The Nightmare Stacks

The Nightmare Stacks is the seventh book in Charles Stross' The Laundry Files series (previously: 1 2 3 4 4.5 5 6). It is the second book to feature a different narrator (#6 also did this) --- this time, a new and mostly-unwilling recruit, a math PhD who has been turned into a vampire by an unlikely theorem discovered while researching esoteric topology for high-frequency trading banks. This character first showed up book #5, and is a good bumbling nerd.

TL;DR: I loved this book!

(Stross is nominated for a Hugo for "Best Series" this year for The Laundry Files, and I absolutely think he deserves it. We'll find out in a few weeks.)

The world of The Laundry Files is much like our own, up to some point in the 90s or 00s where it started diverging because it turns out that Lovecraftian horrors are real and are accessible to those with enough computational power/acumen/idiocy to summon them.  You'd think that it is good to be a computer/math nerd, then, since those are the people with the acumen to control Actual Magical Power, but with great power comes great mandatory bureaucratic machinery to control that power. Nerds are now double-burdened, firstly with the standard dollop of social marginalization, and secondly with the mandate to Save The World (and not let anyone find out they're doing it), and since most of Stross' nerdy characters are lawful good, they actually try to follow rules, limit civilian casualties, and get their stupid make-work done so that they can get to the real work in their off-hours.

The Lovecraftian descriptions include mention of Lovecraft, of course, because in the books' universe, Lovecraft was the same author as in ours (albeit much more accurate-to-reality). This means that characters can openly observe that certain monsters are Lovecraftian, or certain encounters have a DnD-ish flavor, and so on --- they are able to see how much their reality looks like a crafted fantasy story from our reality. This has some fun applications, as characters who e.g. play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons end up describing their encounters in DnD style. It also means that the reader can consider whether, and how, Stross' creations fit into the bigger fantasy pantheon, in the terms that his characters use for understanding their own experiences.

Apparently this setup is infinitely enjoyable to me; certainly Stross' tone, a wry sarcasm, is able to make descriptions of otherwise-mundane tasks a fun read. Plus it is peppered with the technical language of computer science, academia, and geekery. For example, describing the protagonist math PhD/social bumpkin: "Alex doesn't so much wonder about sex as have a fully developed five-year post-doc research program in mind, assuming he ever finds a willing collaborator." (p.195) Or referring to The Royal Armouries as "one of the largest collections of murder cutlery in the entire world." (p. 265) Or using the word "deterministic" for its technical meaning having to do with probability in "they make the entirely predictable and deterministic trip south to the big IKEA warehouse store" (p. 190).

This dry and skeptical tone is somehow shaped into a thrilling, electrifying read that had me shouting in excitement several times throughout the book. I read most of it in the period from midnight to dawn, because I got to a point and thought, no, Stross wouldn't possibly do that... how could he do that... how is he going to do THAT? I had the sense that Stross, as an author, is willing to make big and irreversible sacrifices for the sake of story, and I could not believe how much he chose to make this not another installment in an endlessly-extensible franchise. This is the book where Stross, Dungeon Master Extraordinaire of the Laundry-verse, makes it clear that he is not going to DM this game forever, and he is not afraid of the Total Party Kill. (I am slightly concerned for books 8 and 9, in my to-read queue.)

I am not sure how to convey how utterly stunning and brilliant a book this is, since the heavy plot choices and the sheer importance of what was happening are based on the many, many hours I have sunk into reading all the preceding books in the series, and immersing myself in Stross' dry and withdrawn attitude towards bureaucracy, tech support, and nerds with feelings. Overall this book was a virtuosic demonstration of Stross' command and control of narrative, his incredible attention to story beats, and the unrelenting and fantastic way that his cleverness will sneak up behind you and BOP you on the head with a pun that has been several pages (or chapters... or books!) in the making.

Conclusorily, this book was excellent and I recommend it --- but you might need to read 6 books' worth of prelude to enjoy it as much as I did.


This post's theme word is fuliginous (adj), "sooty", or "colored by soot, or having the color of soot." "Over it all she wears a black hooded cloak, fuliginous and dull as death." (p. 218)