Review of The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

Here we go! This is the first of the new-to-me Laundry Files books I ordered last year so I could catch up. Having finished my rereads of the earlier books, I eagerly picked up The Nightmare Stacks when I next wanted a reset. Charles Stross has shared how he needed to change up the viewpoint protagonist of the series for a few reasons. Alex Schwartz is an interesting successor to Bob and Mo, and he’s dropped into a somewhat silly story of staggering stakes. I didn’t love this one, but I liked it.

Dr. Alex Schwartz is a relative newcomer to the Laundry, having essentially been drafted after his abrupt transformation into a PHANG (a vampire) in The Rhesus Chart. Now he’s up in Leeds, his hometown coincidentally, to evaluate a potential site for a new headquarters for the Laundry. With him is Reverend Pete, Pinky, and Brains. While in Leeds, Alex meets Cassie, seemingly a bubbly twenty-something uni student but in reality something far less mundane—and far more dangerous. If Alex isn’t careful, Earth could be looking at a full-scale CASE NIGHTMARE RED.

It’s easy to write off these books as pulpy urban fantasy. The series started its life as a spoof of James Bond-but-what-if-Cthulu, and while it has branched out considerably, its core is still wacky. Yet if you dismiss The Laundry Files as solely pulp, you’re missing out on Stross’s incredible ability to blend genres, and The Nightmare Stacks is another textbook case.

For the entire series, magic has been presented to us as just really, really advanced math. Wizards, mages, practitioners—whatever you want to call them—are capable of doing this math in their heads, albeit at great risk to their sanity, while many other humans use computers to assist. Alex himself repeats an adage twisted from Arthur C. Clarke when he says, “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.” The main antagonist of this story is far more at home with magic than with science, and indeed, they scoff at the idea that humans are “mana-less” and use sterile mechanisms for our everyday tasks. At the same time, however, Stross sets out to provide a somewhat coherent explanation for how parallel evolution could have resulted in these antagonists. I wasn’t expecting an anthropology lesson, yet here we are!

Stross has done this before in other series, most notably The Merchant Princes books, which were initially marketed as portal fantasy but, as of their more recent reissue, are much more firmly in the science fiction camp. I’d argue Laundry Files doesn’t shade so firmly into science fiction; nevertheless, the lines remain blurred. In this way, Stross demonstrates true versatility and an awareness of how setting and genre serve story, not the other way around.

As for the story itself? It’s … fine. In Alex, Stross has attempted to update his everyman protagonist mould for the 2010s, to mixed success. I don’t really care about the romantic angle with Cassie, though I love how it complicates the story and ultimately results in a very satisfying cliffhanger. We also get less of Alex’s first-person monologue—presented only as intermittent diary entries in each chapter—with more of a limited third-person perspective, so that also makes it harder to get to know him the way we got to know Bob and Mo. But maybe I just miss those two?

There’s still the riveting and ridiculous action sequences you’ll have come to expect from this series, along with all the humour and dramatic irony you could want. As always, Stross blends his very Scottish sense of distaste for British bureaucracy with a studied view on human nature—and particularly our commitment to human laziness.

The Nightmare Stacks is sufficient fare, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.