Dead Lies Dreaming

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross

I've been a long-time fan of Charles Stross's “Laundry Files” series. The Laundry was Great Britain's occult protection division. It was where the wizards and combat magicians were stockpiled. Anyone who had stumbled onto the secret that higher-level computation was the door into magic was drafted into the Laundry to keep the secret under wraps.

The series has always been a whimsical combination of a spy novel and a Cthulhu horror story.

In the first eight books, we followed the career of Bob as he moved from IT schlub to Eater of Souls. Along the way, we learned that there were vampires and there was an invasion of Elves. The purpose of the Laundry was to forestall the day when the stars aligned and Dark Elder Gods returned. The conundrum was that magic becomes stronger the more computing power is found in the real world.

The Dark Elder Gods returned somewhere around 2017. At that point, the series went from urban occult fantasy to a kind of alt-hist/parallel universe where the British Government was taken over by the Dark Pharoah and elven warriors crucify Santa Claus outside of a department store.

A lot of the whimsy that made the Bob part of the series so enjoyable has left the series.

This newest iteration follows new characters, namely a brother and sister born into a family of traditional magicians who have pledged to kill a child every second generation for power, and the friends of the brother. These characters are all “metahumans,” which means that they have magical/paranormal powers. The brother is wasting his powers on petty robberies to finance a silly movie about Peter Pan. The sister is the executive assistant to an evil Hedge Fund Trader/Priest of a god named “The Mute Poet.” The McGuffin of the story is the recovery of a concordance of the Necronomicon.

This story didn't grab my attention like the prior stories. My main problem is that the characters are unlikable. The brother (“Imp” short for “Impressario”) is obsessed with making an avante-garde version of Peter Pan. He can “push” people into doing what he wants. His friends can cause depression (Doc Depression), cause them to have accidents that luckily favor the friend (Game Boy), and move in some indescribable way that is impossible to stop (the Deliverator). They team up with a metahuman thief-taker who can manifest small objects. (Wendy Deere.) The sister (Eve) is obsessed with power, engages in torture at her boss's behest, and provides phone sex at his demand. I take it that Eve loves Imp, which is a nice thing, but much of the relationship seems based on plot convenience.

I don't think I cared about any of the characters. It didn't help that Stross uses victim group classification to manufacture stipulated empathy for the characters. Game Boy is a transexual whose parents tried to “pray away the gay” and made him wear dresses. Deliverator and Wendy are lesbians who start a relationship for no reason that makes sense. Even Imp and Doc are homosexual. Eve does phone sex at the behest of her evil boss. The fact that the characters are all non-binary, and, therefore, presumably oppressed is supposed to do the work of creating empathic characters out of characters who are narcissistic, slovenly, opportunists intent on using each other.

Even the villain in this book is non-binary.

What the heck does it mean when everyone in a book is non-binary? Is the author fishing for awards? Does he think that is what the audience expects? Given the fact that the non-binary population is 3 to 5% of the total population, it seems too unrealistic not to mean something. Was Stross “checking the boxes” and making sure that he has every category covered except “straight”?

That's what it seemed like to me and I am woefully tired of the “check the box” approach to entertainment. I am not here to be programmed with “right think.” I don't need to know the sexuality of any character unless it is germane to the story. Stop using sexual orientation as a poor substitute for writing characters.

The fact that I am kicking about this is some evidence that I was not fully engaged in the book. Here's another example — I got tired of Stross's use of the term “gammon” to refer to a stereotype of an English man. “Gammon” means “ham” and refers to the skin color and corpulence of the individual. It comes across as the “n-word” for white Britons. Admittedly, the villainous “Bond” character likes to characterize lesbian women as “dykes,” but he's not a nice person, and the use of this terminology is meant to trigger us into disliking him. In contrast, “gammon” is used by Eve, whom I assume we are supposed to like. So, again, what is the meaning of this? That anti-white racism is common and tolerable when committed by upscale young women?

Maybe I shouldn't have let these things influence me but it is a sure sign that I was not invested in the characters, i.e., that they were annoying me.

That said, the plot works like a well-oiled machine. The action and thrills are all there. The weirdness of a Cthulu-style reality was presented. It was entertaining.

It just wasn't Bob.

This is set in the world of the Laundry Files, but the Laundry and its work is absent, bar a few passing references. The flavour is the same, though, the usual mix of wild eldritch transdimensional horror and the fetishisation of competency and process you'd expect from hard SF. This one throws Peter Pan into the mix, as an updated version of the Lost Boys get mixed up in a demon strewn hunt for a missing occult book that has some very firm ideas on ownership. Don't be put off by the lack of Bob and Mo, this is very much in the lineage of the earlier books, and if you've enjoyed them this is going to work for you as well.
I'm not 100% sure if it is a standalone, or setting up a new cast for a string of books. It could work either way, and I'd just as happy with a new Imp and co book as I would a new Bob one. And surely there's a crossover brewing down the line....