I am a big fan of spy novels. Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series is the most recent addition to my pantheon of beloved spy books but I also have adored the works of John le Carre and other masters of the spy novel. For the longest time, I craved something set in the fantasy or science fiction genres that captured those vibes and did it well. Then a friend recommended Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series and I’ve been hooked ever since. It captures the suspense and the drudgery of those other spy novels so well but adds and urban fantasy/horror element on top. What if there was a secret branch of British Intelligence that specialized in battling occult threats (like cultists, wizards and vampires) and Lovecraftian entities? Enter the Laundry, the secret intelligence branch that has been doing that for the last thirteen books and most recently in A Conventional Boy.

A Conventional Boy is different from a lot of the other Laundry Files books in that it doesn’t follow someone that is in the Laundry or adjacent to the Laundry. Instead it follows Derek, a young man who was just playing DnD with his friends in the 80s and got swept up in the Satanic Panic. By the time Laundry realized that he wasn’t really a cultist (despite him having some magical talent), it was too late and they just kept him locked up in Camp Sunshine, a secret deprogramming center for cultists. Twenty-some years later, Derek finds out there is a tabletop games convention happening nearby and decides that it’s time to break out and meet his long-time play-by-mail group. Unfortunately, for Derek and maybe humanity, there is actually a group of cultists looking to use this convention for nefarious purposes and now he’ll have to use the knowledge he’s gained from both his tabletop RPGs and from living in Camp Sunshine to maybe save the world.

I really enjoyed A Conventional Boy. After the last several Laundry Files books, the world of this series has gotten increasingly complex so it was nice to have an installment that felt like it could be read by someone who had never picked up a book in this series before. Derek was a great viewpoint character for this because he is similarly an outsider to the rest of the drama of the series and served as a really great window into the world of these books. He’s also a great fish out of water character and I really loved his overall demeanor as he began to realize that he had actually found himself in a situation like the one he had been suspected of so many years earlier.

The strongest element of this book, however, was Stross’ portrayal of convention culture and the weirdness of it. As longtime readers of Kaiju & Gnome will know, these are spaces that Ed and I have spent some time in ourselves and Stross nailed the occasional weirdness of them. In reading about Derek and his friends, it was very easy to imagine Ed and I in similar groups and having similar experiences to them (minus the insurgent eldritch entities). Imagining the weird vibes around the eldritch game debut that is at the heart of this book’s plot, I couldn’t help but thinking about my own bewilderment at things like the Lorcana line at GenCon 2023 or the general vibes of the BookCon I attended back during my Chicago days, specifically the one where I had friends expressly concerned that I might join a cult at it for the ‘lols.’ I could have read a much longer novel about Derek going to a secretly infernal board game convention because Stross just made that part of the novel so believable and nostalgia-providing.

Between the characters and the setting, A Conventional Boy gets high marks from me. It’s a quick read (under 150 pages) and I powered through it in an afternoon. If you’re a fan of the Laundry Files, I think you’ll find a lot to love in this book but if you’ve never read any of these books before, I think this is probably a great place to start. I think after reading this one, you’ll definitely have the urge to go back and read all the rest.

Yes! Another Laundry Files book!!! I absolutely recommend this to fans! I also recommend this to readers that enjoy dark humor, role playing games, and urban/occult fantasy. Just to be clear, I really liked this book.

Although this book does take place in the "Laundry Files" universe it is a standalone and could be a good introduction to the series which takes place on an Earth very much like ours with the exception that mathematics and computer technology can provide access to potentially very dangerous magical powers and beings. This book contains all the humor, adventure, excitement, danger, and blood that "Laundry Files" fans expect, along with a healthy dose of D&D and 80's nostalgia. "A Conventional Boy" introduces a new main character who is a skilled D&D Dungeon Master and adept at utilizing computational demonology, hence it is a good starting point for a newcomer to the series.

I thank Tor.com and Charles Stross for kindly providing an electronic review copy of this excellent book.

I received a gratis copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

To my chagrin, I haven't read any of the previous Laundry Files books. As a testament to Stross's writing, I was able to immerse myself in the world right away and greatly enjoyed the ride. This book consists of a novella, "A Conventional Boy," which follows a forty-something autistic man who was wrongly imprisoned by the Laundry during the 1980s Satanic Panic. They thought his AD&D ways indicated the use of real magic, and by the time they realized their error, he was essentially lost in the system. But he now has a reason to escape: a nearby gaming convention. A convention that, unfortunately, hosts some nefarious folks who ARE delving into some nasty real magic.

I requested this book on NetGalley in part because, as a late-diagnosed autistic person, I wanted to see how Stross handled things. The representation was fantastic--not cliched at all, full of delightful nuance.

The book is rounded out by two short stories. "Overtime" is set at Christmas and is laugh out loud funny at times. The Laundry is such a brilliant lampoon of a particularly British bureaucracy. "Down on the Farm" delves into a mental institution for employees damaged by exposure to magic. The end had some fantastic twists.

Really, this book makes me want to read more in the series.

When the secret anti-occult agency called the Laundry mistakenly nabs teenaged dungeon-master Derek, they think they've caught a genuine cult leader and sentence him to a deprogramming facility aimed at rehabilitating cultists of the various (and very real) Elder Gods. Unfortunately for Derek, since he was grabbed during the 80's Satanic Panic era concerns over Dungeons and Dragons being an actual tool to summon real demons and then forgotten about for decades, he becomes something of a permanent fixture at the 'Camp Sunshine' facility and picks up a lot of information about what real extradimensional summoning looks like and all the incredible dangers they represent. Fortunately for the world, Derek decides well into his middle age to do a quick jail break in order to attend a local gaming convention, at which he immediately clocks the kind of behavior he'd observed during his incarceration, leading to a LARPing session against the dark gods with the kind of real world consequences he's had nightmares about.

Another fun installment of the Laundry Files, with a heavy focus on a kind of nostalgia for the classic pen and paper era of tabletop roleplaying, gamer humor, and the like. D&D players will feel right at home with this one!

I really enjoyed the novella part of this, following Derek, a kid who was institutionalized in the D&D satanic panic for fear of him actually summoning demons and using magic, who is now finding himself at a D&D convention, where there might just be an actual demon summoning cult. The creativity behind this and the whole Laundry Files story is incredible. The two short stories that were also included in this were less exciting, but well written. I will definitely be going and reading the Laundry Files from the start at some point as this is book 13 in the series.

Three and a half stars

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC. All thoughts are my own.

A Conventional Boy is the 13th Laundry Files novel by Charles Stross. Due out 7th Jan 2025 from Macmillan on their Tor imprint, it's 240 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. The book contains 3 works (the aforementioned titular novel, and 2 novella length works, Overtime and Down On the Farm, + an author's note.

Fans adore the sense of gonzo out-of-control wall-to-wall hysterical madness for which the Laundry Files are well known. For readers who adore paranormal bureaucratic fantasy, this is the top shelf good stuff. For fans of Aaronovitch, Doctorow, Simon Green, and the other boys in the band - this is not derivative at all, but ticks the same boxes as the aforementioned. It's funny, full on chaos, darkly humorous, and absolutely full of malicious compliance and government incompetence, with the added bonus of an eldritch horror or three, satanic panic D&D groups, and stopping the end of the world. There's deep nerdiness in the form of a math/physics/programming component to magic and that the agents are really smart (and very very nerdy). Stross has a talent for sarcastic/exasperated/desperate deadpan humour and this is a pretty strong entry in a very strong perennially entertaining series.

For readers who are not already invested in the series, it's convoluted, but this one does work moderately well as a standalone, since it is a prequel and gives readers the backstory for Derek the DM (forecasting ops guy). The series is up to 13 books plus tie ins in the form of the New Management series, a bunch of shorter fiction (stories and novellas) and uses a large ensemble cast of characters, so it's a great candidate for a very long binge/buddy read.

Four stars. Recommended unreservedly to humorous SF/UF fans.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

My thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for an advance copy of a prequel to a long running series, that highlights the life and times of an important member, one whose life was changed rolling dice, a skill that he would later use to save the world.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons about a year before a movie featuring Tom Hanks playing a role player came out, and shocked a nation. In the movie Tom Hanks was made so crazed by his role playing lifestyle that he hung out in a steam tunnel and threw himself off a building. At least this is how I remember it, I watched the movie once, thought the story was stupid, and the character had bigger problems than thinking he was a half elf fighter/magic user, or whatever. This movie though, came at a time when Satan was corrupting the morals of children all over America, with albums playing Satan's words of suicide solution backwards, demonic day cares and more. Satanic Panic made a few of my friends lay down the dice, and even got us a strong talking to by our priest, who a year later left the priesthood and got married. Anyway my parents thought it was dumb, and let me play. When my Aunt complained to her, my Mom said, "He and his friends have fun, use their imaginations and even better use math. Please tell me what is wrong with that." It turns out my Mom was wrong, at least in the world the Laundry Files takes place. Role playing games involve math, which can open up portals, portals that anything can enter into. And only a fugitive dungeon master might be able to save the day. A Conventional Boy: A Laundry Files Novel by Charles Stross, is the thirteenth book in this popular series, and acts as a prologue, while investigating the past of one of their more popular characters.

Derek Reilly was a young man in 1984, with a few friends that all shared an interest in Role playing games. This interest caught the attention of a teacher, who feared for their souls, and so made a call. Derek and his friends were imprisoned by a secret government group that investigates and protects from occult shenanigans, and the attacks from elder gods. All of which can be aided in this world in role playing games. Derek was soon found to be innocent of nothing but a great imagination, however Derek was deemed to now know too much, and hence could never be let out. Derek was sent to Camp Sunshine the Guantanamo for cultists, sacrificers, and other people of occult interest. And basically forgotten. In that time Derek has found a way to share role playing adventures by mail, and when a convention comes close to his camp, Derek takes a chace and skips out. However what he finds at the convention is a lot more than he expected even after 30 years, and he is going to have to roll a saving throws to get out of this mess.

This is the first book that I have read by Charles Stross and I really am annoyed that it took me this long to catch up on this series. Not only a fun adventure, not only a coll flashback to the days I spent flinging dice and making up scenarios to kill my friends, but some really great writing. Stross knows his stuff, and more importantly can write what it is like to play an adventure and capture the feeling, and leave the reader wanting more. The world is interesting and I want to know more. The characters were all new to me, but I had no problem following along, nor figuring out what was going on, or how things worked. This is more of a novella, but it does have two other stories, featuring the main protagonist, Bob Howard, and a few words from the author about the story and where it might be going. A whole lot of fun, both humorous, a little sad, and with characters one really cares about.

A good place to jump on. I had no idea what the world was about, but I enjoyed it and really want to know more. For fans of occult stories, alternate universe tales, and role playing games. And people who like stories that are fun.

When Derek Reilly was a teenager, back in the 80s, no one understood Dungeons and Dragons. The Laundry, a British super-secret organization developed to defend England against incursions from other dimensions, was afraid D&D would result in monsters being allowed into our space and time. Derek got swept up in the anti-D&D mentality and ended up spending his life at Camp Sunshine. Thoroughly institutionalized, Derek works in the office, filing and filling out forms, but maintains an ongoing D&D correspondence with several people outside the institution. When he discovers a D&D convention will be taking place nearby, he manufactures credentials and goes walkabout. It takes two days for Camp Sunshine to figure out he is missing. It takes less than that for Derek to figure out one of the companies participating in the convention is actually trying to conjure a minor god and bring it into this dimension. Mayhem results but The Laundry will prevail. I really enjoy this series with its sly British humor and mind-blowing ideas.

What happens when a boy who was playing the wrong game at the wrong time during the Satanic Panic of the 80's ends up in magic jail, manages to continue gaming play-by-post for thirty years, stages a jailbreak after that thirty years passes to attend a gaming convention, and is accidentally in just the right position with just the right education in occultism from being in magic jail for thirty years to see that the new game being promoted at the convention is actually really occult and really scary and evil?

If you would like to know the answer to that question, read this book!

Poor Derek was just trying to run a D&D game for a couple of friends when some paranoid parents reported his doings to the wrong people (the Laundry). The Laundry, with its mission to keep amateur sorcerers from going pro on their own and maybe accidentally triggering an occult manifestation that could end the world, got a bit overzealous and dragged 14 year old Derek and his buddies off to a secure place that not everyone gets to come back from. Eventually Derek's friends were let go but Derek himself fell through some bureaucratic cracks which were not made better by the desire of the Laundry to avoid embarrassment, and before he knew it, he was a lifer in the holding system for dangerous magicians despite never having cast a spell in his life (except in D&D).

Derek sort of accepted his lot and made the best of a bad situation until motive means and opportunity came along in a perfect storm for him to be able to skedaddle and attend a gaming convention and maybe even play in person with the folks he'd been running a play by post game for from jail.

As a long-term gamer myself who also started during the Satanic Panic and whose parents thought I was endangering my soul, I could feel for poor Derek. He's just a basically nice guy who happens to have learned some really scary stuff from decades of being locked up with a bunch of dangerous wizards. Charles Stross was also around and a part of the very early parts of the advent of D&D and you can see his love of the game in this book. There's a lot of nostalgia, many Easter eggs, and that was a lot of fun.

I didn't rate the book higher because it's basically about the fantasy of "what if you turned into your DND character and had to survive an adventure somehow" and I think that the author was trying to avoid being too much indebted to D&D particulars. It's a difficult needle to thread. How do you engage readers who have never played and entertain them while also getting buy-in from those who know very,very well what you are talking about? In the end, the grind of the adventure felt like it got short-changed because of the necessity to do a lot of lead-up and exposition. I still had fun! It just didn't entirely scratch that very specific itch I have for the "drop into a D&D world" scenario.

The imaginative twist of using D&D dice to battle a looming evil in a LARP game is both inventive and thrilling. With its clever blend of speculative fiction and satire, this story delivers a compelling, fast-paced ride that keeps you guessing. If you’re into sci-fi with a sharp edge and a touch of geeky nostalgia, this book is a must-read.