The Nightmare Stacks: Fresh Laundry

I am, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, wary of long-running franchises. There are a few I persist in following anyway, like the Dresden Files and Honor Harrington, that nevertheless exhibit clear signs of eventually stagnating or losing their way.

Still, these have earned some benefit of the doubt from me, and another one of them has been the Laundry novels by Charles Stross, about the exploits of the British secret service in charge of defending the country and the world from occult menaces from beyond.

I’ve commented in my articles on the previous three books that the series has seemed to be stalling out somewhat. The Apocalypse Codex seemed to come around for another go at the same scenario as the book before, the Fuller Memorandum. The Rhesus Chart and the Annihilation Score meanwhile suffered from continually reusing the same plot point of rooting out an enemy within which the series had already done to death. And the sense of escalation toward unknowable menaces from beyond space and time seemed to plateau out in favour of smaller campaigns against half-related threats.

In addition, the series wandered from its main character, the geeky and sardonic Bob Howard, to other point of view characters, and gave the villains point-of-view chapters, which rather undermined the effect of Bob’s comic voice on the one hand and undermined the shadowy horror of the enemy on the other hand.

But Bob was in oversight in Apocalypse Codex and Rhesus Chart, and his wife Mo was the main character of the Armageddon Score. But in the new book, the Nightmare Stacks, Bob doesn’t appear at all.

In the Nightmare Stacks, the main character is Alex Schwartz, a top-flight computer whiz recruited by the Laundry in the Rhesus Chart after becoming the victim of a daemonic possession called PHANG Syndrome. By the Laundry novels’ definition, he’s a vampire. Along with other members of the Laundry, including several friends of Bob’s, he’s involved in the cleanup efforts after the Laundry was gutted by its various moles. In the process, he’s being brought further into the Laundry’s tangled web, and learning more of their secrets.

The particular one that haunts him as it does the rest of the Laundry is CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the code name for when, as H.P. Lovecraft would have it, “the stars are right” and reality begins a period of distortion and accessibility to cosmic intelligences of alien malice.

However, we learn, there is a whole slew of CASE NIGHTMARE scenarios, and another one, CASE NIGHTMARE RED, has arisen – invasion by alien civilization.

Seizing on an opportunity presented by the breaking down of cosmic barriers, the survivors of the Morningstar Empire, an alien-fey civilization, determine to leave their dying world, laid waste by some of the cosmic horrors mentioned above, and invade ours, conquering it to forestall their own extinction.
The All-Highest leader of the Empire sends his daughter, his spymaster, to assume a human identity and infiltrate the leadership. In the end, she ends up enticing Alex, but in so doing she finds that her assignment may also be her only chance to survive out from under the shackles of the geas spells that bind everyone in her society.

Fundamentally, the problem I’m increasingly having with the Laundry novels is a sense that Stross started this escalation of cosmic menace – what the third book called ‘a hierarchy of horrors’ – but that he (or more probably, his editors) decided that the escalation was happening faster than they wanted, and now he’s making up new spinoff plots to draw this out longer. The introduction of CASE NIGHTMARE RED annoyed me, because of its sense of ‘wait, forget about that thing we’ve been building up for book after book, look at this instead!’

That said, the book also overcame a lot of my other complaints. It isn’t following the plot of finding a mole – one of the main characters, Cassie the spy, is trying to become one, but it doesn’t pan out that way. Moreover, despite losing both Bob and Mo at this point, the supporting characters that are sticking around are ones I like, and I like Alex. And not just because we share a name. His story of trying to find purpose in life and his self-hatred over his condition makes for an engaging read. In a strange way, the scene featuring his family drama was touching and supported a theme of human goodness, as contrasted against Cassie’s origins, as well as the pettier side of humanity as shown, somewhat, by his parents. On a larger canonical note, it’s kind of interesting that, whenever Bob is mentioned (having moved up the ladder of the organization) Alex’s reaction is a lot like Bob’s reaction to his boss Angleton in the early books.

I am also, as I’ve occasionally hinted in the past, a sucker for redemption stories, and Cassie goes through a very persuasive one which I really enjoyed. She’s quite a charming character – her little tic of answering “Yesyes” instead of just “yes” is weirdly cute and she and Alex make a sweet supernatural couple. At the same time, she’s no damsel and is the one to finalize the solution to the crisis.

On the flipside, the Morningstar Empire is very disturbing. In the classic Laundry fashion, they’re a crossover of modern technology and mysticism. They are essentially alien elves, with many of the more sinister of the tropes of the Fair Folk. It kinds of reminds me of the elves in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching Discworld sub-series. They have ‘dragons’ and ‘horses’ which are merely conventional names for something much scarier, and the brutal system of subjugation-by-magic they employ is genuinely scary as well as repugnant. While in the past books giving point-of-view time to the villains reduced their scariness, the buildup to the invasion and its progress is chilling, suspenseful and heartbreaking as we skip to innocent people – airline pilots, police, cosplayers at an anime convention notably – being wiped out by the invaders and even our occult defenses misfiring.

Okay, so in summary this is a good book, no doubt. While the series at large has begun to try my patience, and this continues with the book’s cliffhanger ending, it has a feel-good element I appreciated, good characters and makes use of events of past books to build this one. I haven’t heard a peep out of the Dresden Files or Honor Harrington series for a while, but in the meantime, the third of my favourite long-runners triumvirate is soldiering on.

 

The Annihilation Score: Not Quite the Crescendo

I’ve intimated in past posts that I’m skeptical of long-running series. I’ve borne with a couple of them – Honor Harrington, the Dresden Files, and enjoyed both. But stringing them out eventually reduces them to echoes.

And I’m a little worried that another favourite series might be heading the same way. But I’ve not given it up, or I’d not still be here.

I was pleased to welcome back Charles Stross’ Laundry Files: the exploits of the British secret department in charge of preventing incursions by supernatural alien intelligences and the humans enthralled to them.

After the last two books, I was getting a little annoyed about how the bigger context of the impending cosmic alignment disaster – known in-story as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN – kept getting stalled in the interest of telling smaller-scale stories that seemed to be sideshows both for characters and for the main mythology events.

While a certain amount of this is true for the new book, the Annihilation Score, it manages to have a lot of interesting stuff going on all the same. Not least because, quite unexpectedly, the point-of-view character is no longer Bob, the geeky computer sorcerer. It’s his wife.

Dominique O’Brien – Mo to most people – a philosopher, violinist and combat epistemologist has been, since the second Laundry book, the custodian of a sinister violin. Molded from human bone and empowered by the agonies of the victims sacrificed to build it, it is nevertheless a powerful weapon for the Laundry to drive back the creeping horrors from beyond. However, the cost to her sanity and the changes wrought on Bob by the events of previous books have, combined with the incredible stress and trauma of their duties, severely damaged their marriage.

At the same time as she copes with this, Mo is thrust into a new challenge. The effects of the sea change in the fabric of reality are becoming impossible to conceal from the general public. In particular, a lot of people are showing signs of unusual powers – superpowers, in fact. And keeping the lid on it is out of the question as a result. But, rather than operate openly, the Board of the Laundry puts Mo in charge of a front organization in charge of recruiting superheroes to aid the police, or to deal with the ones who won’t. Thrown together with some persons who have had entanglements with her husband, and a dashing police chief, Mo’s greater enemies, more than any wannabe supervillain, are her own trauma and psychological damage, the violin tempting her further into darkness, and a dastardly conspiracy within the British…

Oh, no, not again.

See, the perennial problem with the Laundry Files lately is that they keep reverting to the ‘enemy in our own ranks’ plot. Four of the books and two of the novellas have already done this in one form or another. It’s getting to the point where it seems like Britain is in more danger from itself than from Nyarlathotep.

At the same time as it keeps repeating itself, the novels are also wandering from what made them so effective. Evoking the Lovecraftian mythos, speaking of alien intellects and the ghosts of civilizations millions of years old, lurking at the edges of reality, made the books seriously scary. But the buildup of that mythos – a ‘hierarchy of horrors’ to use a phrase from the Fuller Memorandum – sort of plateaued out during the Apocalypse Codex. Ever since then it seems like the threat remains small groups of supernaturally-enhanced people. People just aren’t scary the way cosmic alien deities are scary, simple as that.

If it weren’t for that, it wouldn’t matter so much that the books also aren’t as funny as they used to be. Stross writes very witty dialogue, but seen through Bob’s or Mo’s deteriorating mental health, the collision of supernatural weirdness and workaday procedure and form-filling just isn’t very funny anymore either.

Having said all that, I could scarcely put this book down. The Cosmic Horror element is preserved somewhat by the violin – Lecter, as Mo calls it – getting inside her head like a combination of Cthulhu and the One Ring. The problem is that the main mystery gets put on hold for a long time while Mo deals with personal trauma and on-the-job stress, so the ambience of chill creepiness has to be built up very quickly in the run-up to the climax.

That’s not to say that Mo’s personal trials aren’t good reading: her PTSD, flashbacks, nightmares and workaholism are very persuasive and sympathetic. At the same time, her strength and professionalism in the midst of it makes her an admirable character. Her anger and resentment at the way the Laundry runs people ragged and the way she and other professional women are treated is intense and moving – a bit more feminist propaganda to add to the heap, one hopes. There’s a certain amount of humour surrounding public relations, superhero tropes and office politics, though not an awful lot.

It’s kind of interesting the way that Mo is put in charge of a primarily female team – there’s even a mention of the Bechdel Test in dialogue – in a way that suggests a theme about the tribulations of professional women. Mo’s tribulations aren’t over yet, although there’s a promise of her work expanding in scope in stories to come. Hope is also lent for hers and Bob’s relationship as she starts reaching a level on par with what he reached. Too soon to know for sure though.

I quite enjoyed the Annihilation Score – it made good use of groundwork laid in previous books, gave us something new and a fresh perspective by putting Mo front and centre. That said, I feel like the personal/political drama and the Cosmic Horror story keep jockeying for space against each other, so that it isn’t clear which is the A or B plot. Still, nothing deal-breaking has happened. And as I’ve said in the past, the Laundry Files tend to demand a few re-reads before you can make sense of them, so my first impression may improve.

So, like Mo, I’ll keep calm and carry on.

 

The Apocalypse Codex: the Latest Load of Laundry

Comic Fantasy, Comic Science Fiction, even Comic Detective Stories, these we understand. What is less easy to anticipate is Comic Horror. Nevertheless, there is at least one series on the shelves that excels in it.

The Apocalypse Codex is the fourth installment of Stross’s Laundry Files novels, featuring Bob Howard, a geeky technician and ‘computational demonologist,’ working for the Laundry, the secret arm of British Intelligence tasked with protecting humankind from supernatural alien horrors.

In the first book, the Atrocity Archives, Bob is confronted with an apocalyptic plot left over from the occult machinations of the Third Reich, and must struggle against the mind-racking torment of matrix management.

In the sequel, the Jennifer Morgue, Bob is sent to the Caribbean to infiltrate the inner circle of a charismatic billionaire and find out the nature of the eldritch wreckage at the sea bottom that so interests him.

In the Fuller Memorandum, Bob’s adventures take on a bleaker tone as the event codenamed CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is finally at hand, and conspiracies hatched in worlds beyond ours threaten humankind and Bob’s own nearest and dearest.

The Laundry Files take place in a Lovecraftian world. I’ll devote a special article to what that means exactly, but in summary it deals in the horror of humanity’s insignificance in the cosmic scale of things. Indeed, it is actually known as Cosmic Horror. It’s a genre haunted by the unknowable and the unseen, stressing the horror of being caught in the gaze of something so vast and alien that it could be standing right behind you in a totally empty room.

This is not, you’d think, a natural habitat for humour. Stross, however, manages to mesh the two. His secret, it seems to me, is the juxtaposition of the monsters that the Laundry exists to fight, and the fact that however bizarre its function, it’s still a civil service branch with all the paperwork, IT infrastructure and committee oversight that necessarily entails. Because of the unique nature of the work done by the Laundry, the banal bureaucracy and eldritch sorcery also have to collide in unexpected ways regarding things like security and procedure. The fact that paperclip audits, much joked about, turn out to be immensely critical in the Fuller Memorandum is a good illustration of this.

Stross, like Terry Pratchett (of whom he is an ardent fan) also derives humour from sendups of the customs of the kinds of stories he tells. The Jennifer Morgue in particular makes light of many of the tropes of spy thrillers. The difference between what real spywork is like versus the romanticized idea of it (a la James Bond) is a running gag.

Geek culture is the third prong of the comedy pitchfork, with references to Discworld, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Apple and others peppering the text.

For all of this, however, the fact that Bob is a geeky computer guy faced with forces powerful enough to devastate humanity or even the entire universe also manages to be genuinely scary. The sense of some unseen dread constantly at hand makes Bob’s comedic dithering also serve as his coping mechanism, and some of the things he and his combat epistemologist wife have to take on are gut-twistingly horrific. In this context, their happy domestic life is both heartwarming and deeply tragic. This peaked with the Fuller Memorandum, although it has by no means gone away in the Apocalypse Codex.

In this new installment, Bob is still recovering from the previous book’s ordeal, even as he’s sent into the field against another cell of the same forces that nearly got him killed then. His, and the Laundry’s, worst fears are realized, that the forces of darkness may have infiltrated into the highest echelons of government, and Bob is forced into a line of black ops outside even the Laundry’s usual realm of plausible deniability. Put in oversight of two ‘outside contractors,’ something which, by definition, the Laundry isn’t supposed to have, he’s sent to the USA to investigate the abnormal influence an evangelical preacher seems to have even among the great and the good of Whitehall.

This is the first time Stross has carried an arc through more than one book. We’ve entered a ‘mythology episode’ phase here, in much the same way that J.K. Rowling eventually dropped the episodic, start-from-scratch storytelling of Harry Potter from roughly book five onward, getting directly to the heart of the matter. Like Harry Potter, there’s always been a Big Bad informing events, but rather than a person, it’s an event, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, which is growing increasingly imminent with only the past two books dealing with it directly. It is, in brief, the apocalypse, and because it is drawing nigh, it looks as though the stories are going to be built around it from here on out.

The introduction of an ongoing arc was well-timed. Any more standalone adventures would have seemed dull at this point. I think that the Apocalypse Codex is suffering from a mild case of middle-chapter-ness, though. It’s much more plot-driven than character-driven. Stross seldom broke away from the point of view of Bob in the first books. Even when he did, he seldom went beyond those close to him. In this one, perspective rotates between him, his two contract agents, his managers and even the villains. It smacks of the same trend David Weber has been exhibiting with the Honor Harrington novels, spending progressively less time with the main character in the pursuit of a bigger scope. It’s impressive in terms of storytelling, but it’s harder to connect with when we seem to be losing sight of the people we’ve been following up ‘til now. The core cast of the first books was Bob, his wife Mo, and their cheekily sinister boss Angleton. In this book, Mo is barely present, as are Bob’s personal gadget-meisters, Pinky and Brains. Angleton takes quite a while to commence his usual puppeteering of events, and Bob spends a lot of the story in a passive role while new characters do the legwork. Indeed, given their record to date, I can’t quite understand why this couldn’t have been a husband-and-wife mission with Bob and Mo in the front lines together. I also feel that giving the villains POV time dinged the mystique critical to this style of horror a little bit.

Nonetheless, the new characters were pretty interesting people in their own right, and while Mo was in the background, certain moments suggested groundwork being laid for big payoffs down the line. The tone of the story is definitely grimmer since the Fuller Memorandum, but the humour is still there, albeit dried out a bit, and this story dialled the horror back down to merely ‘spooky.’ The actual story had a back-to-the-wall, fight-the-bad-guys vim to it that made it satisfying to read, and the suspense factor held my attention raptly. I didn’t like it as much as the others, but it was by no means bad and it’s still well worth sticking with the series.

I read the first three books in exactly the reverse of their publication order, so feel free to pick them up as they come, although the Apocalypse Codex is probably best appreciated if you read the Fuller Memorandum first. The Atrocity Archives and the Jennifer Morgue also have novellas published with them and there are more of those besides. They’re all great. I don’t think there’s any series I’ve reread as many times as I have the Laundry Files. Some background in Cosmic Horror is useful but not necessary. The first two books and the novellas especially will be more accessible if you have at least a basic grasp of computer and business jargon. Regardless, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll shudder in dread, and you’ll have a damned good mystery to keep you on the edge of your seat throughout.