The Regicide Report

"The f__k! Do you think this is my first human sacrifice!" Bob Howard.

For some time now Charles Stross has made it clear that this book will be wrapping up "The Laundry" series; due to a combination of business imperatives, exhausted possibilities and a simple desire by Stross to tackle other stories.

Perhaps the biggest issue though might be that the main characters, Bob Howard & Mo O'Brien, have become so overpowered that Stross considered it difficult to come up with a worthy scenario for them. I won't deny that I had some concerns after a few books that felt like marking time.

I'm thus pleased to report that Stross is in top form in this nominal last installment, as the culmination of the destruction of the human race is apparently show more in the cards. This is barring a lot of luck; or a lot of double-crosses! I look forward to what Stross comes up with in the future. show less

Everything's awful, as usual, our lovable heroes are working for an evil entity who's PM of the UK. There's a plot afoot, involving the home life of their own dear Queen, but who's plotting what, and which side, if any, is the good one? Rounds out the Laundry series with an epic 'just because everything's awful doesn't mean that the world can't end in a way that's even worse' but not, i suspect, the Laundryverse. As a twisted mirror to the modern UK, it's far too valuable to completely retire.

Bob and Mo, now under the direction of the New Management, deal with an attempt to assassinate the Queen, which will free up all the mana of royalty-worship accumulated over millions of people and her sixty-year reign. (The story is set in 2015.) AO3 exists in the Laundry universe, also. It’s a fine outing, as good as you can get when the stars have come right and humans aren’t really in charge any more.

By my count, The Regicide Report is the twentieth Laundry Files story, counting both novels and short fictions. Stross wrote these over the course of a quarter century, and it all started with a short novel that was a comic send-up of H.P. Lovecraft and Len Deighton. Each succeeding book tackled new parodic pastiches of prior literature with attention to both weird fiction and espionage, but the series definitely acquired its own center of gravity with the accumulation of plots and characters, and the genre emphasis eventually broadened to include gothic horror, superheroes, epic fantasy, and children's fantasy, among others.

In this particular book, the reader's level of entertainment will likely be proportional to a familiarity with show more and appreciation for Doctor Who, the AIP Doctor Phibes movies, Arthurian legend, and of course the full prior run of the Laundry Files. (Another key allusion is to the 2006 Mitchell and Webb sketch "Are We the Baddies?")

I was a little rusty as a Laundry reader coming to this volume. In narrative sequence it is the immediate sequel to the ninth book The Labyrinth Index, which I read almost eight years ago. The five books published in the interim have been a discrete side trilogy not impacting the main series plot, along with a couple of background stories giving an origin for a recent character and an earlier episode for Laundry agent "Bob Howard"--not his real name, of course.

As he had been at the series' outset, Bob is the storyteller for this final installment, and at its end he resumes the documentary conceit of his journals, along with justifying the presence of the alternate narrators whose voices had come to the fore in some of the other books. Bob leaves open the possibility that he will have future adventures, but I took this allowance as a mere rhetorical refusal of closure, especially given the philosophical tone of the passage in which he remarks it. I imagine that Stross, who has had an impressive and varied output of other fiction at the same time as he produced the Laundry Files, must be supremely relieved to put the project to rest at this point.

To be honest, I found the "New Management" side trilogy far livelier and more penetrating than The Regicide Report, which seemed in retrospect to be mostly the release of various potentials that had been built into the series previously. I did enjoy it, and I'm certainly glad to have seen how Stross managed to dispose of his overpowered protagonists, with the level of readerly affection he had built for them earlier. But I wonder if my impression of the author's relief at the finish isn't partly a projection of my own as a reader. show less