My Goodreads review: A Conventional Boy

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A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Consisting of a novella, two novelettes, and a concluding Afterword, A Conventional Boy is a somewhat brief ( 211 pp. in my hardback) but highly entertaining series of sidetracks through the Laundry Files universe. The novella which gives the book its title details the adventures of Derek Reilly, a once-teenage Dungeon Master wrongly imprisoned by the Laundry a few decades back, during the Satanic D&D Panic. All Derek really wants to do is to escape for one weekend, to attend a local gaming convention . . . but it gets weirder than that, of course. A lot weirder. Derek's successful escape attempt brings him into the crosshairs of an actual group of cultists using the convention for their own eldritch purposes. This, in turn, brings in other members of the Laundry (some of whom sounded familiar to me), and chaos rolls on.

The two novelettes (at least one of which I've run into before in electronic form) are both Bob Howard adventures. Again, these are sidetracks rather than essential bits of the Laundry universe -- but regular readers will enjoy the extra details they offer. The Afterword is mainly an explanation of the D&D Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and how it happened to inspire this book. It's helpful to be familiar with tabletop role-playing games, though I suspect quite a lot of Stross readers (including myself) are.





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