The Nightmare Stacks.
Orbit. 2016
Alex Schwartz, recently a highly paid bank employee, currently working for the Laundry on a much reduced civil service salary, and a reluctant vampire to boot, has been posted to Leeds to help set up a secondary HQ. Or at least, that’s why he thinks he’s there. Higher powers have sent him there for a rather different reason.
Cassie was a student, until she got her brain sucked out and replaced by the consciousness of the head spy of an invading Elven army. Alex has to save the world from Cassie’s warlord father. But all he thinks he has to do is convince his parents that Cassie is his new girlfriend. Good luck with that.
We first met Alex in The Rhesus Chart, where Bob Howard helped flush out the vampires. He’s now a Laundry employee (it was either that, or something more terminal), and we get to see how he is faring as the new boy.
Each of the books in the series has a schitck: here it’s elves. Usually in fantasy we get to see an army casually plough through the peasantry in the countryside before the big showdown. Here we get to see them plough through the ordinary people in the suburbs of Leeds: it cleverly demonstrates how utterly horrifying those fantasy battles should be, but somehow never are.
Although there are still the absurdities, of the clash of dark horrors and government bureaucracy, and we care about the various characters, the series is definitely getting darker, as it inexorably moves towards the End of Days.
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