“Equoid” by Charles Stross

[divisionsandprecisions]

Part of the Laundry series, Charlie's crazy mixing of spy thriller and Lovecraftian horror with a sprinkling of snarky Dilbert-like office politicking. These stories contain some of Charlie's best plot reversals where nothing is what you think it is.

The best laughs this time come from Charlie's invented deathbed letters of HP Lovecraft, which he describes as covering "the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet." The snarky humor comes from the sendup of these familiar genres, but the stories work very well on their own as simple action stories and hold up after multiple readings.

I can't find any value to these beyond being a fun bit of meta-literature, but with perfect execution, that's enough.

I admit I am a giant fan of Charlie Stross, and have copies of almost all his books. I read this when it first popped up on Tor.com many months ago (you can still get it for free here).

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Finally read this Friday night, and it was very good. A perfect blend of action, comedy, send-up (note the hat tips to HP's antisemitism and racism, especially). Really really should not have read this before bed though, as the dreams I had in my first REM cycle were totally fucked up: a kielbasa inhabited by a buzzing demon, a woman trying to comfort her daughter but unable to speak clearly because of a geas, stuttering and evasive, and the kiss of two animal-headed people causing a rolling ball of explosive flame to engulf them both.

[robot-culinaire.livejournal.com]

"a kielbasa inhabited by a buzzing demon" Good thing we don't listen to Freud any more...

Adding a little humor in for a change of moods is out of fashion with many writers these days, but I like it. Laundry files have a lot more than a *little* humor, of course...