Book Review: The Apocalypse Codex

Charles Stross

2012

Awards: Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Apocalypse Codex is a story told by Bob Howard, who is a field agent for the British intelligence services. Except instead of being a nice, normal spy for something like MI-5 or MI-6, Bob is an agent for the Laundry, the agency that protects the United Kingdom (and, often, the rest of humanity as well) from demons, zombies, evil entities from parallel dimensions, and other soul-sucking creatures.

The Laundry is so secret that absolutely no one outside of it even knows it exists. They use spells and wards and charms in combination with top-of-the-line hacker technology to make sure it stays that way. And if you stumble upon it by accident somehow, and become aware of it, you are drafted into it. Forever.

Bob is a funny character. In some ways he’s relatively hapless. He’s definitely not a powerful or experienced magician. He has little patience for actually reading his briefing material and has a tendency to plunge into situations that are way above his head. But he is also 100% loyal to the service and never abandons his allies in the field. He also has, thanks to accidents that happened during previous cases, a growing ability in creating magic containment fields and in sensing otherworldly presences with his third eye. His superiors generally like him, and seem to be grooming him for something big—which Bob fervently hopes is not a stultifying promotion to a desk job in middle management.

At the beginning of the Apocalypse Codex, Bob is assigned by his office to follow up on the activities of two “external assets,” Persephone Hazard and Johnny McTavish, who are something like independent contractors. Persephone and Johnny have been investigating an American evangelical preacher named Ray Schiller who seems to be quite rapidly building up an international cult following.

Schiller is, of course, actually possessed by an alien parasite that is using his body to lead a black magic movement that wants to sacrifice tens of millions of innocent people in a rite designed to awaken the Sleeper under the Pyramid, a horrifyingly evil and powerful Lovecraftian pseudo-deity.

It’s up to Bob, Persephone, and Johnny to stop Schiller from succeeding. Luckily, Bob's “external assets” are no newbies to this sort of work; Persephone is a powerful witch and Johnny is an elder in an extremely ancient and irregular church. But Schiller still leads the three of them on a dangerous and hair-raising chase across England and the central United States, as well as other dimensions and universes, all, of course, with the fate of humanity at stake.

The book is really a fun romp. It’s a combination of genres: espionage, modern hacker tech, and gothic horror. Stross makes references to all sorts of science fiction and horror classics, from Lovecraft, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephen King, and Men in Black. And the references are overt: homages used consciously with love and respect, not stolen, or done with any sense of trying to one-up those who came before.

And Stross writes a bit like Douglas Adams: every sentence is dense with funny descriptions, rolling action, and very Britishly witty subuordinate clauses. I could imagine that the style could theoretically get tiresome after a while, but the story is short enough that that doesn’t happen.