The Atrocity Archives (A Laundry Files Novel) Mass Market Paperback – December 30, 2008

I heard about Charles Stross on a certain facebook horror books group, and when I checked out The Atrocity Archives (A Laundry Files Novel), I had to give it a try. It’s a brilliant blend of comedy and horror. The Capital Laundry Services is the front for a super-secret British government agency. Their mission? To protect humanity from all the horrors they’re unaware of. Like most government projects they run on paperwork and back-stabbing. Bob is our erstwhile hero. He’s tech support, but he really wants to be a field agent. Be careful what you wish for, Bob! While trying to dodge the manipulations of his direct colleagues and superiors, he ends up roped into a higher-up’s attempts to keep people safe from the unknown.This is a world in which math can destroy the universe, and Bob’s first, miserable field agent assignment is to break into an office and destroy a math paper. (“If he goes public and reproduces [the paper] we could be facing a Level One reality excursion within weeks.”) This is a book that drops gems like “the Turing-Lovecraft theorem.” You don’t need to be able to understand the magic-babble in order to have a lot of fun reading about it! I expect that a reader versed in math or physics, however, probably would get more out of it than I did. There are other universes, and creatures from those universes who, for one reason or another, would like to find their way into ours. This is what Bob and his colleagues are meant to prevent from happening.Bob is an entertaining guy. He’s pretty normal, all things considered, despite the situation he finds himself in. He has roommates (Pinky and Brains, both of whom also work for the Laundry), he has a psycho quasi-ex girlfriend (honestly, not fond of that character even though we don’t see her much–she’s an unfortunate stereotype), and he’s taking courses at work that are basically “computational demonology for dummies.”I’m so-so on the female characters, at least at first. Bob’s colleagues and psycho ex are stereotypes. But a couple of late-arriving women are much more interesting. One of them needs to be rescued a lot, though.It was confusing that the story I was reading basically ended two-thirds of the way through, and then the last third is a separate story involving most of the same characters and through-plots and taking place after the first story. I was kind of expecting one full tale. A few details in the second story confused me a bit, but I hung on by my fingernails and enjoyed the ride.Content note for death, monsters, and Nazis, but this isn’t a gross-out horror novel.

This, the first book in the Laundry Files series, is an interesting mixture of genres told from the point of view of Bob Howard. He's an IT guy who has been working for the Laundry for a few years - underpaid, shares a house in London with a couple of mad scientists, and looking to break into Field Ops out of sheer boredom. The Laundry is the super-secret government organization tasked with "defending the earth from the scum of the multiverse" and keeping the existence of magic hidden from the general public. He is sent to Santa Cruz, California to help out a professor at UCSC - a British national who isn't being allowed to leave the States, courtesy of the Dark Chamber (the US answer to the Laundry). Then things start happening...This book is a mixture of hard scifi, bureaucratic satire, alternative history, spy genre and a touch of romance. It's very enjoyable, but I found myself blipping over the detailed mathematics of it all (hence the four star review). Don't let this put you off the book, however. Bob is a very likable character and makes an excellent narrator. We are introduced to other characters who will play parts in future Laundry Files stories, most notably Angleton, Bob's scary and mysterious manager. He's my favorite character and he and Bob make a memorable team."Atrocity Archives" is rather short and is paired with an excellent short story which serves as a follow up, "The Concrete Jungle." The short story form is very well suited to Laundry adventures and I hope Mr. Stross gives us more of them in the future. I'm a fan of this entire series and highly recommend that you start here and move on sequentially in order to get the most out of the series.

Bob Howard is his section IT geek in The Laundry - the UK's version of government sponsored supernatural protection agency. Life is pretty predictable for him till he decides to apply for active duty, and his first "simple" job goes pear-shaped on him. From this point onwards Bob is going to learn that while he might know a lot about the supernatural he didn't quite know as much as he thought about The Laundry itself.This book is actually one novel, "The Atrocity Archives" where we meet Bob and the strange world he inhabits and a novella, "The concrete jungle" which follows up the main story in sequel.I really enjoyed this book. It doesn't have any real noticeably slow patches. Despite his sometimes horrible work I also liked Bob. I'm glad I picked up this book, while the whole idea of a real dangerous supernatural world surrounding us isn't unique this is a nice fresh approach to the theme. Some of the things it deals with are straight out of a nightmare, but despite that it has an undertone of humour and a sharp eye for office politics and procedures. It's a bit like Dilbert with teeth at times. This is a book I'll be recommending to other friends.