davidgillon | Currently Reading - 3-Oct-2018 (Reply)

The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross

Book 8 of The Laundry Files. I was stalled partway through by the sheer existential horror of Michael Gove as Minister for Supernatural Defence, but turned out to be much closer to the end than I thought and finished this quickly when I got back to it. This one has Bob back in the hot seat as narrator/protagonist (the literary conceit is that these books are narrative diaries written by Laundry ops for whoever has to pick up the pieces after they get eaten by things squamous and rugose) after diversions involving Mo (Bob's wife) and junior agent Alex (who is a PHANG - Person of Haemophagic Autocombusting Nocturnal Glamour) in the last couple of books.

The previous book saw Alex fall for a manic pixie dream girl, who turned out to be a bit too real on the manic pixie side of things as the Last Host of the Alfar invaded Yorkshire and had a fair try at leveling Leeds, triggering a really unfortunate interaction between the Laundry's network of automatically targeted gargoyle guns (aka the national CCTV network) and a costume con, making it a really bad day to be wearing pointed ears. This one opens with the Laundry in such desperate straits they're reduced to sending Bob out to be interviewed on Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman (on the grounds he was out of the country helping Japan deal with an outbreak of kaiju, so clearly not responsible for the cock-up in Leeds).

Unfortunately, Ray Schiller, Bob's least favourite US preacher, is back, despite being left on an alien planet as kibble for his less than ideally comatose god at the end of The Apocalypse Codex. And this time he's got the Cabinet right where he wants them, with their pants around their ankles and about to fall victim to a very nasty hypercastrating* parasite that will rootkit their brains to allow remote access by the Sleeper under the Pyramid. First step in his plan is to get rid of the Laundry and have their job outsourced to his security company, and the Cabinet are all too ready to accommodate this after the disaster in Leeds. So Bob turns up at work to find himself facing an arrest warrant for the murder of the US agent he had a rendezvous with in order to receive the Delirium Brief of the title and other Laundry big shots such as ~~Modesty Blaise~~ Persephone the witch face similarly problematic issues. So of course everyone goes on the lam, and our heroes are then recruited by the Senior Auditor** for the vaguely defined Continuity Ops, the Laundry's mission brief having come from the Crown, not Parliament.

Schiller needs to be stopped, but Continuity Ops needs to assemble the proper team for the mission, starting with Cassie, Alex's girlfriend, who ended up the unfortunate incident in Leeds as All Highest of the Alfar Host, YesYes! and is now the manic pixie dream girl at the top of the pyramid of a very feudal and very literal power structure. Which means busting her out of a PoW camp on Dartmoor, leading to a very unfortunate incident involving Bob, a speeding armoured limo, and a Challenger tank, which in turn may mean Bob is now not just the Eater of Souls, but the Eater of Souls with quite a nasty case of PTSD-like hypervigilance.

While other arrangements are put in place, some of which Bob would go berserk over, Mo and Bob get to work out some of their marital difficulties (they're leveled up to the point they're each afraid of killing the other in their sleep), but not to the point of actually fixing them. And all too soon it's time to take out Schiller's network, a complex three-way mission targeting his London penthouse, his HQ inside the Heathrow security perimeter, and the country mansion where he's about to let the PM and Chancellor let their hair, and pants, down.

You've got to credit Stross for narrative chutzpah, I don't think anyone's ever planned to to take down an Alien God with an Anton Piller Order before. But even that may not be enough to stop the Sleeper under the Pyramid, and behind the scenes the Senior Auditor is quite literally selling his soul*** to make things work.

* This is a real thing some parasites do.

** Schiller and his team having made the serious mistake of assuming the Laundry's Auditors do the accounts, not act as the proxies for its leadership.

*** Though I suspect the Senior Auditor may have been very clever, and moving long before anyone realised. This is not the same thing as expecting the Senior Auditor to survive the process.

Up Next:

Not sure, one or more of K B Spangler's Spanish Mission (Hope Blackwell book 2), Mishell Baker's Phantom Pains (Arcadia Project book 2), Vivian Shaw's Dreadful Company (Greta Van Helsing book 2 - bit of a pattern here) or sovay 's Forget the Sleepless Shores.