You can tell Charles Stross was a programmer before he became a science fiction writer. His acclaimed series The Laundry Files takes place in a universe besieged by interdimensional horrors and defined by applied mathematics. Here, programmers, computational scientists, and teenage hackers all run the constant risk of accidentally invoking the attention of brain-eating atrocities. Words are dangerous, but a clever application of numbers is worse.

In his 2008 novella Down on the Farm, which is part of The Laundry Files series, Stross explains the logic behind the world he's created: “If you think too hard about certain problems you might run the risk of carrying out a minor summoning in your own head. Nothing big enough or bad enough to get out, but… those florid daydreams? And the sick feeling afterwards because you can’t quite remember what it was about? Something in another universe just sucked a microscopic lump of neural tissue right out of your intraparietal sulcus, and it won’t grow back.”

But that is not always a problem. If you already have parasites in your brain, for example, it's possible to circumvent this dilemma. Stross' latest book, The Nightmare Stacks (UK), continues to delve into the intricacies of The Laundry Files' world.

A new protagonist

Fortunately, a secret organization called The Laundry exists to protect geniuses from their own intellect, fishing out recruits before they can be devoured by unspeakable monstrosities and conscripting them into the service of the government. The Laundry exist to prevent several flavors of apocalypses, ranging from extraterrestrial invasions to intradimensional encroachments. Like all of the books in the franchise, the latest installment is droll in the way only British can be.

Stross opens by telling us that a vampire named Alex is haunting the seaside town of Whitby and that it is “quite traditional.” After musing about the "ancient wisdom” and “hideous secrets" that "haunt the conscience of the undying,” Stross reveals he's also our main character, and what haunts his conscience, in fact, are banalities like expense claims, student loans, and avoiding his family.

Similar to The Laundry Files’ primary protagonist Bob Howard, Alex is very much the stereotypical geek—brilliant but easily incapacitated by the mere presence of an attractive woman. Despite his preternatural gifts, he is quite hapless, whining through first-person recaps of his predicament. For the first eighth of the book, I found Alex really unlikeable. His complaints, all very pedestrian in the wake of impending cosmic destruction, come across as rather self-absorbed, possibly even smack-over-the-upside-of-the-head-worthy.

But his obnoxiousness is ameliorated by the supporting cast. There’s Reverend Peter Russell, who is Alex’s mentor and a dyed-in-the-wool nice guy that succeeds at balancing the best parts of religion with a progressive mindset. And there’s Pinky and The Brain, a pair of gay mad scientists who might be, I think, some of my favorite characters of all time. But we’ll get back to them in a moment.

The Nightmare Stacks twitchily jumps between about six different perspectives across the timeline. One of them involves the mysterious Host of Air and Darkness, the subterranean survivors of some cataclysmic event that involved Dead Gods shattering the moon. In these sequences, the prose shifts in timbre, becoming more decorative, more in league with old-fashioned fantasy. It even has the usual abundance of haughty capitalized titles—"Most Honorable Agent Second, Doyenne of Spies and Leaders of Liars"—and no small amount of complicated-sounding paraphilia.

Strange as all that might sound, it all does come together. We soon find out that the Host is scheming to infiltrate our dimension and that the Laundry is tangentially aware of this dilemma. But Alex has more immediate problems to contend with.

A romance

Even as The Laundry researchers extrapolate on hominid evolutionary biology, Alex busies himself with a gauntlet of relatable problems. Daydreams of a green-haired girl who he lets slip away. (Her name is Cassie, and she comes back. Don't worry.) An aggressively good-natured mother who won’t stop needling him about his love life. A sibling he adores and cannot say no to, no matter how dire their requests. And to make all of that worse, he has to go house hunting on a twentysomething’s salary. It’s hard not to nod quietly in response to every new tribulation, especially after Stross switches to third-person present, eliminating our blood-drinker’s abrasive petulance.

Eventually Alex rises up against the system and strikes back in the most innocuous ways possible, like deploying mind control powers against a tedious training course leader who just won't shut up. And coming up with a magical chunking algorithm that allows him to circumvent the vampiric obsessive-compulsive need to count spilled grains of sugar. (See? Programmer all the way down.)

But the real highlight of Alex's plot arc is a phone conversation he has with another vampire. There’s something lonely about how Stross depicts the relationship between two men who have nothing in common but a shared condition. It’s familiar and sad and achingly human; we’ve all held onto people just because we didn’t want to be alone. I wish Stross spent a bit more time reflecting on how vampirism, which is bluntly compared to HIV a few times, isolates its victims, but I understand it’s also not that kind of book.

The Nightmare Stacks begins speeding up once Alex gets entangled in the mess that follows when the Host’s Agent First takes a reconnaissance trip into our world. It’s a surprisingly charming jaunt, despite the fact that Agent First does not waste time in extracting Cassie's soul and installing her own in its place. Like a deranged version of Giselle from Disney’s Enchanted, Agent First devours mundane life and spits out pure wonder, largely because the split halves of her soul—there's still a little bit of Cassie in there—work rather well together:

Cassie walks home in a light-headed daze, marveling at her surroundings. Things that she was taught to be afraid of (dark alleyways, damaged streetlights, drunken strangers) pose no threat to her now: Agent First can deal with situations that would leave the original Cassie puking in terror. Meanwhile, Agent First is reveling in Cassie’s alien aesthetics, memories that paint the space around her with a wash of comforting familiarity. That is a bus; this is a taxi; you cross a road safely like so.

Eventually, Alex and Agent First cross paths and an attraction stirs. Of course, that was inevitable. The elevator pitch for The Nightmare Stacks, according to Stross, was “nerd boy meets manic pixie dream girl, only he’s a depressed vampire and she’s an elven forward intelligence officer for an invading army.”

But with a twist

In a conversation with Ars, Stross commented, “The manic pixie dream girl trope has irritated me for quite some time, as have some other aspects of the whole RomCom subgenre—the abusive behavior of the male protagonist, the frequent self-immolation of female protagonists, and so on. So I decided to send it up by making her a manic pixie dream girl instead. Except she also turned out to have redeeming personality features, because without them, she wouldn’t be sympathetic enough to support the romance angle.”

Alex and Agent First's budding relationship is happily believable and, rather interestingly, captained by Agent First’s whims. (I refuse to call her Cassie because Reasons.) It is Agent First who makes the first move, Agent First who calls the shots. Having said that, this is not a simple reversal of roles. For all of Alex’s awkwardness in the beginning of their acquaintanceship, he grows into himself, shedding some but not all his puppyish clumsiness. By the climax of the book, they’re both taking turns rescuing one another from distress, and it’s a great deal better than seeing one party unnecessarily damselled. I imagine some of it may have to do with the fact that Stross is trying to make up for inadvertently turning Dominique O’Brien—aka Agent CANDID aka Bob’s wife aka hero of the last book—into a trope. “Nobody called me on this back in the day, but as I wrote more I got better at recognizing high-level thematic and structural elements in my own work and realized I’d shat the bed, so I resolved to fix it in the next book,” Stross said.

It’s clear to anyone who follows the series that Stross is trying to do what he says: write strong female protagonists who aren’t “strong as in a two-fisted action hero with boobs, but strong as in actually being a plausible human being who has simply swapped one bunch of gendered behavior programming for another, and accepted or rejected it to a different extent.” However, as Stross himself points out, The Laundry Files are ultimately seen through the lens of one Bob Howard. Stross added that it's “something of a miracle that Bob isn’t a complete misogynist shitbag, given the average outcome of that generation of male computer science graduates." Stross is trying, and the latest books do show effort. The Annihilation Score, for example, investigated the complicated relationships that a forty-something woman forms with superheroes and her husband’s possible thing-on-the-side.

The Nightmare Stacks pushes the envelope slightly further, first by switching protagonists, and second by introducing a better spectrum of diversity. They’re Pinky and Brain playing strong supporting roles. Again, let me reiterate how much I love them. They shout a certain cartoon’s catchphrases at one another, dabble in terrifying sciences, and bulldoze their way through every conflagration. Their relationship exists as a constant, manifested in the easy way they communicate, but it is never forefront in their characterization. Unless you were already aware of their connection, there’s a high possibility you’d miss it entirely.

Also, there’s a fabulous coming-out scene involving Alex’s family, and it is done quite sensitively. I won’t lie. I cringed my way to the resolution but came out pleasantly surprised. Although The Nightmare Stacks is still far from perfect, I’ll take my small victories where they come. Especially if they involve an elf being rapped on the knuckles for being an insensitive clout.

What's next for The Laundry Files

Back to the book itself. The Nightmare Stacks really, really picks up once the Host begins to mobilize, and it’s a gristly delight to learn about their interpretations of fantasy archetypes. Basilisks and wyverns and dragons like nothing you’ve seen before, hideously tentacled and riddled with parasites. It’s here too that Stross reminds us that he’s deliciously adept at describing violence. The fight scenes are crunchy, sharply written, every twist and torque easily transposed onto your own flesh and sinew. There are parts that made me wince, and I’ve toured forensic images for research while eating dinner.

I’m going to take a moment to point out that The Nightmare Stacks’ bewildering kaleidoscope of viewpoints starts to make sense at this point in the book, as chaos erupts through England. Very quickly, it becomes an episode of 24 and we’re darting between invasion points, jumping between scenes. Stross uses this fusillade of sequences to build up a chain-reaction, each explosion of violence setting off context for the next. It’s easy to get lost in the fire, and maybe that’s where Stross wants to leave us, confused and stunned for the next installment. (The Delirium Brief, he tells me, is going to be dark.)

I’m curious where Stross intends to take the next book. He’s made it clear in previous interviews that Bob’s growth as a character has distracted the focus of the series. But Bob is coming back in this next book, albeit operating in the capacity of a middle manager. “Almost like Angleton,” Stross teases. (Angleton, for those who aren’t aware of the character, was a Very Terrifying Man.)

And of course there's Dominique O’Brien taking on the role of an Auditor, a position also associated with great terror.

But if The Nightmare Stacks is indicative of the crescendo that Stross is planning, I’m all strapped in and ready to see what The Delirium Brief might bring.