So: these reviews are about my subjective enjoyment of books. I'm not trying to give an objective rating. So sometimes I read a good book that is just not for me.
This is one of those: I really did not enjoy this book. I expected to like it: it was hyped by people I know and most of the reviews are very positive. I've enjoyed a lot of science fiction recently, and I like 'big concept' books. It's at 4.5 stars on Amazon and 4.2 on Goodreads: pretty stunning numbers. I don't think all those people are wrong, they just like something that I don't.
Why didn't I like it?
To try to sum up the book: imagine sort of a Men-In-Black setup, but instead of goofy aliens, the threats are 'antimemes' which are ideas that can attack or feed on memories. They sometimes appear embodied, sometimes aren't, some of them have mysterious backstories and others are more playful.
It's set in the modern day near the UK, but is mostly a capsule plot: you don't get many scenes from the normal world, there's no introduction in which everything is fine, a lot of the action is in or around the headquarters of the organization.
There's pretty limited character development and personality, not a ton of interiority other than people reflecting on the difficulty of the fight and whether they're capable of it.
This book is firmly in the style of Lovecraftian horror, which means themes of the unknown, cosmic dread, helplessness, and so on. That genre doesn't really work for me. I love science fiction in which a world with particular principles is constructed and you see how those play out: Octavia E. Butler and Ted Chiang are good examples of that. A world of unknowable mystery and all-encompassing dread just isn't very interesting for me. And events on a cosmic scale aren't spooky or scary to me, they're too detached from the real world.
The other thing that I really didn't like is that the world-building never ends. Or in other terms, they just keep pulling out deus ex machinas. Like it feels exhausting to build an idea in your head of what the principles of the fictional world are, and then it's revealed that in this universe there's always some new unexpected technology in the next chapter. Maybe this is meant to deepen the sense of dread: despite pulling out all the big guns (both fig. and lit.), there's no hope in sight.
So for me this was a pretty unsatisfying read. It didn't hook me with the intrigue or stun me with the world-building. I think there's a lot of context around this book that I was not exposed to: it is an outgrowth of the author's extensive online writing in the SCP Foundation online community. There's probably some fan-service happening here that's going over my head. But anyway, yeah - didn't hit.