Over the past couple of months I’ve been reading The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue back to back, the first two novels of Charles Stross’s The Laundry Files series. I say months here because I took lengthy breaks while reading them, being occupied with other interests. That is not a slight against the books, who are really good as you would expect from a series that was as a whole legitimately nominated for a Hugo Award and some of the shorter writings in it won. It’s just my personal reading habits and interests.
Considering the acclaim and subject matter, I feel kind of like I’ve been living under a rock for not having found out about the series earlier. They actually only popped onto my radar because the author was a guest on a podcast I listen to a while back, and a short description of the universe made me want to check it out. Churba apparently mentioned the series a while back, but until I searched for the name of the series I didn’t even realize he had.
The Laundry Files is an amalgam of spy-thriller, eldritch horror and work comedy. The hero is “Bob Howard”, a cover name that only is evocative in how nondescript it is, thus fulfilling an intention that the name “James Bond” failed despite having the same goal. The character has more in common with Arthur Dent than Ian Fleming’s creation, and thank goodness for that. He is a computer programmer turned field agent for a british government agency that has no official name and is simply referred to as “The Laundry” because it is their job to clean up, which in this case means keeping the public from finding out that the world is part of a multi-dimensional reality with all sorts of Lovecraftian beasts on the other side of a thin membrane that can be pierced by applied mathematics, with not a few careless script-kiddie or math student having their soul devoured by said horrors from beyond.
It is mostly told from Bob’s first person perspective as he has to both engage with the mentioned dangers but also a lethargic bureaucratic culture where political infighting and jockeying for positions and promotions often causes neglect and jeopardy of others, which isn’t great when training exercises can go pear-shaped and result in an unlucky participant becoming host to a minor demon. Thankfully the series isn’t trying to say that the private sector would be better at this (quite the opposite actually) but rather that it would be nice if people could put aside their personal ambitions and that a “thank you” and some extra resources would be nice for the people who actually keep society running.
I really enjoy the series and the juxtaposition of mundane work troubles with extraordinary dangers from beyond. Of course I am a prime target as a computer nerd, with the series littered with reference to geek culture, though unfortunately sometimes they can drift into a bit too overt stuff. The series borrows liberally from Lovecraft, which is quite deliberate, but also can be a bit cliched at this point. Then again, these novels came out in 2004 and 2006 respectively, so maybe that’s just the intervening time playing a trick on me.
My favorite part of the series has been the short story The Concrete Jungle which is included in the paperback volume of The Atrocity Archive that I bought, which I think could be a good entry point for the not-yet convinced. I think it has the best mixture of the aspects of the series of what I read so far, is short, and doesn’t require any real preexisting knowledge about the series itself.