[books 2016] the new Laundry novel
Sep. 15th, 2016 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulro46. The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross
The seventh in Stross' Laundry series, in which Lovecraftian horrors from other dimensions are real, and there is a branch of the Civil Service to deal with it.
Regular readers will know that I love these books, and I was really excited to find that this one takes place in Leeds. It turns out that was kind of distracting - I kept having to check with Google maps that I remembered correctly where places are. But it made me appreciate things like the chapter title "the Doom that Came to Harehills" - I worked in Harehills for two years.
Like the last book, Bob is no longer the protagonist - he's now one of the scary people (in the loosest possible use of "people") on Mahogany Row. The protagonist is Alex, one of the vampires (sorry, PHANGs) from the last book but one. I like Alex a lot. He's funny and adorable. The adversaries are the Laundry-world take on the Fae.
So everything that should make it Right Up My Street, but I still struggled a bit with it. Part of it was a technical thing - the use of italics to demonstrate that the Fae are speaking in their own language. In my visually impaired state, I struggle with italics. Added to the fact that I never like the parts in books where the POV shifts to the antagonists, that meant quite a lot of the book wasn't that engaging.
It's definitely not that he's phoning them in (something some authors do when they get to this point in a series) - it's definitely well thought through.
I think the problem was that it wasn't The Annihilation Score - Mo is by far the most interesting character in the series, it's about classical music, and Mo's violin scares the ever-loving bejeezus out of me.
The seventh in Stross' Laundry series, in which Lovecraftian horrors from other dimensions are real, and there is a branch of the Civil Service to deal with it.
Regular readers will know that I love these books, and I was really excited to find that this one takes place in Leeds. It turns out that was kind of distracting - I kept having to check with Google maps that I remembered correctly where places are. But it made me appreciate things like the chapter title "the Doom that Came to Harehills" - I worked in Harehills for two years.
Like the last book, Bob is no longer the protagonist - he's now one of the scary people (in the loosest possible use of "people") on Mahogany Row. The protagonist is Alex, one of the vampires (sorry, PHANGs) from the last book but one. I like Alex a lot. He's funny and adorable. The adversaries are the Laundry-world take on the Fae.
So everything that should make it Right Up My Street, but I still struggled a bit with it. Part of it was a technical thing - the use of italics to demonstrate that the Fae are speaking in their own language. In my visually impaired state, I struggle with italics. Added to the fact that I never like the parts in books where the POV shifts to the antagonists, that meant quite a lot of the book wasn't that engaging.
It's definitely not that he's phoning them in (something some authors do when they get to this point in a series) - it's definitely well thought through.
I think the problem was that it wasn't The Annihilation Score - Mo is by far the most interesting character in the series, it's about classical music, and Mo's violin scares the ever-loving bejeezus out of me.
