A Conventional Boy: A Laundry Files Novel
Jan 2025 · Laundry Files Book 13 · Tordotcom
5.0star
5 reviewsreport
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240
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About this ebook
In this new Laundry Files adventure the fate of the world will literally depend on the roll of dice... twenty-sided dice, that is.
In 1984, Derek Reilly was just another spotty teenage dungeon master growing up in middle England. But then a secret government agency tasked with suppressing magical intrusions received a tip-off – and one midnight raid later, his life was turned upside down by the Satanic D&D Panic.
Decades later Derek, now middle-aged and institutionalized, is a long-term inmate at Camp Sunshine, a center for deprogramming captured Elder God cultists. He’s considered safe enough to edit the camp newsletter, and he even has postal privileges – which he uses to run a play-by-mail game. After 25 years, Derek finally has reason to escape: a nearby D&D convention. While Derek’s D&D games were full of fictional elder gods and world-ending threats, a LARP game at the con is a dread ritual designed to summon a great evil into our world, and it’s up to Derek and his players to stop them.
The fate of the world may depend on the contents of Derek’s magic dice bag.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
In 1984, Derek Reilly was just another spotty teenage dungeon master growing up in middle England. But then a secret government agency tasked with suppressing magical intrusions received a tip-off – and one midnight raid later, his life was turned upside down by the Satanic D&D Panic.
Decades later Derek, now middle-aged and institutionalized, is a long-term inmate at Camp Sunshine, a center for deprogramming captured Elder God cultists. He’s considered safe enough to edit the camp newsletter, and he even has postal privileges – which he uses to run a play-by-mail game. After 25 years, Derek finally has reason to escape: a nearby D&D convention. While Derek’s D&D games were full of fictional elder gods and world-ending threats, a LARP game at the con is a dread ritual designed to summon a great evil into our world, and it’s up to Derek and his players to stop them.
The fate of the world may depend on the contents of Derek’s magic dice bag.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Ratings and reviews
5.0
5 reviews
Peter Ingraham
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April 12, 2025
It's good! Recommended. It's more on the humor side than the horror side, but that's a good choice IMO. You don't need to have read the Laundry Files before - I didn't know Derek or Iris before this, and it was perfectly accessible (although I had read The Atrocity Archives decades ago, the first in the series). Knowing tabletop RPG lingo and 2011-era memes helps, of course (the perils of writing a prequel in a series set in the modern day - the time when "arrow in the knee" was setting-fresh humor!). If I had to nitpick, it's that at novella size, this really could have been a full novel. It feels like if you took a 5-act play and just... stopped in Act 3. Feels like it should have had more - a fuller final confrontation involving something cleverer, perhaps, but Stross doesn't like to over-linger on cleanup I guess. It's also that the inherently goofy premise (escaping high-security math / magician jail to GO TO A GAMING CONVENTION) means that the story could have devoted even further to silly comedy, but I guess it still needs to be set in the Lovecraftian Laundry-universe. If it was a stand-alone story, I'd say for sure to have cut even more horror and have more silliness. Fun stuff!
Ron Sannachan
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January 14, 2025
Brilliant, as Charle's work always is.
About the author
CHARLES STROSS is the author of the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry Files series, and several stand-alone novels including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn’s Children. He has won three Hugo Awards, including one for the Laundry Files novella Equoid, published on Reactor (formerly Tor.com). Born and raised in Leeds, England, he lives with his spouse in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a flat that is slightly older than the state of Texas.
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