This is a Welsh ‘Hi-di-Hi’ that Derek Reilly has been unable to escape from for 40 years. But he hasn’t really been bothered, he has had his postal Dungeons and Dragons to keep him busy. But then the camp being refurbished and an up coming D & G convention means escaping under the radar and grabbing a bus means he’s in his way. But this is the under-world of The Laundry Department, Occult and Elder Gods. Never was the throw of a multi-sided dice quite so terrifyingly life ending possibility. The book ends with three short stories, which while fun seem to be there just to pad out the word count. I was only disappointed that they didn’t include the characters from the main story. Thank you to Little, Brown Book Group Uk and NetGalley for the ARC. The views expressed are all mine, freely given.

The Laundry Files kept popping up as a series that I wanted to read one day because it sounded so entertaining. But it wasn't till now, when I got the chance to read the Conventional Boy that I got to see what it was about, and I will say, this book was so entertaining with a very likable guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time when people freaked out about Dungeons and Dragons (thinking that he was summoning and not just playing a game) and he got to spend years at Camp Sunshine due to paperwork errors. Derek is so sweet and innocent yet so knowing about the real magic now and what does he do? He uses paperwork to break out to go to a convention. I must say it must have been fate cause it certainly gets crazy at the convention and Derek is just the man for the job! This was a great introduction to that world and I also enjoyed the two short stories with Bob Howard and I will definitely be going back to read the Laundry Files finally! Cool world, a bit scary because the things that go bump in the night are most likely interdimensional horrors bent on eating your soul but I wouldn't mind have those dice that Derek made. They would be so useful for deciding things and figuring out what is the best path!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the chance to read this advance book and introduce me to a wonderfully entertaining series!

Back in the 80s, the growing popularity of the role-playing board game, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), met with a confused moral panic. In the real world, some folk believed it was trying to lure kids into satanism and worse; in the universe of the Laundry Files, it’s the more realistic belief that players were (inadvertently or otherwise) dabbling with computational demonology – that mage’s spell, those mystic runes, can look a little too close to real magic, after all!

And that is how 14-year-old Derek Reilly ends up in Camp Sunshine, a deprogramming centre for (real) cultists. The mistake is noticed and most of the D&D group released but unfortunately for Derek he turns out to have a glimmer of genuine magical aptitude. At first no one is sure what to do with him, and then time passes and he’s more or less institutionalised, and decades later it’s just more convenient to overlook the whole… thing.

I actually found this whole background more disturbing than I think was meant – or, perhaps it was meant, as a scathing commentary on real world cases with similar outcomes, if less cross-dimensional horrors. Either way, I didn’t enjoy the concept of poor Derek being locked up for his entire life through a big misunderstanding and lazy bureaucracy. But, never fear – when Derek sees an advert for a big D&D convention, it’s the spark he needs to finally make some changes – only, it was never going to be as simple as just escaping…

Once at the convention, this feels very much a Laundry Files story, as well as playing nicely with lots of D&D tropes and lore. The blurb of “Slow Horses crossed with Stranger Things” is pretty accurate! I must confess I’ve managed to get a little behind with the series – since the New Management – but this is actually tied more to the original arc. In fact, it’s actually a little bit of a prequel/back story, although I didn’t twig – I need and want a reread of the whole thing, frankly 😉

A Conventional Boy is about two thirds of this volume, the rest being two previously released short stories, Down on the Farm and Overtime. I’ve read both before, but it was a pleasant reread, especially as both feature our original hero, Bob Howard. It does take the strange approach of moving backwards in time with each tale, and I’m left wondering if there’s an element of ‘Previously on The Laundry Files…’ ahead of the release of the final (eeep!) book in the series next summer – i.e. will these be important moments in Bob’s history for the last adventure? Certainly, we could see a return of the inmates of ‘The Farm’ and their years-long project; or, this could just be thematically linked with the main story, ie locking inconvenient people away. Overtime is more on-theme for the festive period – but, probably for the best that publication dates mean most won’t face that take on Santa until after Christmas… 😉

Overall, this was a fun dip back into the world of the Laundry Files although it felt like more of a nudge to go back and read the main series rather than being a standalone. That said, if you’ve not tried the books before this wouldn’t be a bad jumping in place – yes, lots you’re not going to know about the set up, but in shorter form to whet the appetite. Either way, recommended.

Not strictly a novel, and more a novella plus two short stories, this is 100% a book for the nerds out there.

A Conventional Boy follows Derek, a D&D Dungeon Master who escapes Camp Sunshine to attend a TTRPG convention, only to end up facing a cult determined to welcome thier God into our world. Whilst for me, it lacked a little of the classic Laundry charm, it is a fun story, and fills in some of the gaps about other characters, like what Iris Carpenter got up to.

The real strength of this book for me, and something that feels like a truly authentic return to the Laundry are the two short stories. Overtime shows us a glimpse into Bob's day to day, and finds a creepy way to answer the question 'What happens in the Laundry when everyone goes home for Christmas?'

Down on the farm looks at the risk that working for the Laundry, even when you aren't on the frontline poses to your health. What do you get when you mix unwell Laundry agents, secret geniuses, an overworked nurse and a computer that's been there since the 1960's? Nothing good, that's for sure!

After the frustrating side-trip of the New Management books, Stross finally returns to the Laundry series proper, albeit with a prequel. This is the long-promised backstory of Derek the DM, the Forecasting Ops guy with the magic dice. Parts of which are very neat; if you were a roleplayer yourself in the eighties (and Stross was enough of a grognard to have created a now-canonical D&D race), and you write fiction about the British establishment's bureaucratic response to occult threats, then it makes perfect sense to ask how the Satanic Panic would have intersected with such an agency (short answer: not well). And now that RPGs have gone fairly mainstream, it's a great set-up for a character who's been institutionalised since gaming was still thoroughly spoddy to find himself at a modern convention – even if fitting the story into the series' established timeline means this has to take place back in 2010, when the process was definitely underway but had yet to be turbocharged by Stranger Things &c.

Of course, in the very irresistibility of that scenario lies part of the problem. Perhaps it's just a generational thing, internalised nerd-bashing, but I have a level of reflex aversion to books that seem too eagerly engaged in tickling geek tummies with familiar references. And while A Conventional Boy certainly isn't anywhere near R**dy Pl*y*r *n* territory, I did occasionally find things getting a bit Scalzi. Worse, sometimes it gets the references wrong. If characters from something approximating the real world find themselves trapped inside an RPG, and one of said characters comments that they've fallen into a bad LitRPG, then you're already skirting the limits of acceptable meta. But the story is set a couple of years before that term was even born. Granted, Stross' afterword says that the Laundry world, even on the surface, started diverging from ours in the nineties – but that branch point is definitely too late to explain why snakebite and black is apparently just cider and black here. That, granted, is the sort of glitch which could well be fixed between my Netgalley ARC and the finished book, but there's a more general problem with inconsistencies in quite how institutionalised Derek is meant to be. We're told that the camp had TV, and he watches it, so surely he shouldn't be in quite such an eighties mindset as to wonder "What does the internet have to do with phones?" Although I did love his summary of modern cars as all looking slightly melted.
(There's also the question of the location explicitly being named as Scarfolk. Which I hope has been cleared better than in the previous Laundry book that was called Escape From Puroland when I read it, but not when it came out. Pissing off Sanrio is one thing, but I really wouldn't want Scarfolk Council on my tail)

Still, for all those little quibbles around the margins, there's never half the sense of the whole edifice being unsound that I got from the New Management books (which one amusing/apologetic subplot here implies could all have ended up that way due to a messy convention RPG session intersecting with Derek's unusual relationship to causality). Sure, as a reclamation of all the old scare stories about roleplayers thinking the games are real, it's not up there with Die. But for all that, it's a Laundry book, and it feels like one, exasperated bureaucrats and out-of-their-depth geeks up against cosmic horrors in authentically crappy British backwaters. And I've missed that.
(The book does also include two earlier Laundry stories, Down On The Farm and the festive Overtime, both of which I read and enjoyed when they were first posted on the Tor site)