Books like Slow Chocolate Autopsy

I wanted to like this book as much as I liked the cover and the title, and I think my first mistake was in expecting it to be a more traditional sort of prose-based narrative. Instead, what I got was...well...Slow Chocolate Autopsy. I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it as much as I thought I would. I did enjoy a few sentences, and a few paragraphs, but nothing held together, aside from one or two stories. "The Articulate Head" and "The Apotheosis of Lea Bride Road" were probably the strongest stories for me. "Careful the Horses Bite" wasn't bad, but the overall problem I had with the book was the monotonous narrative structure: each story seems fragmentary in exactly the same way. There's a poetic cadence to the manner in which Sinclair writes, but it ultimately undermines the stories he's attempting to tell--or not tell, as the case may be: for me, at least. I think this is a problem with structure more than anything else. It was a bit like playing music with a metronome: at some point, you stop playing music and simply listen to the tick-tock of the metronome. That happened to me. By about page 75, I stopped reading the book and simply started measuring the full-sentence to sentence-fragment ratio. For prose, even experimental prose, this doesn't work for me...as it means that once your know the cadence of the writing, you can tap it out on a table-top as an interesting finger-drumming exercise, or you can set your watch to it. Reading it becomes unnecessary and nearly-unpleasant. The prose-based stories are all the same general length. For something experimental, it was oddly rigid and surprisingly uninventive; for a work based on the kind of "psycho-geography" of London, it was opaque and inaccessible for someone not born in London, and yet it held an endless, though somewhat turgid appeal for me. I won't deny that I missed something here, but I think that this is also one of the few failings of the book: as someone not born in London and as someone who doesn't live there, I couldn't find a way into the interconnected/disjointed narratives here: as mood pieces they were great, but I've already gotten wildly inventive, giddy, and intoxicating, emotionally-complex versions of that mood from China Miéville and more disturbing, nauseating, emotionally-engaging takes on the theme by M. John Harrison. In Slow Chocolate Autopsy the prose is beautiful, and that's one of the drawbacks as the book as a whole feels more like an ornate, decorative earring without a person wearing it. The rhythm of the admittedly beautiful (though monotonous prose) seems to render this piece into a kind of percussive, abstract music, as--for me, at least--Sinclair's sentence structures maps out a really interesting drum-beat. If that was the intent of this "novel" then he succeeded, but in terms of the "Norton" stuff, I got no sense of a character residing in a place, but not in any particular time. I felt a profound sense of London, but not a London somehow decoupled from or transcendent to our expectations of how time flows. Cities have been described as eternal, but the impression I got from this book is of a London that is somewhat petrified, vaguely anachronistic, and infinitely grimy.