The Atrocity Archives
by Charles Stross
(Golden Gryphon, $24.95, 273 pages, hardcover; published in May 2004.)
The Atrocity Archives collects three  works
by prolific British author Charles Stross: the short novel "The Atrocity
Archive" (sans "s"), originally serialized in the UK magazine Spectrum
SF; a sequel, the previously unpublished novella "The Concrete Jungle";
and a new essay called "Inside the Fear Factory".
The short novel "The Atrocity Archive" is Stross's strongest work so
far. Like much of his fiction it suffers somewhat from a tendency to
lose itself (and readers) in long expository passages, but here this
quirk is kept under better control and only interferes with the concluding
chapters, where the exposition rolls out torrentially, the author barely
able to contain himself any longer.
The novel describes the work of Bob Howard (is the allusion to Robert
E. Howard, the creator of Conan, intentional?), an insubordinate but
resourceful operative for The Laundry, an ultra-secret British intelligence
agency that deals with paranormal phenomena -- only in this context
it's all "scientific", the encroaching otherwordly events explicable
via cutting-edge information theory.
The mood is winningly reminescent of Len Deighton's classic Cold War
spy thrillers, pitting the protagonist against mind-numbingly petty
office politics, all the while spinning an exciting and imaginative
adventure. Stross seductively creates an entire secret history of international
intelligence agencies working to keep the other levels of reality from
spilling out into everyday life -- or using their knowledge for the
advantage of their government.
The sequel, "The Concrete Jungle", much more laden down by exposition,
lacks the emotional urgency that makes "The Atrocity Archive" so involving
but is still worth reading for the playful inventiveness of its ideas.
Stross closes off with an insightful and thought-provoking essay on
the links between horror and espionage fiction, concentrating on Deighton
and H.P. Lovecraft, the two most obvious influences at work in The
Atrocity Archives.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 12 June 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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