The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross

It's time to revisit the Laundry Files series; I did an overview of the first five at one point, but it's now time for the eighth volume in the series, followup on The Annihilation Score and The Nightmare Stacks.

I've overall been a fan of the Laundry books, although I did think that overall the third and fourth books were the best of the bunch.  The first two were written before Stross had an overall arc or overarching plot in mind, and with a couple of exceptions the events of those books are generally glossed over as the series continued to find its own voice.  And while I liked many things about the more recent ones, I also felt they came with serious drawbacks and plot holes.  Therefore while I was always up for reading a new Laundry novel, I wasn't considering them entirely essential.  So I was pretty happy to discover that The Delirium Brief was the best one in years, and may be the best one yet.

However, it also requires a pretty thorough knowledge of events occurring in books 3-7; it's possibly the worst starting point that you could imagine.  And I'm going to proceed to talk about why I liked it so much, which involves ruining the (well done) plot twists, so if you want to read it without spoilers please go do so now and then come back when you're finished.  This will be here when you get back, after all.

Ready?

All right.  One of the things that I've always liked about Stross is that he's one hell of an idea guy, and also one hell of a logical implication guy.  He comes up with some pretty nutty stuff, and he's also prepared to follow chains of reasoning to likewise unusual ends.  Unfortunately, the thing that I tend to like least about him is that he will get more interested in a new idea and drop what he's working on.  The last couple of Laundry books have had endings that can charitably be described as "abrupt" and uncharitably described with worse invective; they've also suffered from a tendency to info-dump and build unreleased tension.  As a result you tend to look forward to the next one as resolving some of these issues and then it just . . . never ends up happening.  It also seems like at least some of the recent ones have been early drafts without much revision.  For instance, in the recent case of The Nightmare Stacks this led to a frankly bizarre love subplot.  In order to work properly, the characters needed weeks or months to interact, but the demands of the main plot (an invasion of alternate-dimensional humanoids) made it happen over the course of days.  There are other issues like this throughout books 5-7, although overall they're pretty interesting.

Here, however, Stross had to go back after the Brexit vote and do a substantial rewrite of this one.  I'm not sure what exactly he needed to change (since the book takes place in an alternate 2014, before even the Scottish independence referendum), but he felt that the political situation called for it, and as a result this one is much, much better flowing than the last few have been.  It begins right in the aftermath of book 7, where over ten thousand have died following the destruction of Leeds following the invasion of the alternate-dimensional elves.  The UK government looks really bad and now they've come to have knowledge of the Laundry, that secret, hidden agency which deals with occult defense.  Accordingly, the government promises to bring them to heel and to accountability. 


For a cosmic horror novel, this one also hits a fair bit of everyday horror as well.  Bob Howard starts out by meeting with a US Postal Inspector (occult text division) who basically states that the US government has already fallen.  To what, we don't know, but apparently it's so bad that even other horrible monsters are afraid of it.  No saving throws, no additional warnings, no last-minute desperate fighting.  Just a fait accompli.  Perhaps this was the subject of the rewrites, and the comparison to modern politics is depressing.  You just turn around and suddenly your government is under the control of eldritch abominations.  I can relate to that.

Before long, Bob's been called in to testify in Parliament and on TV.  At first this looks like the civilian government is going to reassert control in a staid bureaucratic fashion, but then the decision is abruptly made to shut the whole thing down and hire external contractors to perform these functions.

As omniscient observers, we can tell this is a really awful idea, for two main reasons - first, we know and love all those scamps who work at the Laundry, so we know that they've really got the best interests of the realm at heart.  And second, which is a pretty big one, is that the proposed contractor is affiliated with Reverend Raymond Schiller, who is (gasp) an American and (double gasp) the slave of the extra dimensional soul-eating horror known as the Sleeper in the Pyramid.  Schiller even being on this plane is bad news since as of the end of book 4 he was stranded on a dead plateau on an alien world.  As it turns out he's not dead, but he's not exactly just Schiller anymore in there either.  (Schiller's also got version 2.0 of brain-controlling parasites that have moved on from just eating tongues - there's some really awful body horror going on in this one.)

However, the Laundry has always worked in the shadows and the critiques made of their operations and methods are actually pretty reasonable.  They've never managed to get any support from the press, from Parliament or from the public, and much of what they do is frankly not believable.  What did they think was going to happen on that inevitable day that they were forced into the spotlight, with no allies?  They knew that day was coming - they had Pete working on the civil defense plans - but they never adequately prepared.  And they came to widespread public attention following a massive disaster that killed thousands of people, so they look incompetent as well.  Although the government is making a very serious and in fact existential mistake, it's not done entirely without reason.

This leads back into my previous observation that Stross is good at implications; he's also good at misdirection.  He's led us into this false sense of certainty that the Laundry are the good guys here.  Yes, they are defending humanity against creatures that would happily devour the lives and souls of every person on earth.  No, they don't go to the extremes displayed by their American counterparts (the OPA, a/k/a the Black Chamber) which extensively uses demons and violence.  But we've always known that they make their employees take a binding oath which compels them to both secrecy and obedience.  At first this seems like a joke on overbearing workplace practices and maybe played for laughs a little bit, but if you really think about it that's amazingly scary and obtrusive, not much different from the slavery of the Black Chamber.  And as it turns out when the organization disbands the very first priority of the senior-most members is to figure out how to re-bind all of their employees.  You know, with soul-destroying oaths.

Bob quickly finds himself on the run, using the organization's remaining resources to accomplish a couple of missions and try to prevent Schiller from taking over (first) the government of the UK, and (subsequently) the entire remaining population.  He takes the new oath administered by the Senior Auditor and obeys his mission directives.  Here's a few things he doesn't consider - becoming a free agent.  Approaching the media.  Renegotiating the employment agreement that he's got, or reconsidering how the Laundry is organized.  Even choosing to die is an option.  But no, he simply does what the Senior Auditor tells him to do, which is probably his reflex by this point since he hasn't really had any choice in the matter up until now.  And in so doing he crosses his own personal event horizon from which there's probably no going back.

There's no good guys left in this novel, so at the end it's a pretty hefty gut punch when you realize that they've managed to stop Schiller but only by utilizing methods that are - at best - equally extreme as the threat they averted.  And we've confirmed that Bob maybe isn't really Bob anymore, or perhaps more accurately that he's still Bob-shaped and was once Bob.  I have been more annoyed than anything with the cliffhangers and non-endings but this book managed to wrap up its primary plot and still tease effectively.  I eagerly await the stories to come of Bob under the New Management; although, at this point it's pretty clear that when they talk about the end of humanity when the stars come right, they really mean it.  There's no more shutting-down-the-portal-at-the-last-minute safety to be had.