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    The Nightmare Stacks
    The Nightmare Stacks
    The Nightmare Stacks
    Audiobook14 hours

    The Nightmare Stacks

    Written by Charles Stross

    Narrated by Gideon Emery

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Laundry Files' "fast-paced blend of espionage thrills, mundane office comedy and Lovecraftian horror" (SFX) continues as Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross assigns a day trader to a permanent position on the night shift... After stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires, Alex Schwartz was drafted by The Laundry, Britain's secret counter-occult agency that's humanity's first line of defense against the forces of darkness. Dependent on his new employers for his continued existence-as Alex has no stomach for predatory bloodsucking-he has little choice but to accept his new role as an operative-in-training. Dispatched to Leeds, Alex's first assignment is to help assess the costs of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker into The Laundry's new headquarters. Unfortunately, Leeds is Alex's hometown, and the thought of breaking the news to his parents that he's left banking for civil service, while hiding his undead condition, is causing more anxiety than learning how to live as a vampire secret agent preparing to confront multiple apocalypses. Alex's only saving grace is Cassie Brewer, a drama student appearing in the local Goth Festival who is inexplicably attracted to him despite his awkward personality and massive amounts of sunblock. But Cassie has secrets of her own-secrets that make Alex's night life behaviors seem positively normal...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 28, 2016
    ISBN9781501919374
    The Nightmare Stacks
    Author

    Charles Stross

    Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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    Reviews for The Nightmare Stacks

    4/5

    215 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The best in the series so far. Alex is a more interesting protagonist than Bob and the romance is interesting as well as opposed to Bob's boring hookups. Using the elves and vampires like that is clever and hilarious. It worked well and i loved it.
    • 4/5
      I really like the new POV character, and the main plot was pretty good. The enemy-side interludes didn't work that well for me -- they felt a bit too repetitive, or there were 2-3 too many of them.
    • 2/5
      Loved the worldbuilding and the themes of loyalty, oaths, etc. Found the romance between the leads utterly unconvincing and frankly ludicrous.
    • 3/5
      With this latest installment in the series you don’t see either Bob or Mo. Bob gets namechecked a few times and Alex shudders almost every time he is mentioned. Alex is in Leeds for his first assignment, trying to ditch the sun, his family [Leeds is his hometown] and maybe get up to speed with all the constant training classes.
      What Alex doesn’t know is the Oracle dept. has determined that something is going down in Leeds and things go quickly into the grinder as Alex is the point man to stop an invasion. The body counts are getting higher with each book and I think Stross was smart to move the focus of the story off Bob and Mo so they don’t suffer too many power ups before the final book.

      I will say the ending had me swiping for another page in my review copy and I really want to see what comes next out of this ending.

      Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley
    • 3/5
      Now we are following Alex the PHANG who meets a manic pixie dream girl who happens to be Unseeligie First of Spies and Liars for an invading force. Much of Leeds is leveled, which is a bit of a cop out for a series based in London.
    • 4/5
      Charlie Stross reboots the Laundry series as neophyte operative Alex Schwartz comes to terms with being seconded into the British Government's secretive paranormal defence establishment. This is the second volume in which readers have seen Bob Howard on sabbatical (having been powered up to such an extent that it is harder to sympathise with his plight).

      By contrast, having Alex in the driver's seat allows us to experience with fresh eyes the insane joys of bureaucratic labyrinths, pennypinching accountancy departments, and the peculiarly stupid protocols and hierarchies of the military. Alex of course, is coping with losing his high flying job as a mathematics whiz at an investment bank, whilst adapting to the very special disease of vampirism, which he has contracted through by dabbling too deeply in arcane mathematics. Alex's mundane task is to scope out the ground for a relocation of the Laundry operations to Leeds. The location is less than pleasing to Alex, whose grandchild deprived parents are residents of that fair city, and who are likely to be disappointed by Alex's reduced circumstances.

      Meanwhile, in another dimension, the girl of Alex's dreams/nightmares is on a mission to find refuge for the remnant of her people, who have been just a little too enthusiastic in their warring on each other for primacy. Breaking up their moon was, in retrospect, not the best of ideas.

      Needless to say, these star-crossed lovers cross paths, and mayhem ensues
    • 4/5
      I'm assuming that you've read at least some of the previous books in the series with this review.With this seventh book in the story of looming supernatural disaster for the Human world we get a further installment of what that event might look like, as dark elves with a perfected system of combat magic burst into England, leaving the Laundry and the higher security authorities reeling unless Alex Schwartz, junior paranormal intelligence operative and neurotic vampire, can penetrate the fae court. While some reviewers have used the word "fun" to describe this work, the course of the invasion (once that begins) is desperate and bloody, with the conclusion of the book coming like a car smashing into a brick wall and being something of a cliffhanger.Do I recommend this book to previous readers of the series? Yes. But it is rapidly morphing into something very different than what Charlie Stross started out with "The Atrocity Archives."
    • 4/5
      I really liked this.

      I was skeptical of the viewpoint change--it was fine.

      I had a few reservations while reading. I didn't think C***** was fleshed out as a character enough in our world--but then again, she was wearing someone else's face and memories. I thought Alex's family aversion was a little over the top, until I met them.

      I really hope we get to see the integration of C*****'s folk into our defenses.
    • 4/5
      Out and about with a young vampire initiate into the Laundry, instead of Bob and Mo. He’s pretty gormless, except for being a math wizard—and that’s literal, with the Laundry. The plot is essentially: superpowered elvish princess comes to prepare the way for her people’s invasion, then falls in love with this minor functionary who is everything she’s ever wanted in a man. Does it help that Stross lampshades this very clearly as Stockholm Syndrome? I can’t decide, but I’m still reading Stross, so I guess that’s a decision in itself.
    • 5/5
      Minor spoilers. The Nightmare Stacks is, I think, best approached as a generalization of the previous Laundry Files novels. Although the novel is about Alex, it's not about his reactions in the same way that the early novels were about Bob's reactions (usually for humorous effects). This is about the role of the Laundry as a whole in a world shifting towards Nightmare. Interestingly enough, the background suggests that the invasion is driven not by developments along our timeline, but by those along the elves' timeline. That they happen to erupt into an England shifting towards CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is just bad (or perhaps good) luck.Thematically, Stross has moved on from looking at enforcement to the very image of authority itself. His elves have hierarchy to a degree no historical monarchy in human history has had: to get close, you have to cross the absolutism of Louis XIV and James II (see Steve Pincus' 1688 for a detailed discussion of James II and how new this model was) with the god-kings of some ancient cultures. Most human "monarchies" have tended to be oligarchies with a constrained leader: piss off enough of your nobility and you end up dead (William II, Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, Richard III) or embroiled in much civil strife (Stephen, John). (Charles I and James II fall into special classes of their own, facing a broader opposition in Parliament.) The elves have a strict hierarchy driven by absolute authority (and an almost Eddorian penchant for undermining each other). For all that, they also stand for our past. Understanding not only social but natural order as hierarchical has a long history, and Ulysses' speech in Troilus and Cressida merely sets out a generally accepted commonplace. And if we're too dull to miss the point, we're given, late on, a Cabinet meeting where the PM makes all the same types of mistakes, on the same types of assumptions, that the Elvish All-Highest does.Because one of the themes of the book is that top-down hierarchies don't work very well. Just about every single decision made by the elves is bad, because it prioritizes retaining or exerting power over seeing the world as it is and responding appropriately.They would have lost, eventually, no matter what; if not in England then when they had to deal with the Black Chamber or BLUE HADES or were simply nuked from orbit. What the story tells is how, even with missteps, losses were minimized, partly by sheer luck (Cassie's personality, Alex's existence, itself improbable until very shortly before, accidents of timing).Another thing to think about is civilization. The elves are, in one sense, more "civilized" than we are: better aesthetics, more advanced in their technology than we are in ours. Their word for us, as Stross presents it, is the Tolkienian Elvish word for "orcs". (Some of this is not a new perception: both Chesterton and Lewis noted that a medieval perception of the modern world would be dominated by the word "drab" in a great many contexts.) But they are also destructive, violent, and brutal. So civilization has two senses which are here opposed.I like the shift to Alex's viewpoint: aside from the way in which his lack of seniority is required for the mechanics of the plot to work, triangulation gives a better perspective.In one sense, the action plot - lots of things that deliver an Earth-shattering kaboom - makes this an easily accessible book, and we do get a high-level overview of CASE NIGHTMARE RAINBOW, so it could be considered a reasonable point of entry into the series (especially as it calls for no back story re Bob and Mo), but I'm inclined to think that it gains more from knowledge of the already established context, so I would recommend beginning earlier and coming to this with that background under one's belt.
    • 4/5
      ** slight spoiler alert ** A great, fun read in this series. Alex, the twenty-something PHANG narrator, is a mostly self-centered, semi-competent young man trying to navigate his condition, his low-paid, involuntary civil service position at The Laundry, and living in the same city as his parents. Oh, and his new girlfriend is a member of the non-human invading force.And...PHANGs have a counting compulsion! the invaders look like Tolkein elves! My greatest disappointment was the lack of thunder and lightning when Alex completed a compulsive count. Perhaps we get the big finish if he says the answer aloud.While I miss Bob's POV, I've enjoyed seeing things from Mo's perspective (#6) and now this entry from Alex. I'd love to see Pete as a narrator, or Pinky, or Brain. Maybe the next entry in the series will have multiple POVs...no, wait, I can't wait 5+ years for #8.