The Delirium Brief
SPOILERS AHEAD
With The Delirium Brief, Stross reaches an aggressive midgame of The Laundry series. The past five books were setting pieces on the board, moving pawns, feinting with a knight or bishop. Now, he savagely uses those pieces, cutting down whole swaths of the setting. Expect to see all your favorites from the series to show up, don’t expect them to survive, at least not with all their parts…
In the wake of the CASE NIGHTMARE RED incursion in Yorkshire, the Laundry is very much blown and very much in everyone’s bad graces. With thousands dead, and billions of pounds of property damage, it’s hard to point out that hey, without us you’d be talking megadeaths. The situation is so bad that Bob Howard is running PR, since everyone else is too disgraced. The Laundry might have a full arsenal of banishment rounds and SCORPION SCARE basilisk guns, but they’re no match for a new breed of cultists, chanting horrific words like “privatization”, “outsourcing”, “reorganization”, “efficiency”, and “ISO compatible.”
Yes, friends, The Laundry is summarily shuttered on a Monday morning, pending a new occult intelligence agency provided by an American company, Golden Promise Security. Golden Promise is an arm of the Church of the New Flesh, the baddies of The Apocalypse Codex, who somehow survived being stranded on a lifeless planet with a dead elder god. The Reverend Raymond Schiller has a new parasite that’s even creepier, and a new plan to suborn the British government, either in service or in fear of whatever nasty has taken over the United States.
The first two thirds are a slow burn of bureaucratic intrigue and contingency plans, but the last section explodes in kinetic and arcane violence, as the underground remnants of The Laundry throw in everything they have against Schiller, including making a bad alliance with a Lesser Evil Elder God, on the basis that the thing that just wants to be adulated is better than the one that wants to eat your soul.
As always, it’s a pleasure to be back with Bob, and the whole Mahogany Row of Deeply Scary Sorcerers finally makes sense. I actually enjoy Stross’s cutting remarks on bureaucracy and the drugs-and-sex-and-corruption at the top echelons of society. Nobody gets mad like a Scottish Socialist. That said, I feel like this book could have used another edit for style, and a more judicious use of call-backs. I like this series a lot, and I often thought “who was that, and when did they first show up?”