Stross's The Atrocity Archives is a fun blend of Jim Butcher's urban fantasy and William Gibson's near future that has some incomplete feeling scene changes and characters, but is generally lighthearted and very well executed. The premises of all the short stories in the collection are absurd in our world but feel completely at home in Stross's London, and you can feel the author's attention to detail in the way he weaves in mathematical and computer science concepts in place of hocus pocus mumbo jumbo words to open portals to other dimensions that works very well.

The one thing I like most about the books, though, is the way that Stross pulls in current events from our world (like public cameras in London, or DRM legislation worldwide) and sheds a different light on them in the context of the world of his characters. ( )

I experienced a rollercoaster of emotions with this book - laughter, pleasure, nausea, terror, delight and psychological horror. I did have some quite bad dreams whilst I was reading it, but there was a lot on my mind at the time, Charles Stross is a very good writer, and there is a quite of a lot of creepy, horrifying, sickening stuff here.

There are many fantastic features here: the Laundry (even enjoyed the name) - the home of national security/intelligence on all things occult, with its office politics, poorly understood support staff, some incompetent management decisions, questionable training policies, and the obsession with correct forms for the correct task; Bob Howard and his colleagues; the idea of joining up mathematical theory and summoning, with hell-raising, hair-raising results; the humour and satire; the techy-speak. Many things about the organisation for which Bob worked sounded familiar, but also had me wanting to watch "Yes, Minister" again. Other reviewers have mentioned Dilbert, and yes there is something of that here.

The sickening, terrifying stuff here is the amalgam of war criminals and the occult, involving some very nasty human sacrifice experiments by some very power-hungry people. It's all strangely believable, and the humour of the rest of the Laundry itself is a necessary leavening that stopped me from abandoning the book altogether (there are some very grim patches). The actual border between fact and fiction in parts of this book got very blurry indeed; elements of real war crimes, trials and codes became something else with the addition of the fantastical, but spotting exactly where that happened became tricky. I left the book glad to have read it, but almost relieved to want to be reaching for history books and newspapers about past or current real events.

I have not picked up a copy of The Jennifer Morgue yet, but I await that with a mix of awe, trepidation and horror. ( )

Stross draws on elements of the Cthulhu mythos and spy thrillers and then he centers upon his own hard-science, cyberpunk geek-ese to create two entertaining stories of Bob Howard and his role in the British occult/intelligence/security organization known as The Laundry. ( )

I'm beginning to run out of credibility when I say I don't do horror. ;-)

The horror in The Atrocity Archives is in places horrific and in places farcical. Not a lot frightens me about the concept of tentacle monsters coming to eat my brains when the stars are right, but some of the descriptions of what human beings will do for that kind of power are truly sickening. Other aspects of the book are extremely funny. Charlie Stross understand the nature of the bureaucrat as well as that of the geek and uses that understanding to great effect. This is a great mash-up of horror, spy novel and science fiction of the geekiest variety, and it is a remarkably enjoyable read.

The book contains the (short) novel The Atrocity Archives and the (I guess) novella (or possibly novelette) The Concrete Jungle.

I'm looking forward to reading the sequel(s).

ETA: I forgot. Bechdel. I reckon it passes both the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, for different reasons. We have Bridget and Harriet talk shop a couple of times. More importantly, we have a variety of female characters, most of whom are shown as competent, intelligent, professional women. One of my favourite scenes is at the end of The Atrocity Archives where Bob goes to see Alan in hospital. The people present are described as a 'nurse and a police officer'. About two pages later, Charlie casually slips in the fact that the nurse is male and the police officer female. Can you honestly tell me that you didn't have those the other way round in your head before it was made explicit? If so, you're a better person than me. ( )

This book was a bit of a slow starter. The characters and world are interesting. The combination of occult and computer science is irresistible. But the core story takes some time to reveal itself. It is worth it in the end. ( )