced and killed off, always violently. Maur uncovers supernatural conspiracies.

We learn that, where most objects are made of ordinary stuff, some, though they look ordinary, are made of a mysterious other stuff. These are called ‘apports’ and they have the ability to ‘rouse’ the dead. The undead proliferate. Characters talk of ‘hot stinging darkness’ and ‘a vortex of black force’. A malign entity called ‘Old Pal’ looms. We discover, many pages in, that Maur is a medium who can communicate with Old Pal, and is herself haunted in a literal sense: in one scene, ectoplasm gushes from her vagina.

M.R. James gets name-checked. ‘Funny, ain’t it,’ says Allardyce, ‘how many of Monty James’s so-called you-know-whats are touchable before they’re seen, less like spirits of the dead and more like devils, things that plop onto the bed with a horrible mass.’ That’s certainly the kind of ghost story The Rouse is: horribly palpable, often disgustingly physical in its manifold hauntings.

There are many encounters with uncanny presences, creatures, things lurking in the shadows, but repetition wears the barbs of this kind of writing smooth. It’s not badly done, but its scary-spookiness suffers from diminishing returns. Less is more may be a contentious piece of writing advice, but when it comes to the business of trailing tendrils of dread across the sensitive membranes of your readers’ sensibilities, it is a solid rule. There’s a reason M.R. James wrote short stories and not 1,300-page meganovels.

The style grows more ornate and ormolu as it goes on. At the beginning the prose is ‘everything was very still’ and ‘her heartbeat slowed and she looked around’; by the end it is full of ‘cornucopaseptic ooze’, ‘the squeeze and haul to alter quiddity’, ‘Stallo had grown attuned to the oozing around within the brainpan of qualia not his own’. More, the second half of the novel is littered with formatting eccentricities, lacunae, sentences that break off abruptly, whole pages blank, or given over to single words, or scattered letters, or word-ladders. They’re there to fracture and break up the reading experience, something they do effectively, such that quite often I really wasn’t sure what was going on. But bafflement is not the same thing as mysterious dread.

Towards the end of the novel, as its plot strands are finally tied together, The Rouse folds into its ghost story a revenge story – ‘Ghost stories don’t work that fucking way,’ Allardyce objects. ‘They’re not about justice.’ To which Maur replies: ‘They’re about everything.’

Are they, though? There’s an awful lot in this enormous novel, but I’m not convinced ‘the ghost story’ is really able to encompass the whole of history from 1950 to the present day, the myriad lives that intersect. The Rouse includes striking scenes, vivid and sometimes disgusting writing, but it is not just long, it is too long. Rather than aggregating the weird, the novel’s extensiveness dilutes it. The reader has supped overfull of horrors long before they turn the final page.