Short Book Reviews: Another Fun "Laundry Files" Novel

 Season of Skulls (A Novel in the World of the Laundry Files), by Charles Stross (Tor)

I’ve loved “The Laundry Files” by Charles Stross since the first adventure, a delicious blend of spy action adventure and Lovecraftian horror, with a dry sense of humor and a touch of romance. The series begins in a present-day world where magic is a branch of computational mathematics (i.e., if you get sufficiently powerful computers, they tap into magic, often with results you really, really don’t want, like awakening ancient powers and opening gates to other dimensions). Now, many volumes later, Britain is under “New Management” and the Prime Minister is an Elder God of terrifying power. Eve Starkey, once the hyperorganized assistant to an unscrupulous magician, is just trying to get her life back and stay under the radar…and fails at both.

This latest installment has all the tension, wit, and quirky imagination of its predecessors, but with a bit more, very satisfying romance thrown in. Poor Eve has been through so much, and her ex-boss, perhaps not-so-ex-husband is such a loathsome toad, she deserves a little happiness in the end. Stross delivers all this and more.

Great fun for lovers of the series

Short Book Reviews: The H. P. Lovecraft Elder Gods Stalk Modern London

Dead Lies Dreaming, by Charles Stross (Tordotcom)

The Elder Gods have cast their long, twisted shadow over contemporary London, the “New Management” has transformed government into a private megacorporation, and supernatural powers are popping up in people of all walks of life. One billionaire tycoon will stop at nothing to acquire the one true Necronomicon, a cursed grimoire right out of H. P. Lovecraft. When a group of psychic misfits stages a bank robbery, ex-cop Wendy Deere is put on the job as private security to track them down and soon finds herself drawn in to the hunt for the ghastly book. The plot goes from playful to horrific, from reality-bending and beyond in true Stross fashion. Although this world has much in common with The Laundry Files, and I kept waiting for our friends from those stories to show up and save the day, to my mind this is a parallel-Laundry-Files universe, just as fun and wildly inventive, and it works great as a stand-alone.