The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
I stumbled across this one by accident at the library. I'm glad I did. This is the importance of a good title (intriguing artwork doesn't hurt either).
Imagine Tom Clancy meets H.P. Lovecraft, written by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert). Yes, it is that bizarre. One of the things that struck me funny very early on is the name of the main character, Bob. Yes, Bob. Bob isn't glamorous, he's not a James Bond kind of save the world agent, he's not even a Jack Ryan kind of character. He's an underpaid IT guy in a Government bureaucracy trying to navigate the world of matrix management and get a transfer to the "field operations group." He gets his transfer, almost completely by accident- and it almost kills him, twice.
What I like best about the book is that Bob deals realistically with the horrors of Lovecraftian world. Minor horrors are disgusting, but not mind warping if you see them all the time. The big ones are something to be scared of, and he is. He (Bob) understands the "magic" of the world- Thaumaturgy (magic of numerical manipulation and mathematics), but doesn't try to make it "understandable" to us. The theorems and calculations sound like something out of a Doctoral Dissertation on Quantum Mechanics (which they could well be, Mr. Stross has a Doctorate in Computer Science), but are glossed over easily enough to just make them part of the story.
The perverse view of the government bureaucracy is something you seldom ever see in Lovecraft or spy books, but makes the book so worth reading because most of us can identify the patent stupidity of a line manager who knows nothing about the field their people work in. It gets even better in the included short story "The Concrete Jungle" when we get to see Bob swimming in the shark infested waters of bureaucratic powerplay.
I'll be picking up works by Mr. Stross, he is entertaining and a very concise writer.
4 1/2 Alien Elder God tentacles out of 5
Neil
