In "The Rhesus Chart" he walked into a nest of vampires and came out with his hair mussed but basically intact. After fourteen years in the Laundry Bob is, despite his ongoing self-deception, not entirely human: watch what he does, not what he says. ![]() Bob is back as the primary (but not the only) viewpoint in "The Delirium Brief", but we've reached a point in the series where he has to be deployed with extreme parsimony. Many readers commented on the absence of Bob from "The Annihilation Score" and "The Nightmare Stacks". "The Nightmare Stacks" takes place in March-May 2014, and is the story of how the continually escallating threats faced by the Laundry finally overcame the agency's ability to suppress and contain incursions without public notice, and is the first half of a two-book pivot point in the series (the ongoing consequences of the disaster in Leeds continue to the inevitable conclusion in "The Delirium Brief") it's the beginning of the tumble over the cliff-edge leading down to the Lovecraftian Singularity.Īnd we have a new narrative viewpoint, and sundry new protagonists showing up. At the end of "The Annihilation Score" the Laundry's cordon of secrecy was in tatters but plausible deniability had been maintained-barely. It reached a conclusive and grisly climax in the massacre at the Last Night of the Proms, an annual British cultural event a horrible event the true nature of which was, nevertheless, suppressed and presented to the public as a terrorist incident not unlike the Moscow theater hostage crisis of 2002. "The Annihilation Score" was set during the summer of 2013, in a UK suffering from a surplus of superheroes (or at least extradimensional brain-eater afflicted humans experiencing outbreaks of eldritch powers before their heads exploded: some of whom assumed that donning skin tight lycra and committing vigilante crimes was a sensible reaction to being parasitized). ![]() It should be fairly obvious by now that, although initially the stories were set in the same year as publication, the Laundry universe has now dropped behind the real world calendar and diverged drastically from our own history. The Nightmare Stacks has been reissued in paperback in the UK and as a lower cost ebook in the USA, and The Delirium Brief is nearly upon us, so it's about time for me to write my usual crib sheet essay about the seventh Laundry Files novel!
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