I love Charles Stross' Laundry novels – I really do. But the absolute absence of any connection between the book titles and their content makes it very, very difficult to remember which book is about what.
This book deals with the aftermath of the accession of some sort of extradimensional horror as Prime Minister, under whom Bob Howard's psycho former girlfriend – who's now both a PHANG (basically a living vampire) and a baroness works, while being connected with the police superhero who used to be Bob's wife's colleague.
See, I remember the players because of connections to the characters I care about (Bob and Mo) but I really can't remember what the plot or story of the book was. And I don't want to remember, because essentially all hope is gone. The world of the Laundry is destroyed, so is their nation, for different reasons, and possibly the world as well, for possibly related reasons, and all of this is before CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
This is approximately the equivalent of Walter Lord following up his Titanic books with a volume about a waiter on the Titanic who got in trouble because his supervisor discovered a discrepancy in the count of salad bowls in the second class dining room – but it wasn't his fault, and yet his career is still destroyed. But that's not what the story's about – it's about the challenges he faces keeping the pantry organized on the afternoon of the sinking. It's well-written, but only barely enough to cover that it's a story I don't care about. If the apocalypse is coming Tuesday and we lost everything last week anyway, then why do I care about what the people who live across the street are doing with their final hours?
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