Bob Howard seems to be just another governmental drudge working the 9-5, stuck in bureaucratic IT Hell. However, when things go wrong in the programing, it is likely to summon up a nameless horror from the other side.

I think if I had tackled this 10, or even 5 years ago I may have liked it very much, but I could tell by page 35 that it wasn't going to work for me. Way too much IT-computer-math-techie-speak, not to mention graffiti language. The main character has potential, but the overall tone is dark. It is described as a "horror" or "Lovecraftian" style, so that didn't surprise me. One of the author's inspirations is Neal Stephenson, which is also a clue for me, because I do not care for his writing, either. I have a feeling that many people who enjoy this style of writing, and content would love this book. I won't star-rate it and bring down its average, since I didn't finish it.

Great mix of computer geek and math humor that comes out as a cross between Douglas Adams, James Bond, and H.P. Lovecraft. ( )

This contains almost all Stross's Laundry writing at the time of reviewing, including his essays on why Lovecraftiana and spy thrillers belong together; it lacks Down On the Farm, but that's freely available online anyway (as is the not-Laundry-but-a-conceptual-cousin A Colder War). Of the novels, The Atrocity Archives has the looser plot, and gives me the impression Stross was uncertain exactly how much Dilbert-esque geek gallows humour and references to occult mathematics to inject, but it's heavily driven by ideas anyway, a 'look, no hands' tour de force for any reader with the right background to understand, say, an offhand reference on p. 7 to a pile of books by 'Knuth, Dijkstra, Al-Hazred, other less familiar names'. The Jennifer Morgue, on the other hand, is a decidedly more tightly constructed story, but it felt as though it had sacrificed some of the eldritch dread (and the domestic office politics) to pull off its committed James Bond spoof. (The precise conceit it uses to excuse itself for this is a nifty one, but inescapably reminiscent of Witches Abroad and Snow White and the Seven Samurai; I'm not suggesting it's similar enough to be outright derivative, more that there may well be some deeply secret British writers' cabal with some very exacting induction rites.)

To my mind it's the short stories that are the most finely crafted of the Laundry series, with their freedom to stop worrying about character development and changes of scenery, take one central idea and run away with it. The Concrete Jungle reveals the dark truth about the spread of CCTV in Britain, and Pimpf is an excuse to make sysadmin jokes and talk about RPGs.

There are certainly examples of comedy Mythos genre crossover less likely to leave readers wondering what percentage of the jokes they got (Laidlaw's The Vicar of R'lyeh does the Cthulhu-meets-computing aspect in a slightly gentler fashion), but I'm not aware of any other that blends its themes with quite such undaunted ingenuity.

Stross is a worthy descendent of Len Deighton; his writing is excellent. I've been reading Deighton since "The Ipcress File" and LeCarré since "A Call for the Dead" and it's wonderful to find a worthy successor to these two. The fall of the USSR in 1991 really devastated the spy canon and Stross has conceived a great and plausible alternative. ( )