Lost Estates, by Mark Valentine

 

"There would be tokens and talismans of the true country ..." 

--- from "The House of Flame"

9781783800476

Swan River Press, 2024

198 pp

hardcover

It's no secret that Mark Valentine is one of my favorite writers and now, with Swan River's publication of Lost Estates, I've added another gem of a book to my collection of his works.  If you haven't yet bought a copy, go to Swan River Press  and get one now. Seriously. 

In an insightful and informative conversation between this author and writer John Kenny, Valentine pleads "not guilty" to labeling the stories in this collection as "folk horror."  He would rather use the term "borderland" or "otherworld" stories, which he 

"came upon in contemporary 1923 reviews of Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair and Visible and Invisible by E.F. Benson,"

saying that these were "terms then in use and understood for occult and supernatural fiction."   In Valentine's opinion, "they do convey better the sense that can sometimes be felt in certain places of being close to a different realm."    I like it.  

It's not long into the first story before this notion of "being close to a different realm" makes itself known.  "A Chess Game at Michaelmas" finds our narrator leaving the train at Abbotsbury, where he has come at the invitation of a Mr. Winterbourne, with whom he had been corresponding about Winterbourne's "house and its particular custom" as part of his research.   The train was only the first part of the journey; he still has a five-mile walk to make, which he doesn't mind.  It is as "the grey chalk of dust" was being drawn across the day" that he felt not only a "change come over the country" through which he was traveling, but also a gradual sense of passing "into a different sort of space, a pause in the usual order of things."  The feeling lasts for only a moment, but "the impression lingered..."  He eventually makes his way via the hand-drawn map he was given to an old and somewhat shabby Georgian house where he and the owner discuss the unusual "rent" on the place.  It seems that that his family holds this place "from the King in return for a service or duty."   The narrator offers his opinions about the history of this particular sort of "custom," but what he doesn't realize is that before his visit ends, the rent is about to come due.  This story is absolutely fascinating, not just for the weird elements and the lore, but for me it's much more about the historical components and especially the yews.    "A Chess Game at Michaelmas" happens to be one of my favorite tales, but it's  another longer story at the end, "The Fifth Moon," that takes my number one spot,  pondering the lost treasure of King John.  As part of the Hambledon's Mysteries of History series that explores "historical mysteries" that also features the local landscape, a writer takes on the disappearance of  the wagons and carts ("the baggage train") carrying treasures belonging to King John in 1612 that were traveling through The Wash, an estuary in the marshy area along the West Norfolk coast of the North Sea.  The story goes that John had arrived at King's Lynn (at the time known as Bishop's Lynn) where his entourage had divided into two groups. The King and one group took the safer but longer road around through Wisbech heading for their destination, while the other took a "short cut" heading for Sutton across the estuary in a spot that was "passable for a few hours at low tide," getting stuck and sinking "into the salty mire."  Taking along a photographer, and temporarily borrowing another friend's old houseboat that had been beached on the marshes as a base,  the writer makes his way to the area where he points out that "out there ... if the tales be true, lies the most fabulous hoard ever known." While investigating the landscape and the story for themselves, the plan is also for the two to interview a couple of local "experts" on the lost treasure for their opinions on the matter.  But it isn't long before another, much darker, diabolical account of the story crops up that is vastly different than any they've heard.  It is a stunner of a story, and I was so taken with it that right away on finishing it  I made an intense trip down the rabbit hole for anything connected to the lost treasure of King John and the area of the Wash itself.  Just as an FYI, by way of more explanation about Valentine's interest in the subject, check out this article written by Valentine for Wormwoodiana.   

from Meandering Through Time

Between these two outstanding tales, there are ten more, and while won't go into all of them, there are a few I'll highlight,  beginning with "Worse Things Than Serpents."  At a crossroads with a signpost offering "Church" one way and "Garden" the other, the narrator of this story examines the church first, since "Norfolk churches are usually worth stopping for," then afterwards decides to go on to the garden.  Turns out there is no garden, but once back on the road he sees a "homemade roadside notice" calling his attention to "Brazen Serpent Books."  He makes his way to the empty old shed that is the book store, no proprietor in sight.  Eventually making a selection, he leaves a note that he is "Happy to Pay What is Due."  Given his experiences in the store, the price might just be a bit on the high side. In "Fortunes Told: Fresh Samphire" there are actually two narrators, one from a man searching for his friend Crabbe, who "has vanished from his small house near the sea, and yet he is still here," and the other from Crabbe himself.   Here, landscape, history, lore and of course the other-worldly all come together, making for an eerie and quite honestly extraordinary piece of writing.   One of the darkest (at least for me) entries in this volume is "And maybe the parakeet was correct," involving a journalist hoping to come up with something different by exploring European football.  Traveling through a few countries, he ends up in Paris where in the back streets looking for "narrow passages where the enfants, shall we say not-quite-so-good, might be found, the sort that kick a ball around in the street" while treating strangers with "insolence and derision."  He gets his wish, watching "six or seven urchins" at the end of an alley, but realizes that what he is seeing is no ordinary game.  For "The Readers of the Sands," the best description I can offer is "haunting," which is actually an understatement now that I'm thinking about it again.  It begins as

 "three travellers headed by their different ways to a causeway leading them to the house called Driftwood End, which stood on a spur of land above a vast canvas of sand." 

The first is a guide through the hazardous sands of the estuary, the latest "holder of an ancient office" known as "Bishop's Sandman."  The next is a "seer" who employs sand along with the patterns in the sand in her profession, and the third a woman who creates "hour-glasses" and "egg-timers" from "sea-wood and blown glass." She has also discovered a somewhat strange ability she has which she keeps to herself, one which she will have opportunity to use at a particularly critical moment during the gathering.   Their host is a certain Phillip Crabbe (and I have to wonder if this is the same Crabbe who  vanished in "Fortunes Told: Fresh Samphire") who lives at Driftwood End, and he has brought them all there for a particular purpose.  The remaining stories, "The House of Flame," "The Seventh Card," "Laughter Ever After," "The Understanding of the Signs," the titular "Lost Estates" and "The End of Alpha Street," are all excellent as well but I'm running long here. 

The blurb for Lost Estates notes that these tales offer "antiquarian mysteries, book-collecting adventures, and otherworldly encounters," as well as "mysterious landscapes, places of legend, and secret history."   Valentine has an incredible abundance of knowledge about ancient customs, history and lore that inform his stories; the joy is in seeing the connections he forges between that knowledge and the characters who interact with the landscapes which he so expertly renders here, either rural or city.  The stories themselves  have a truly special quality that I appreciate, meaning that once I start one, I'm deep into it and the outside world just vanishes.  He makes me feel like I am right there with the characters as they approach that (as the dustjacket blurb states) "unusual terrain,"   making it  beyond  difficult to put this book down at any time during the reading.  And if you get a Machen vibe, well ...

Very highly recommended -- Lost Estates is most certainly one of the best collections by this author I've read.  

The Collected Connoisseur, by Mark Valentine and John Howard

 

"What we seek, and what we also half-fear, is all around us, always, had we the necessary calm intentness to discern it. "

 

9781905784202

Tartarus Press, 2010

308 pp

paperback

Over the years I've read my fair share of stories featuring supernatural detectives, and prior to starting this book, that's what I thought I had here. What I discovered was not at all what I was expecting, but something unique instead: an "aesthetical detective extraordinaire" in the form of the Connoisseur.   He is described as a

"connoisseur of the curious, of those glimpses of another domain which are vouchsafed to certain individuals and in certain places." 

The Connoisseur is a nickname given to this man by Valentine, who with the Connoisseur's consent, "dependent on anonymity and all necessary discretion," recounts "some of his encounters with this realm. "  The narrator notes that while the Connoisseur  is far from wealthy, he "supplements a decent inheritance" with "administrative work," he "shuns many of the contrivances of modern living," and is therefore able to indulge in a "keen pleasure in all the art forms."   He is a seeker of knowledge and a walking encyclopedia of the arcane; if there's something he does not know, he knows any number of people to whom he can turn for answers.  The mysteries he encounters are often  built around some sort of cultural artifact either in his possession or brought to his attention, for example, in the first story "The Effigies," the narrator is looking at a "dark earthenware jug of quite perfect form" on the Connoisseur's mantel, sparking a story about his friend's visit to its creator, Austin Blake,  renowned maker of "amphorae and delicate vessels" who had suddenly stopped producing at the height of his fame.   There are also a few occasions in which Valentine accompanies the Connoisseur and witnesses events firsthand.   

It is not difficult at all to recognize the influence in these stories of those writers Valentine notes in his introduction as "lifelong companions," and "household gods":  Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare and William Hope Hodgson.  "The Hesperian Dragon," for example, is easily recognized as a delightful sort of play on Machen's "Three Impostors."  Blackwood's finely-tuned sensitivity to the hidden awe of the natural world is reflected in "The Last Archipelago," and as in the case of our narrator throughout The Collected Connoisseur,  Hodgson's Dodgson serves as chronicler of the adventures of Carnacki.    Beyond the recognition of Valentine's "household gods", however, lies something even deeper where these authors are concerned -- in the introduction, in discussing a few other writers of the 1890s he'd read, including M.P. Shiel,  Valentine notes that 

"These then, the wondrous, the spectral and the aesthetical, were the airs floating around me when I began to think whether I could go one step further than reading, and try writing, the sort of fiction I enjoyed."

It is this sense of the "wondrous, the spectral and the aesthetical" that he and in the last few stories, John Howard capture here in a style that reflects the writing of those previously-mentioned authors who came before, but still manages to remain quite original.    Not everyone can carry off the voice of times past in his or her writing, but here it is pitch perfect.  The last six of these stories were collaborations between the two authors, and anyone who's read the work of John Howard will recognize his style immediately.  These tales are also a bit more fleshed out, with a bit more action involved, and provide a great ending to this collection.  

I loved these stories, all of which on the whole offered days of fascinating reading,   but of course and as always there were a few that stood out.   "In Violet Veils" is probably my favorite of the collection, in which an experiment in the "revived art of the tableau vivant" results in a warning by the Connoisseur that 

"such curious re-enactments were not to be essayed without some peril of affecting, in unforeseen ways, those involved: who could tell what might result from such a hearkening back to the original power of the mythological image portrayed?"

He knows whereof he speaks, having experienced firsthand an eventful, bizarre tableau vivant in the past.   "In Violet Veils" has the feel of the decadent/symbolist literature I love to read, with more than a touch of the weird that gives it an extra edge of eerieness.  In "The Craft of Arioch"  the Connoisseur relates to Valentine his strange experience during  a "walking holiday" in Sussex with his cousin Rebecca. Having left "the high roads and the dormitory towns" and traveling the "winding roads and nestling villages," they eventually find themselves at a barn where they expect to find hand-crafted rocking horses.  Let's just say after a ride on a "cross between a horse and a white dragon," and "a winged cat with preternaturally pointed ears and peridot eyes," they return from "unknown regions" and "a plane of experience different to anything we may find in this world."  "Sea Citadels," "The Mist on the Mere," "The White Solander" and "The Descent of the Fire" round out the list.   

At the beginning of "The Secret Stars" The Connoisseur in conversation with Valentine notes the following:

"What we seek, and what we also half-fear, is all around us, always, had we the necessary calm intentness to discern it."

 The Connoisseur's "rare glimpses" are the very heart and soul of this book.

The Collected Connoisseur is one to read curled up in your favorite reading space, hot cup of something or other in hand.  Like the Connoisseur, I am quite partial to Qimen/Keemun tea; I  am also one of those people described on the back cover blurb -- "the lover of esoteric mystery and adventure fiction. " More to the point,  I am also in complete awe of Valentine and Howard's visionary writing here and elsewhere.    Every reader of the weird, the fantastical, and of the occult  should have The Collected Connoisseur sitting on his or her shelves.  No collection would be complete without it. 

The Double Star and Other Occult Fantasies, by Jane de la Vaudère

9781943813643
Snuggly Books, 2018
translated by Brian Stableford
242 pp

paperback

"Those who dream by day have knowledge of a host of things that will remain forever unknown to those who only dream by night. Visions are strewn with fulgurant lightning flashes that, at times, unveil eternity for us and permit us to regain a few scraps of the terrible mystery." 



What would we do without Brian Stableford? The man is a lean, mean translating machine, and he has an uncanny knack for uncovering the best work by heretofore unknown authors.  I actually read The Double Star and Other Occult Fantasies some time ago, but recently when someone I know online said he was currently reading it, I decided that I would give it a second read.  I'm so glad I did. It was time.

In his introduction, Brian Stableford shares what little there is to know about Jane de La Vaudère, suggesting that  owing to her family's social status, when as a child she lost both of her parents she was sent to a convent along with her sister to be raised and educated until she could later be married off.   Born Jeanne Scrive, after leaving the convent, she married a military surgeon named Camille Gaston Crapez, who inherited  the Chateau de la Vaudère in Sarthe and began calling himself Crapez de La Vaudère [If anyone is at all interested, there is an interesting (French) blog post in which the author, looking for genealogical information, discovers Jane de la Vaudère quite by accident while researching the Crapez family in Parigné-l'Ėveque].  Before her death in 1908, she had worked as an artist, a poet, a playwright, a novelist, and writer of short stories.  As Stableford also notes,

"a Poesque fascination with what the American writer called 'The Imp of the Perverse' seems to have been a constant feature in the artistry of La Vaudere's literary endeavour, and perhaps her life as well, if what seem to be echoes of her own sentiments in her work really are revealing.  That element of her work made her a significant writer in the development of modern horror fiction, although she is not mentioned in any reference book on the subject." 

Let me repeat:   "a significant writer in the development of modern horror fiction,"   yet her work remains relatively unknown.  I say, read this book and you'll want to read everything she's ever written.

my photo, back-cover image

 In these tales,  as quoted from "The Dream of Myses," the final story in this collection,

 "The passions ... all flow from amour, the fundamental law of the world." 

They do not, however, necessarily remain earthbound or cease at death; the obsessive desire for a love which continues beyond this earthly realm (and the consequences thereof)  is the essence of this book.  These stories encompass reincarnation,  reanimation, astral projection, hypnotism, chimeras, mysticism, dreams and more, with all but the opening story, "Emmanuel's Centenary," entrenched in elements of the erotic and the sexual. 

I'm not going to go into any detail at all about any of the nine stories in this volume; they are truly best discovered by the reader with no knowledge ahead of time.    To say that the stories in this book are excellent does not quite do them the justice they deserve.  They are  delicious, sublimely written,  decadent and dark, and offer a look at "the scraps of the terrible mystery" as they "unveil eternity." I seriously cannot praise this book enough.  Patience may be required but you will certainly be rewarded for your effort many times over. 

WB Yeats: Stories of Red Hanrahan, The Secret Rose, and Rosa Alchemica

"O Divine Rose of Intellectual Flame, let the Gates of thy peace be opened to me at last!" 

                       "Out of the Rose," from The Secret Rose

Never having been much of a poetry person, I was a bit taken aback when I discovered that WB Yeats also wrote some pretty strange fiction.   The truth is that he wouldn't have even come up on my reading radar had it not been for the essays about him I read in  The Library of the Lost: In Search of Forgotten Authors  by Roger Dobson (ed. Mark Valentine), where I learned about his work The Secret Rose. 

9780486493817
Dover, 2013
originally published by Macmillan, 1914
119 pp
paperback

I picked up the Dover edition containing The Secret Rose and Rosa Alchemica, but never one to read just part of a book, I began with Yeats'  Stories of Red Hanrahan, which starts like this:

"Hanrahan, the hedge schoolmaster, a tall, strong, red-haired young man, came into the barn where some of the men of the village were sitting on Samhain Eve."

I knew with just that opening sentence that something supernatural or at least strange was about to happen -- it's Samhain Eve after all.

 I wasn't wrong: after a card game with some of the fellows and an "old mountainy man" who owns the deck, Hanrahan is told to follow the "great hunt" that ensues when a hare leaps out of the cards, quickly followed by a dog and then an entire pack of hounds.  Hanrahan leaves the barn, but in the darkness quickly loses the hounds.  What he does find, however, as he sits in the heather "in the heart of Slieve Echtge," is a door with a light behind it.  Judging by what happens next, it seems that this itinerant schoolmaster has discovered an entrance to the Otherworld (here in the form of "big shining house"); on entering within, he notices a woman, "the most beautiful the world ever saw," with "the tired look of one that had been waiting."  Unbeknownst to Hanrahan, on entering this doorway he has entered into the realm of immortals --  the beautiful woman is "Echtge, the Daughter of the Silver Hand;" aka daughter of  Nuada, one-time king of the Tuatha dé Danann and therefore a goddess. Four old women appear, and with each appearance he is presented with a sort of test which he promptly fails. He is found "weak," and wanting, but even worse, his failure causes this goddess to remain asleep. His failure also has personal consequences;   Hanrahan must somehow make up for his fault;  throughout his wanderings,  he is bound to never know "content for any length of time..."   This first tale is key to what follows, a series of short tales that contain a blending of traditional, political, and mystical elements that weave their way through an entire Hanrahan story cycle.  It also seems to have elements of the traditional Romantic quest, albeit one that is interior and suffused throughout with the occult. 

from Ask About Ireland

The Secret Rose is described by the author himself as having "but one subject, the war of spiritual with natural order." In his dedication of this group of stories to A.E., aka George William Russell, Yeats notes that

"If a writer wishes to interest a certain people among whom he has grown up, or fancies he has a duty towards them, he may choose for the symbols of his art their legends, their history, their beliefs, their opinions.."

and goes on to say that "as this book is visionary, it is Irish for Ireland, which is still predominantly Celtic" and that it preserves "a gift of vision, which has died out among more hurried and more successful nations."

One of my favorite stories in this group of tales that illuminates all of this  is  "The Wisdom of the King," which begins with the "High-Queen of Ireland" having died in childbirth.  Her son was given in the care of a woman who lived in the woods, and  who one night was visited by a "grey-clad woman, of great age.." who had grey feathers on her head instead of hair.   Calling herself a "crone of the grey hawk," she places herself at the head of the baby's cradle.  The hut soon fills with a number of these women, and they proceed to mix their grey blood, a drop at a time, with the baby's; he is now imbued with their knowledge, their wisdom.   As he gets older, his head begins to sport grey hawk feathers; when he is old enough to rule in the place of his now-dead father, "the poets and the men of law" decreed that everyone (even visitors outside the realm who come to seek his wisdom)  "upon pain of death" had to weave into his or hair the feathers of the grey hawk.  Furthermore, anyone who told the boy the truth was to be "flung from a cliff into the sea."  You can only imagine what happens when he learns of the deception.

 These nine stories are like taking a mythical/mystical spin through history and tradition and they speak to an older wisdom, the knowledge of which only few are gifted and thus live a rather isolated life; sacrifices are made, and individuals take part in their own spiritual or mystical quests for the ideal. They were also my favorite part of this book. 

After finishing The Secret Rose, I started researching what to look forward to in Rosa Alchemica, and realized that this Dover edition did not include either "The Tables of the Law" or "The Adoration of the Magi," so I picked up Mythologies, which does. 

9780684826219
Simon and Schuster, 1998
originally published 1959
368 pp
paperback

It also contains Celtic Twilight and the mind-bending (and patience-expending) Per Amica Silentia Lunae, but I won't comment on either here.

 With  these last three stories, we delve deep into the realm of the alchemical, the mystical, and the apocalyptic.   The narrator of "Rosa Alchemica", who reminds me a bit of Huysmans' Des Esseintes because of his need to "fashion" his life according to his desire,  is sitting in quiet reverie in his Dublin home when he is interrupted by a knock at the door.  His visitor is a certain Michael Robartes, who is there to ask him yet again if he would join Robartes' Order of the Alchemical Rose.  He had declined earlier in Paris, and now asks Robartes why he would say yes when he'd already refused him? But become an initiate he does, or at least he's on the way to doing so at a temple on the coast when it seems as though all hell breaks loose. It's the inner workings of the ceremonies at the Temple of the Alchemical Rose which are fascinating here, but the ending speaks volumes as well.

 The same narrator appears again in  "The Tables of the Law" and "The Adoration of the Magi."  In the first story, rather than Robartes, it is Owen Aherne who appears to introduce his own mystical/spiritual philosophy.  Based on the writings of Joachim of Flora, an abbot of the twelfth century, his proposed system picks up Joachim's more heretical beliefs (from a secret book) that will displace "the commandments of the Son by the commandments of the Holy Spirit," and usher in a new age. Things, of course, go terribly wrong.  In the second, our narrator is once again in the company of visitors, three elderly brothers who tell him that they were there to reveal "important things."  Their strange story begins as one of the brothers fell asleep while  reading Virgil and a "strange voice spoke through him," bidding them to

set out for Paris, where a dying woman would give them secret names and thereby so transform the world that another Leda would open her knees to the swan, another Achilles beleaguer Troy."

Their travels take them to a brothel where a prostitute has just given birth; it seems that now "the Immortals are beginning to awake."  Or at least one that can "take many forms."

I have to say that this has been my first Yeats experience, and I do not claim to understand all of it, but I do have a newly-found reverence for Yeats scholars who do.  Still, it was absolutely a trip to read, and this book was definitely an experience most fascinating and one I'll never forget. It took me a long time to go through this one, stopping to check on various references here and there, but even with my limited understanding it is a book that I can certainly recommend. 

The Green Face, by Gustav Meyrink

0946626928
Dedalus Books, 2004
originally published 1916
translated by Mike Mitchell
224 pp

paperback

This is one trippy book, and that's putting it mildly.  It is certainly classic Meyrink, though, and anyone who's read his The Golem would have to agree that the two books were definitely the work of the same person.  Once again turning to legend as a basis for his book, this time Meyrink uses the story of the Wandering Jew, and as in The Golem, he also incorporates several different sorts of esoteric and occult elements within the text.

Fortunatus Hauberrisser finds himself in Amsterdam.  Meyrink's Amsterdam is now "flooded with people of all nations," since the war was now over and people are there either hoping for "permanent refuge in the Netherlands," or they've made it a stopover while they consider where to go next.  Hauberriser finds himself going into a shop called Chidher Green's Hall of Riddles.  While waiting for the assistant to finish her phone call, he falls into "a deep sleep," after which he awakens and is spoken to by the old Jewish man who owns the shop. The old man had a face "like nothing he had ever seen before," with "eyes like dark chasms," and skin "a greenish olive colour." The face continues to haunt him long after he leaves the shop -- and  Hauberisser doesn't know it, but his sighting of this face will launch Hauberriser on a quest, not just to find the old man again as he wanders through Amsterdam, but also for the truth.  And, since it's Meyrink writing here, we know that his search will involve initiating Hauberriser and the other characters that he encounters into the journey to a higher plane of existence and spiritual knowledge.  However, there are major obstacles that Hauberriser and his fellow seekers will have to overcome before they can achieve their goals, none the least of which  is a Zulu bent on murder and destruction.

I'm sorry to keep comparing this book to The Golem, but it's really hard not to.  In both, elements of alchemy, Kabbalah, Buddhism, mysticism, and other esoteric beliefs find their way onto the pages; secret knowledge is given and the recurring idea is the way to transcendence of the physical self, and indeed of the physical world, while keeping one foot in both.  Here, though, a new element creeps into the story, a dark ending that is clearly a reflection of the anxieties of the time -- I mean, it is 1916; World War I is still going -- and the end, which many readers have noted as "apocalyptic" ... but I think I'll leave it there for now.

Meyrink's commentary on civilization is excellent here -- there's a scene that takes place in a "mixture of music-hall and restaurant" on Amsterdam's Nes that has Hauberriser shaking his head once the audience changes to "the same cosmopolitan would-be society" who have come to watch the most bizarre show.  Hauberisser is dumbfounded at what he witnesses both on stage and in the audience, noting that

"...a mask had been cast aside that had never concealed anything but intentional or unintentional hypocrisy, lack of vitality positing as virtue or ascetic monstrosities conceived in the mind of a monk!" 

He goes on to say that "a diseased organism" had been "taken for culture; now it had collapsed, laying bare the decay within."  And also, as one might expect at this time in history, Meyrink  tackles nationalism, demagoguery, and racism (although strangely, he does use a racial slur more than once to describe the Zulu so you've been warned).

Frankly, The Green Face isn't quite as good as The Golem, but I'd certainly rate it much higher than his The Angel at the West Window.  It's another novel that is NFE (not for everyone), but it's one I certainly recommend to anyone who is already of fan of Meyrink who may not have read this book yet.  It's another out-of-the-box read for people who enjoy pondering what they've just read, tailor made for someone like me.

***

for an awesome perspective on this novel, check out this blog post at Zen Throwdown. 

The Laundry Files, by Charles Stross

There's something to be said about a guy who can combine HP Lovecraft, various writers of spy fiction, computer geekness and a little of the management nitwitnedness of Office Space and come up with a series of consistently good novels that incorporate all of the above.  After all, as he notes in the afterwords of his first series novel, there are a lot of similarities between Lovecraftian horror and spy fiction, especially the espionage novels set in the Cold War.  Along  the way he throws pointed barbs at iPhones, cults, Power Point presentations, evangelical Christians, handguns and other sources of irritation -- all of which come off as funny, but only because you realize that some of the things he pokes sarcastic fun at resonate with your own fears, peeves, and annoyances.  This guy is Charles Stross, who is the author of four books that comprise The Laundry Files, one of my favorite series of novels ever written.  If you'll pardon the expletive, I don't know he manages to keep coming up with this amazing shit -- each book is different, sending the main character Bob Howard, computational demonologist,  into perilous adventures as he and the Laundry, the super-secret civil service organization  Bob works for, prepare to save humanity from the onslaught of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN -- an apocalypse arriving from the multiverse.   The people at the Laundry have developed some very modern and secret technologies that combine the most high-tech electronics with the occult to keep Bob and others like him safe to defend the world -- all based on magic as a form of mathematics.  These novels remind me of old-time adventure stories with a hopped-up occult/geek/horror twist that for some reason unknown to myself I just can't seem to get enough of.

These books are perfect for someone like me -- I never did jump on the Twilight bandwagon, I don't do talking werewolves or other stuff like that, didn't swoon over the zombie phase and actually waited for it to die down before venturing back into the world of fantasy/horror because this kind of stuff seemed to dominate the bookstores forever.  Tons of people like that sort of urban fantasy/paranormal romance stuff -- and that's great, but it's just not my thing.  So I ran across my copy of Atrocity Archives at home while reorganizing my bookshelves and decided to give it read, and within a couple of weeks, completely finished the Laundry series, finishing one book and picking up the next right away.  I can definitely recommend each and every novel to anyone who is a) into HP Lovecraft; b) likes irreverent humor and sarcastic wit; c)  likes occult fiction; d) enjoys the old Cold War-type spy fiction and e) looking for something entirely different.   I'm hooked on these books now, and sadly, having just finished the last one, I am not looking forward to having to wait for a while to get back to the Laundry and Bob Howard's latest adventures. 

So now, to the books themselves: I loved them all, have very little in the way of negatives to say about any of them, so I'll just offer a barebones outline of each one in their publication order.   It goes without saying that you simply must read them in the same order or you'll be totally confused. 

The Atrocity Archives

9780441013654

Ace, 2006

originally published 2004

368 pp

paper

Take a helping of HP Lovecraft, toss in a layer of spy fiction, add a hefty dose of computer hackers & math nerds as well as the absurdity that can exist among bureaucrats who manage a cubicle-filled office, and you've got The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross. The title of the book covers not only the main story "The Atrocity Archive," but also "The Concrete Jungle," a novella that starts with one too many cow sculptures at Maynard Keynes, as well as an interesting essay by Stross entitled "Inside the Fear Factory."

Bob Howard works for a super-secret government agency called The Laundry. He's a computer guy who does stuff like fix sick Beowulf clusters, calibrates tarot permutators and does security audits of collecting card games to ensure that "stoned artists" in Austin Texas don't accidentally come up with a "great node." A year earlier he'd applied for a job in active service, and as the novel opens, he's getting his first crack at it. His assignment is to break into a company called Memetix (UK) Ltd., where a mathematician has succeeded in duplicating the Turing-Lovecraft theorem. It's in the world's best interest that the theorem is kept under wraps -- because certain mathematical computations can rip "honking great holes in spacetime," and once that happens, those things that live in the angles of different universes can make their way into ours. His mission is successful, and some three months after a mishap during a training class lands him a suspension he is sent back out into the field again. He ends up in Santa Cruz, where he is supposed to talk to a gorgeous scientist named Mo who is not allowed to leave the United States because of the nature of her work. When she is kidnapped and Bob intervenes to help her (which is against SOP) he ends up with a head injury and a flight back home. Shortly afterwards, Bob gets a new job in the Laundry under Angleton, his new boss -- and is assigned to accompany Mo (now back in the UK) to Amsterdam -- and all hell literally breaks loose.

"The Concrete Jungle" finds our hero once again wrapped up in a job for Angleton -- where he is ordered to go to Maynard Keynes and count the cows. His findings lead to the possibility that someone is playing around with "gorgonism," and may be planning to unleash its power via hacked CCTV networks.

Both "The Atrocity Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle" are great fun. Both make fun of the bureaucratic crap people in government jobs have to deal with -- budgets, paperwork for the sake of filling in paperwork, timekeeping and managers who have nothing better to do with their time than to make life tough on the employees and demand accurate paper clip counts in case of an audit. Bob's weird roommates at Chateau Cthulhu are also a good source of laughs. Beyond the humor of it all, Atrocity Archives combines spying, the occult and Lovecraftian horror into something very geeky and at the same time very original.

If you've got a geeky or irreverent sense of humor, this book should be just up your alley, especially if you also happen to be a fan of Lovecraftian-type horror, occult fiction and the occasional Cold War spy fiction novel.  Being in tune with geek culture is also a plus, although I have to admit that it's not one of my things. Looking at several  reviews, a lot of people have commented on the long time it takes to get into the story in "The Atrocity Archive," but I didn't care -- I was highly entertained; in all honesty, much more so by "The Atrocity Archive" than "The Concrete Jungle." Don't miss the essay at the end of the book -- it's well worth spending some time on.

The Jennifer Morgue
9781930846456
Golden Gryphon Press, 2006
313 pp
hardcover

Bob Howard and the Laundry return, this time in an adventure with a very James Bond flair. The geek culture and Lovecraft influence are still there, but this time Bob is lifted out of his office chair and smack into a case where once again the fate of the world hangs in the balance.  Back in the 1970s, the CIA was eager to retrieve a Soviet submarine that had gone down in the Pacific Ocean in a mission known as Operation Jennifer, located at Jennifer Morgue Site One.  They finally lock onto it, but as the sub begins to rise, suddenly something down below starts stirring; at 3,000 feet below the surface it is suddenly pulled back down. The CIA is in violation of the Benthic Treaties made with the Deep Ones (codename BLUE HADES), and in accordance with Article Five, Clause Four of the treaty, the Deep Ones decided to exercise their salvage rights and to claim the sub.  Flash forward to the 21st century:  Bob Howard, newly promoted,  is in Darmstadt, Germany after a harrowing ride on the autobahn.  He's supposed to attend a joint meeting with his international counterparts and he meets Ramona, an agent from the Black Chamber (America's "superblack agency dealing with occult intelligence.")   Together they are tasked with cozying up to  a rather nasty billionaire named Ellis Billington, who has acquired a CIA spy ship with plans on invading a section of disputed BLUE HADES and DEEP SEVEN (the Cthonians)  territory in the Caribbean at Jennifer Morgue Site Two.  Bob's boss, Angleton, wants to know what exactly Billington's going to do there, so that he can work necessary action to keep Billington from "pissing off" DEEP SEVEN and BLUE HADES.  If that happens, well, let's just say humanity is in for a load of trouble.  Angleton would prefer not having to worry about how he's going to have to tell the powers that be.   All of Britain is now depending on Bob, and Angleton warns him not to make his "usual hash of things."   From that moment on, our erstwhile hero (and Stross' novel) goes into James Bond mode, complete with weapons that would make even Q proud, the secret-agent car (here a Smartcar rather than an Aston Martin), casino action and Bond girls, and even code names like BROCCOLI-GOLDENEYE. 

What I love about this book (and the others as well)  is that it really doesn't take itself very seriously and it's hard to keep the laughs away.  There are so many jokes in here (Power Point presentations, bad-guy monologuing and suits are at the root of many) -- my only problem is that I'm not very much into geek culture so I'm probably missing a lot.   But the story is so much fun to read that it's really hard to stop until it's all over. Yet, with all of the positives, the thing I didn't like much about it is that Bob gets sort of lost in this one to the other characters -- there's a reason why but I can't spill it -- while the book loses something taking the route Stross decided on.  The second story in the book, "Pimpf",  is not nearly as good as Jennifer Morgue or its predecessor Atrocity Archives -- but it does introduce a character who will show up again in The Fuller Memorandum.  My advice -- try the Atrocity Archives; if you like it, you're going to like this one.

The Fuller Memorandum
9780441018673
Ace, 2010
310 pp
Hardcover

"It's Bob Howard vs. Evil -- and Evil cheats."

Third in the Laundry series, the story behind The Fuller Memorandum is related via Bob Howard's memoir of some pretty harrowing events.  Two years prior to the events of this book, his boss Angleton had suggested to Bob that he write his memoirs.  When Bob wonders why a 30 year-old should even start thinking about an autobiography, he discovers that it's in the book of rules that officers above a certain rank keep a classified journal or update their memoirs.  The info will be classified and used as a part of the Laundry's "institutional memory." If something ever goes awry while Bob is out keeping evil at bay, at least the knowledge in his "thick little skull" will have been preserved.  The Fuller Memorandum is one section of Bob's memoir that covers his story of "the beginning of the end of the world," among other things. 

It all begins with Bob's assignment at RAF Cosford, where he is supposed to take a look at an aircraft that is the site of some strange incidents.  He's also supposed to try to stop these weird things from happening, and while he's there, he needs to take a look in Hangar Six, part of the RAF Museum annex. His contact is Hastings, who tells him that the plane is from Squadron 666, a plane that did duty for the Laundry, logging some 280 hours on the "other side, escorting the white elephants." Just what that means isn't clear at the moment; Angleton had said something about white elephants but now Bob needs to take care of the problems. A forgotten ward leads to an explosion, survived by both Bob & Hastings, but the lady at the front desk, now bringing tea to the hangar, is caught up and killed.  Under orders to take time off from the Laundry while he awaits any further action, Bob picks up his wife Mo (who also works for the Laundry) from the airport to find that Mo is in pretty bad shape, "two millimeters away from a nervous breakdown."   But because Bob is not yet cleared, Mo can't talk to him about what happened to her.  Expecting a messenger with a Letter of Release, what shows up at his doorstep instead has followed Mo home from Amsterdam, an Uncle Fester lookalike wearing the "mortal skin of a dead man walking," bringing Bob into CLUB ZERO, involving a cult called The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom, a nasty bunch of groupies of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the end of the world.  To make matters worse, Angleton has disappeared, and Bob is left to try to figure things out for himself. At the same time, The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom (oh! I just noticed their acronym would be FCUK!), the Americans and the Russians are all looking for something called the Teapot as well as  the Fuller Memorandum, a document that will help to awaken the "Sleeper," a first step toward a chain of events leading to the end of humanity.   As Bob's investigation proceeds, he enters into what may be the weirdest case in which he's ever been involved, one that could very well signal the beginning of the end.

According to Wikipedia, where The Jennifer Morgue was written as a sort of pastiche send up of Ian Fleming's James Bond, The Fuller Memorandum is written as an "homage of sorts" to the work of Anthony Price, author of a series of spy novels featuring Dr. David Audley and Coloner Jack Butler.   Lovecraft's influence is still alive and kicking in this book, along with occult conspiracies and some more earthly horrors.  The same cynical, sarcastic humor and asides  (this time directed at Iphones, cultists, workers' rights and handguns among other things) in the other two books are still here, as are the author's excellent characterizations.  Also in common with The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, while the action is definitely over the top,  I loved it -- I absolutely can't get enough of The Laundry or of Charles Stross' writing.   I hope this series lasts a good, long time.

The Apocalypse Codex
9781937007461
Ace, 2012
326 pp

 "Bob Howard may be humanity's last hope. Start praying..."

Still recovering from the hair-raising events of The Fuller Memorandum, Bob now finds himself on the Fast Stream track for promotion, and his superiors have decided that he needs to attend some Professional Development training with regular civil servants who don't work for the Laundry.  Bob of course, doesn't want to go -- he'd rather audit some courses at the Dunwich facility that would improve his prospects for survival for "when the tentacles hit the pentacle." But of course, he has no choice, and after the first "four hours of soul-destroyingly banal tedium," meets Gerald Lockhart, who is in charge of external assets.  Lockhart wants Bob to join forces with Persephone Hazard, code name BASHFUL INCENDIARY, who has been hired to investigate why an American televangelist has all of a sudden taken an intense interest in the people surrounding the Prime Minister.  The Laundry is not allowed to snoop on Number 10, but the activities of the televangelist, Ray Schiller, have whetted the organization's curiosity.  It's off to America for Bob, where he follows BASHFUL INCENDIARY to a retreat in the Rockies, where she will be poised to discover exactly what Schiller and his disciples are getting up to -- and it's definitely not pretty. 

According to Howard's own blog, he wrote The Apocalypse Codex with Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise in mind.  But you'll also find a lot of Lovecraft, as well as some "Wrath of Khan" moments as Bob tries to prevent a group of evil and somewhat misguided members of the Golden Promise Ministries from ushering in the Second Coming that could launch NIGHTMARE CASE GREEN before its time. That would be very, very bad indeed. 

In The Apocalypse Codex Stross has created a plot that starts out like a light tap on the gas pedal and then accelerates in increments to some stomach-tensing action as you wonder how the heck they're going to make out of this one before the apocalypse erupts. Although a great deal of the action is told from the perspectives of two of the other characters, it fits together well considering this story is coming from Bob Howard's memoirs. It also seems like the Laundry series is getting a bit more serious now as events are moving toward the inevitable fight between humanity and what's laying in wait inside the edges and angles of other universes, but I hope it doesn't ever lose its sense of humor and geekness that these books are noted for and that is part of the reason I love this series.   It's another excellent and fun installment of the Laundry series, but don't read this if you're a very religious Christian unless you have a sense of humor.  It's obvious that Howard has issues with fundamentalist Christians in the way he throws those pointed barbs around -- the arrows don't bother me, but some people might take his humor the wrong way.  If you can get past that, you'll be rewarded with a fun adventure that takes you deeper into the heart of the strange and mysterious Laundry. 

and now, the long wait before the next book....aaarrghh!