The Elder Gods have cast their long, twisted shadow over contemporary London, the “New Management” has transformed government into a private megacorporation, and supernatural powers are popping up in people of all walks of life. One billionaire tycoon will stop at nothing to acquire the one true Necronomicon, a cursed grimoire right out of H. P. Lovecraft. When a group of psychic misfits stages a bank robbery, ex-cop Wendy Deere is put on the job as private security to track them down and soon finds herself drawn in to the hunt for the ghastly book. The plot goes from playful to horrific, from reality-bending and beyond in true Stross fashion. Although this world has much in common with The Laundry Files, and I kept waiting for our friends from those stories to show up and save the day, to my mind this is a parallel-Laundry-Files universe, just as fun and wildly inventive, and it works great as a stand-alone.

I've been an avid reader of Charles Stross and The Laundry Files in particular. A series that started as parodies of well-known British Spy novels with snappy humor and a delightful taste of Lovecraftian horror... as well as Information Technology horror. If you've worked IT, you know there's plenty of material there. The series now stands on its own as a dark fantasy, comedy lightly coating the deep horror of what you're reading.

Dead Lies Dreaming is a departure from the familiar story line, set instead in the greater setting that Laundry Files falls within. There's no Bob, or Mhari, or any of the familiar faces... except one. The New Management, the being formerly known as The Mandate. This is his England, a country drastically shaped by the damage the Laundry could not mitigate, and this is a story about the people who live in that country.

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.

The result is supernatural horror by way of a Guy Ritchie with a Peter Pan fetish. There's disorientation at the completely different set of characters, but it's made up for in the schemes, wit, and moving pieces on this multi-dimensional and reality bending game of chess.

Familiarity with The Laundry Files is unnecessary to enjoy this book, instead all one needs is awareness of wider troupe standards such as the Necronomicon. If readers start here there's nothing to stop their enjoyment, and from there they always have the option of starting at the beginning to learn how we got where we are.

Advance Reader Copy courtesy of Macmillan-Tor/Forge in exchange for an honest review; changes may exist between galley and the final edition.

A very different Laundry Series book! It is set in the Laundry universe, but is a self contained tale that does not involve the any of the usual or unusual cast of characters from said series. Instead this is the tale of magic, corruption, double-dealing, and a caper-heist that involves time travel of a sort to retrieve a misfiled magical tome. In the end, the main characters survive because the have not totally lost their humanity in the midst of the magical mayhem that Britain has become. An interesting addition to the series.

Bob Howard and the Laundry failed to keep the extradimensional evil doers out of this universe. The world is paying the price now. The Black Pharaoh has been installed at No. 10 Downing Street and magic is rising again after years of dormancy. Eve Starkey is Executive Assistant to Rupert de Montfort Bigge. Bigge believes he has Eve by the short hairs due to having a lot of blackmail material on her, but Eve is heir to a powerful spell book that her family has guarded for a century or more. Eve's brother, Imp (or Jeremy), lives in their ancestral home, while maintaining its neglected facade to keep everyone else out. He lives there with his crew of Lost Boys. Wendy Deere is hired by HiveCo. to investigate a bank robbery that Imp and his crew pulled off. Little does she know this investigation will change her life forever. Turns out Rupert is the High Priest for a rival god to the Black Pharaoh and there is more going on than meets the eye. A new series in the elaborate world Stross created for The Laundry Files. Always entertaining, especially if you are a fan of British humor.

If we select nominations for Best Series based on a representative title being released in 2020, The Laundry Files may not make the grade. But if we are choosing nominations based on the strength of the entire series, then Charles Stross’s decades-long Laundry Files series is nearly a lock for our ballots.

This is not to say that Dead Lies Dreaming is a let-down. Rather, it’s an uneven book that doesn’t always showcase the strengths of the series, or Stross’ rich imagination.

Taking place in a London transformed by the rise of the dark and eldritch forces unleashed during the events of the previous few Laundry Files novels, Dead Lies Dreaming follows the exploits of a group of marginalized youths who support themselves through magic-based crime. Through various circumstances — and family connections — they become embroiled in a plot to travel back in time and secure a rare and dangerous tome of magic.

As always with Stross, there’s a fair degree of on-point criticism of capitalism’s excesses, much of which lands well. The sections in which he uses the point of view of the marginalized youths to examine the completely bizarre housing market in the United Kingdom, are perspicacious, witty, and sad.

One of the strongest scenes — and perhaps the most difficult to read because it hits so close to home — involves a visit to a long-term care facility. Stross writes the section with a keen eye for the real-world horrors of old age, dementia, and under-resourced nursing staff.

Where Dead Lies Dreaming falls down as a book is that it’s hard to get a handle on any of the characters as people. Several of them seem interesting at first — particularly police officer / thief taker Wendy Deere, and corporate power-broker Eve. Stross has introduced a large and diverse cast, but doesn’t develop many of them beyond sketch work.

Stross has made a clean break here from all the previous books in the series. The story barely even mentions any of the existing characters, does not tie into the overall story arc, and doesn’t even touch on the spycraft that had been the unifying theme for the series. This makes one wonder whether this book might have been better-served by being pared down, streamlined, and released as something wholly separate.

It has been almost a decade since Charles Stross penned a novel that was not a sequel to one of his previous books. Dead Lies Dreaming is still a sequel, but in some ways it is a welcome change in that it stands alone far more than most of his recent novels. Some might even find it a better entry point to the world of the Laundry Files than several of the previous books. But is this a world that is worth devoting many more books to? Only Stross can pull that off, and we think he could, but is he ready to move on? Dead Lies Dreaming leaves us hoping he might be.

While this is technically the 10th Laundry Files book, Dead Lies Dreaming is more of a stand-alone story in the Laundry Files universe than a continuation of the series. There is an obvious nod to the Cthulhu Mythos in the title. While the story has Lovecraftian references, it is far from cosmic horror. An evil businessman wants to get his hand on an actual copy of the fabled Necronomicon that’s up for sale on a private online book auction. He sets his power-hungry assistant to the task. However, many forces want to get ahold of it, and the stakes are high. The plot is not treading any new ground. Still, it is a solid and fun romp through the dark work where technology literally is magic and world leaders are actually evil supernatural beings. Dead Lies Dreaming has action, adventure, double-crossing, and double-double crossing. My favorite part of this story features 19th century Whitechapel, but to say more would spoil the fun. If you have read Charles Stross, you know what to expect. If you haven’t, you will be entering a cyber-punk/Lovecraftian/dystopia/magic-meets inefficient government bureaucracy with a lot of wry British humor and a dash of James Bond-style action-adventure. Read this!

I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, while billed as a Laundry Files novel, this latest entry from author Charles Stross would be better described as just occurring in the same general universe as the Laundry Files series as no real characters from the Laundry Files series are here and only some one off references are made to specifics from the earlier novels. So if you are expecting a continuation of Bob Howard type adventures you will be very disappointed. On the other hand, I still found the novel an easy and enjoyable read, although the story/plot is divided into several sections that essentially merge for the last third of the book which I found to be the most entertaining. Wendy Deere showed some initial promise as a potential new Bob Howard type main character, but her arc rather quickly, and in my opinion somewhat unbelievably, shifted into a more minor supporting character role in a larger ensemble. And once I was finished reading, I was left wondering what the point of the whole story was. It seemed like the author changed direction mid stream but maybe that was his intent all along.

Charles Stross's Laundry Files universe of stories is one of the finest achievements of social/political satire in this century. Whatever else is going on - and there is always a lot going on - these books are hysterically funny. And I suspect at least a third of the jokes and references go over my head.

In this version of current times, Lovecraftian gods live, mathematics is a form of magic, and the computer age has awakened the Dark Gods and thinned the Veil between worlds. But Heroes who would save the world still have to deal with HR and government/corporate bureaucracy and the pitfalls of the Information Age. And save their receipts.

In earlier books, Stross has parodied English spy fiction and brought elves, vampires, and superheroes into his universe; in this one, he turns his attention to Peter Pan and time travel. But this isn't your Uncle Walt Disney's Peter and Wendy. I haven't read Barrie's original Peter Pan, but I gather Stross goes back to the source material for his inspiration, while playing off our Disney-fied expectations..

This is a good entry to the universe - it's a new story line with a new set of characters. Stross is a very fine writer; the characters (even the villains) are well drawn, the plot is complicated but laid out nicely, the suspense builds, the action sequences are compelling, and the ending is satisfying.

I recommend this highly.

I should preface this review by saying I’m a massive fan of Charles Stross, and I love the Laundry Files series. That being said, there was no need to rely on good feeling for my positive review. I wouldn’t recommend this as your starting point for the laundry files, you’re probably going to need a bit more back story. Advanced maths is magic, too many people practicing magic thins the walls of reality. It also will eventually give you an unpleasant type of dementia caused by extra dimensional nasties chomping on your grey matter.

This book was an entertaining romp through an alternate present day London. Transhumans - people with abilities or powers caused by the thinning of the walls between realities - are key characters in this book, Wendy, an ex police officer with the ability to call needed items into existence - like a baton, or battering ram...The Unlikeliest bunch of bank robbers you’ve ever seen, each with their own individual talents.

But this is a London in thrall to the Black Pharaoh, where you can be executed for an increasing number of crimes. A high stakes heist, with parties double crossing and attempting to out think each other. Hints of Peter Pan, although not any version you’ve ever seen before!

I really hope we get to see more of these characters, particularly Wendy and Eve. We got a glimpse of their individual back stories but I had the sense there was a lot more to tell.
Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC

Perfect, if dystopic, next step in the universe of the New Management. Love the heist, love the diverse group of kids, love the hints of a world post CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. More please!

Changing one of the basic premises of a series is risky; when Stross had the stars come right, the Laundry Files faced some major narrative challenges, and he’s chosen to start with a bunch of new characters, mostly criminals-but-not-so-bad, along with an ex-police officer turned private investigator/enforcer-type now that the New Management has eliminated most public functions. It’s hard not to see the narrative shift being affected by Brexit and the pandemic, too; the general idea is that most people keep on doing their ordinary things even as the extended public executions begin and there’s no longer any pretense of the law binding the rich and powerful too. But that’s background to the more specific caper: there’s a scary book, a codex to the Necronomicon, and a number of nasty types are competing to get it, along with our protagonists, who mostly work for one or another of the nasty types (or are said types themselves, in one instance). I’ll go with it because I’m invested but I really wish I knew what was happening to Mo and the old crew.

Just read an ARC from NetGalley of his latest "Laundry files" universe title, "Death Lies Dreaming" - it's terrific, and builds on the world created in previous titles, but with a new set of protagonist.s.

Modern day Peter Pan vs Demonic Oligarchs in a heist story, with deadly office politics, family history aiding and abetting the main characters - it’s got time travel(ish), hedge funds, computational magic, superpowers, demonic books, Eastern European ex-special forces, Tinkerbell(ish), outsourced law enforcement, romance, and lots more.

Just when you think you know where it’s going, the route suddenly changes - I strongly recommend it.

A great, tightly paced, alternate London where magic and powers co-exist in present day, heist story. Stross never disappoints. His characters, pacing and plot are all interesting and fun to read.

The Setting: an alternate England where the government has changed hands to the New Management run by the Mad God of Downing Street .... magic now seems commonplace as manifested by Transhumans ... strange things slither out of the shadows into everyday life ... and cults and dark churches are the norm. So starts this compelling tale starring a quartet of young adults ... some with transhuman skills, but all under direction of the Imp (born as Jerome Starkey). This is my first foray into the artistry of Charles Stross ... I have never read any of the highly touted Laundry Files books ... this novel can certainly be enjoyed as a standalone.
Imp and his gender-variant crew have so far entered into low level heists to earn their keep. The Imp is charismatic and theatrical. He feels destined to become London's greatest cinematic artist by filming his version of J.M Barrie's "Peter and Wendy". His vision and version entails downloading dead kids from cyberspace by Peter - a ruthless gangleader and psychopath and hacker and resurrecting and saving them from the lawless cyborg, the Dread Space Pirate Hook ... with whom he shares a mutual homoerotic love-death relationship. ( As you can see a rather nightmarish rendering of the beloved children's fantasy) This type of relationships mirrors his own with "Doc" - another member of the crew. Game Boy was the third member ... he considered himself a transgender ... but his parents placed him into Conversion Therapy, hoping to pray-away-the gayness, Now , almost eighteen he was on a waiting list at a gender reassignment clinic. and on black market hormone supplements. And, rounding out the quartet is Del (born as Rebecca McKee, age 21) ... basically the getaway driver.. her driving skills are unsurpassed. She came out to her mother at sixteen .. and takes no shit from anyone.
Magic plays a central and driving role in this drama ... a respected and sometimes feared function of everyday life ... coming a long way from its occult roots. Both the Imp and his sister Eve (Evelyn) are from a family of oneiromancers ... able to harness dreams into some sort of reality that can be stored in Memory Palaces. With magecraft one can access the ghost roads and follow the ley lines linking both places and time to other parallel universes.
Eve Starkey is an executive assistant extraordinaire, working under a magical binding for the dastardly powerful and ruthless, Rupert de Montfort Bigge. He is an ecclesiast in the Cult of the Mute Poet .. a secret esoteric religious order .He already has a quite sizeable collection of texts on the subject of witchcraft and magic .. and, yet he tasks Eve to obtain the cursed and missing occult concordance to the true Necronomicon ... at any costs... even if wetwork is necessary. Eve enlists her brother, the Imp and his crew. And so starts the greatest heist in history following the ghost roads through time to retrieve the book in the rookery of Whitechapel, England in 1888 ... under the eyes of Jack The Ripper and other denizens and demons of the night.
Charles Stross proves to be an amazing storyteller as he weaves a convoluted tale of dread and the supernatural that escalates to a thrilling denouement. Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Books for providing an Uncorrected Proof in exchange for an honest review. I look forward to delving into the oeuvre of Charles Stross .. I'm adding him to my list of Author's to Follow.

Charlie Stross's Laundry Files universe is a clever and humorous mashup of James Bond-ian spycraft, technical geekery, Lovecraftian horrors, and British bureaucracy. The first nine novels follow Bob and his cohort as they level up both in power and authority, to the point where it has become increasingly difficult to continue their progression while keeping things interesting on a human level. So it comes as a great relief that in Dead Lies Dreaming, Stross has reset the stage with a new set of characters with less power and lower stakes (Jim Butcher could learn a lesson here!).

This tenth installment in the story stands alone and introduces us to some compelling new characters, who I hope will continue to be developed in subsequent volumes (especially Wendy and Eve). As always, there is considerable humor in the details, an interesting and internally consistent plot, and enough surprises to keep an engaged reader from predicting the ending too early. This may not be the best novel in the series, but it's one of the best in recent memory. The Laundry Files series is very highly recommended, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend starting here, even though this installment mostly stands on its own.

[An advance copy of the manuscript was provided by Tor via NetGalley]

Disclosure: The reviewer would like to thank the publisher, Tor, for providing an electronic ARC for review.

"Dead Lies Dreaming" is the latest novel in the Hugo nominated Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. The Laundry Files series starts out as humorous look at a world in which magic and the occult can be manipulated using math and science in a way that is surprisingly similar to computer technology. Add to this a secret but highly bureaucratic spy organization headquartered in London that is tasked with mitigating supernatural threats along with an irreverent but otherwise ordinary protagonist and you have a recipe for a very entertaining series. Stross keeps his readers engaged with very fresh material by using different protagonists, environments, countries, and challenges in each novel. Stross even did away with the Laundry in the last several novels as Britain is taken over by an ancient and malignant deity in preparation for all out magical chaos....

"Dead Lies Dreaming" is a spy thriller tale revolving around competing criminal organizations including magic, spells, powerful magical items, demonic religions, and time travel to Victorian London. It features an all new cast of characters who engage in less-than-legal activities. The reader can usually identify the antagonists as having less than worthy motivation and being much more violent than the protagonists. The peak challenge of the book is the journey taken by four battling groups of people who take a magical route to a dark and horrific version of 1888 London to fight for the possession of a powerful and dangerous magical artifact. The descriptions and writing at this point make the book really hard to put down.

"Dead Lies Dreaming" definitely has a different feel from earlier novels in The Laundry series, but it is consistent with the overall direction of the series. It is an enjoyable, engaging, well-written, and entertaining story with unusual but believable characters..

Thank you to the author, Macmillan-Tor/Forge, and NetGalley for providing an advance copy for review.

One of the first things you'll notice if you happen to come by this book not knowing anything about The Laundry Files, is that it's seemingly the next in an ongoing series, and that you should presumably read the prior novels before jumping into this one. That's not <i>quite</i> true, though.

Dead Lies Dreaming is purportedly the 10th novel in a series, that in a few words, explores the details and consequences of a magic system that's made easier by the ever-advancing computational abilities of modern computer systems but the use of which attracts extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horrors from beyond spacetime. The events within takes place at some point after the 8th book in the series, which was book-ended by a bit of a seismic shift in the larger status quo for the series.

Given that it deals with entirely new characters in situations entirely separate from (if a result of) events in the main series, this is a perfectly good jumping on point for new readers interested in the series, with the caveat that if you then go back and read the rest of the main series, you'll be in on that pretty bleak twist that marks the transition from a semblance of our current world into the state that you're introduced to pretty effectively right at the beginning of the novel.

So, for anyone that's in the middle of these two camps and not yet caught up to and finished at least The Delirium Brief (or feels like starting a 10-book series + various novellas from scratch) you may want to read up to that point before jumping in here.

With that out of the way, what can you expect to find in this latest installment? In a word, a heist story, that goes off in directions I wasn't necessarily expecting it to go relative to the rest of the series. This entry's biggest strength is just how breezy and eminently readable it is, which in my opinion stems from the fact that Stross is playing with entirely new characters here that don't have the weight of 9 previous novels behind them, which allows a lot of freedom in terms of the direction and method of approaching this story.

You can also expect a consistent flow to the novel which makes it hard to put down. Expositionary setup from multiple different viewpoints blends very nicely with deftly written action sequences, broken up here and there by interesting technical infodumps relevant to the situation at hand (but not as overblown as you might find in a Neal Stephenson novel - whether that's a positive or negative thing is entirely up to the reader). One of the things the author does that was really noticeable here is know the points in the story when it is best to switch characters or interrupt or resume an expositionary flashback. All of which is peppered here and there with timely offhand comments, sometimes in the form of footnotes, that provide a much-needed dose of comic relief, especially when taken in the context of the wider universe of these books. All of this combines to effectively tell a complete story (even though this is the first of a planned spin off trilogy) with very interesting implications for the Laundry Files wider universe.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this newest entry both as a first in a new trilogy and as the first in a side trilogy in a series that has never once actually disappointed me, which is pretty rare, all things considered. If you're acquainted with the author's other novels, don't hesitate to pick this one up, and if you're not, this is as good a place to start as any. I think it's fair to say that I'm more than looking forward to the next entry in this sub-universe.

Let me gush about this utterly perfect continuation of the Laundry Files! I'm an utter fan of the author's and this book proves that he is consistently marvellous! It's the 10th volume and yet also a new beginning of sorts. Maybe it's even a standalone, we just will have to wait and see.

In the previous volume, the Black Pharao finally made it into our realm, leaving his pyramid on the dark moon behind and taking over Downing Street. In times of Trump, Putin and, yes, also Johnson ... is this really supposed to scare us? Well, sort of. Because the new Upper Management is bringing back archaic punishments for even the littlest of crimes, having everyone mistrusting everyone else and being perpetually afraid. Moreover, London has become infested with rich people buying up every scrap of land before letting it decay and normal people being crushed between rivaling factions.
Which all means that Charles Stross has his fingers on the pulse of the times!

Then he adds a merry band of robbers into the mix that are divers as well as delightful and topps it all off with gloriously sick and capable baddies as well as a mysterious family curse!

Seriously, I am still marvelling over Stross' craftmanship that he used to combine the high-tech magical world we know from the series with stories like Bond and Peter Pan. Not to mention that he evidently also took a course in accountancy. *snickers*

The plot was layer upon layer upon layer of mythical magical goodness, the writing was fast-paced like you wouldn't believe, the action was strong, the characters had palpable chemistry and the worldbuilding was once again superb.
Maybe it was the storytelling-aspect of this volume that appealed to me most despite me not being too much of a fan of Barrie's creation.
Anyway, no matter if this is a standalone or kicking-off a new era (which would make sense considering how the last volume ended and that humanity has itself entered a new era under new management), it is delicious and fantastic and you don't even have to have read the previous 9 books to enjoy it (though I recommend that you do)!

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sometimes I'm just astounded.

After reading this book, I'm not only reeling after a great Heist story, but I'm rocking to a Dark Fantasy that happens to be Hard SF while very much being a Superhero tale being couched in a Lovecraftian universe while setting me up to be murdered by Bond in its classic thriller milieu just before I wonder if Peter from Peter Pan will ever grow up.

If you're asking WTF, then you're in the right frame of mind.

And it's AWESOME.

For you old fans of Bob and Mo and fairy kingdoms clashing against Elder Gods, put your expectations on hold. There's not much of that here. We're very much in a day and age after a Greater Evil has taken over the government and the best thing that a government employee can hope for is holding the chaos at bay just a few seconds longer.

For the rest of us, and that includes a group of thieves and a thief-taker in modern pre-apocalyptic London, we've got a little mission. And a -- or rather, The Necronomicon.

If you're not just a tad thrilled (or horrified) by this news, then go read some romance fluff. That's the only genre that isn't expertly mashed in this brilliant novel.

Oddly enough, a new reader of Stross could read this particular novel without having read the previous ones. They may miss a lot of the worldbuilding jokes and might freak out at the sheer complexity of the inherent humor of computational necromancy or residual human resources, but that's okay. They'll still be in for a treat. After all, Santa is dead.

Long live Santa.

*I cackle, running off into the sunset, my hair turning pure white just before I jump on a sleigh, fleeing Boris Johnson*

Thank you to the publisher for giving me a free digital ARC of this book in exchange for feedback.

I expected to enjoy this, and I did. A new "Laundry Files" book is always exciting for me - they are invariably clever, funny, and pleasantly scary, and this new one is, too.

The characters are not the main characters of the earliest books ,which threw me somewhat, but I learned to connect with them. I'm not sure I'm entirely clear on how this book moves the overall story of the series forward, but it's fine - I enjoyed reading the book, and I trust Stross as a writer enough to trust that it will all come together in the end.