Dead Lies Dreaming

Charles Stross

Oct 2020 · Laundry Files Book 10 · Sold by Tordotcom

About this ebook

When magic and superpowers emerge in the masses, Wendy Deere is contracted by the government to bag and snag supervillains in Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross' Dead Lies Dreaming: A Laundry Files Novel.

As Wendy hunts down Imp—the cyberpunk head of a band calling themselves “The Lost Boys”— she is dragged into the schemes of louche billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge. Rupert has discovered that the sole surviving copy of the long-lost concordance to the one true Necronomicon is up for underground auction in London. He hires Imp’s sister, Eve, to procure it by any means necessary, and in the process, he encounters Wendy Deere.

In a tale of corruption, assassination, thievery, and magic, Wendy Deere must navigate rotting mansions that lead to distant pasts, evil tycoons, corrupt government officials, lethal curses, and her own moral qualms in order to make it out of this chase alive.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

I'm cutting this book some slack because Stross explains how it wasn't supposed to exist and was written amidst a lot of stress and family turmoil in his blog. It's not Laundry, it's Laundry adjacent and lets him write about life under the New Management. I kept reading and was waiting... waiting for Mo, Bob, vamps, someone, but not just anyone, familiar to come riding in and update us on where they've been. What became of them. What they became. But no. We did get many a reference to previous book events and how a random new bunch were affected. That was cool. But, not what I waited all year for. Like I said, it's Stross and an interesting look at the current state of things, but it was very obviously written with less of the usual Laundry flare. If this series is winding down, I hope the rest is filled with many updates on our core heroes and a satisfying Rainbow coded end.

Unfocused and unengaging, this Stross novel is well below his usual bar. It's in the same continuity as the series but has zero ties to prior stories - no established characters, no recurring plot lines, even the magic is different. He's ditched the "computational demonology" magic system, beloved by computer nerds, and in its place given readers a bunch of kids with poorly explained medium-grade superpowers. The unique magic was the one of the main draws of the series. Bland modern fantasy doesn't hold up. There's nothing inherently bad with new characters but the book doesn't take the time to flesh them out. It also doesn't bother to ramp up the stakes: the supposed protagonists are in mortal danger from the start. As a result, there's no tension; they clearly won't die, so it's merely a question of what plot convenience will save the day. Overall 3/5 because Stross is still a good writer and his work is mediocre at worst. This is fairly close to his worst, though.

About the author

CHARLES STROSS is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novella, including for the Laundry Files tale “Equoid.” His work has been translated into over twelve languages. His Laundry Files series includes the Locus Award finalist The Delirium Brief.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped catastrophes, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stakeout) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing, he tried to change employers just as the bubble burst). Along the way he collected degrees in pharmacy and computer science, making him the world’s first officially qualified cyberpunk writer.