The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
252 pages
Published 2004
Read from May 8 to May 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Reading
Lovecraftian stories before reading any Lovecraft feels a bit odd. In
essence, I'm reading fan-fiction before I gain any familiarity with the
source material. Not that Lovecraft's output is particularly obscure or
niche; cultural osmosis alone has given me a rough outline of this Old
Ones business. And in any case, this book (so far as I can tell) owes
Lovecraft little more than general a debt of inspiration, the basic idea
of humans summoning vast, ancient horrors.
There are some minor spoilers here.
This book combines one previously published novel (The Atrocity Archive)
with a new short story ("The Concrete Jungle") via the strange alchemy
known as "Make people pay again for a slightly altered version of the same
product." The general idea is a mix of spy thriller, Lovecraft, and
IT-grade cyberpunk, written in an internet-age version of pulp prose.
(Sample: "She looks how Annie Lennox would look if she'd joined the
constabulary, been glassed once or twice, and had a really dodgy curry
the night before.") If that sounds like the most godawful oh-so-clever
mishmash, prepare to be surprised. It shouldn't work, but somehow it
does. For the most part. It isn't a perfect book, but it's pretty damn
entertaining.
The Atrocity Archive, which forms the bulk
of this volume, is a bit on the unfocused side, puttering along through
the bureaucratic mess of expense reports, saved receipts, office supply
audits, and HR-mandated training courses for the first forty or so pages
until the main plot finally kicks in. We don't get what we all really
want -- freeze-dried Nazis and the visage of Hitler carved by ice giants
across a hemisphere of the moon -- until about page 130. From there,
unfortunately, Stross falls into an annoying shorthand method of
generating suspense, by having the narrator puzzle over some vital
detail he "missed." If your story's resident necromancy expert and
techno-babble (mago-babble?) dump can't piece together what's going on
until it's too late, it's just not fair to expect the reader to catch
the significance of the clues. Plus, if he's not all that worried about,
I don't know, the sky turning red above their team while the demonic
manifestation is still on the loose, it just kind of makes him look a
tiny bit stupid. A climax that only goes down the way it does because
the hero got an attack of the stupids is not a good climax.
"The Concrete Jungle," to my mind, changes the basic equation set up in The Atrocity Archive.
That novel was set in a story universe where anything occult was
seemingly a state secret; inadvertently discovering mathematical models
of magic would get you disappeared into an unlisted government building
with a quickness. This story, by contrast, treats magical creatures and
ephemera as common knowledge. Imperial Victorian officers freely discuss
the existence of gorgons as a commonplace reality in their letters
home. This shift in the setting changes the tone in subtle ways; instead
of spies battling spies and secretly protecting the world from Old
Ones, as in the first novel, "The Concrete Jungle" has more of a typical
urban fantasy feel to it, most akin to the "supernatural cleanup crew"
set-up so ubiquitous on television nowadays. It was entertaining enough,
but lacked something of the freshness of The Atrocity Archive.
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