I think my response to this story boils down to this: I like the setting a lot more than the characters. I had a hard time connecting and identifying with these emotionally traumatized, hard-boiled, murderous & suicidal, quasi-human men. The love between them -- if you want to call it love, maybe more like love-as-escape-from-pain -- felt like a shadow. We see them meet, we see them part, we see Alain fall shrieking and mutilated into the depths of the abyss, but we don't really see why they have this attachment to one another. Perhaps that's intentional. But it left me wondering why Sam, the scarred misanthrope, loved the other so much.
But the war-torn Paris, with its airships and spells, and the words the author used to bring it to life, I liked a lot. It felt like a real place, seen through the "spiritual noir" eyes of Sam. Great stuff.
On the subject of Picasso, I'm neutral. It seemed like the author chose the artist to cast more light on what his creations -- Frankenstein-Sam, Bird-Alain, etc. -- look like, rather than for the story's sake. Especially considering we never see Picasso himself. If it had been Dali, or Matisse, or Yax-Valtar the Sarcomancer, we'd have gotten a very different feel for the nature of the strange beings that populate this story, but probably not the story itself.
