I want to start this review by being honest-I have never read any of the books in Laundry Files series or any book written by Charles Stross actually. But in fairness, despite not having any knowledge about the previous books in the universe this book is set in, I still enjoyed it. I was totally immersed in the story and Derek Reilly, our MC, is a very interesting character.

I was really intrigued when I learned that he was imprisoned, spent his life in a prison called Sunshine Camp, and the reason for his imprisonment is even more interesting. Not to spoil much, but D&D has something to do with it. And basically, the premise of this story also has something to do with D&D and of course, the back story of Derek.

After reading this novella, I became convinced to read the other books in the series. I was told this can be read as a standalone, which, in some way, it is. But still there are parts, some mentions that I think I will appreciate more if I had read the other books. Still, though, my love for this novella wasn't affected, it can really be read as a standalone, but it will add to your enjoyment if you're more familiar with the series.

Overall, this is a very interesting read, very well written, and immersive.

Fun interlude, filling in the back story of a character and taking a pop at RPGs and the Satanic Panic. Looking forward to the next novel

I haven’t read any of the other Laundry Files books that are about a top secret British spy network fighting supernatural threats. This book contains the title novella and two short stories. It’s a lot of fun. The novella is about Derek who was locked up as teenage D&D player during the satanic panic of the eighties and has been held in a camp ever since. Forty odd years later he escapes to attend a gaming conference being sponsored by an actual demon summoning cult. An enjoyable ride if you know a bit about dungeons and dragons etc!

Maybe it's the power of suggestion, maybe it's nominative determinism, but A Conventional Boy is pretty, well, uh, vanilla, at least as Laundry Files stories go. Not that there's anything wrong with that! It's a perfectly readable novella that hits all the tentacular Laundry beats with a little Aztec-D&D spin, and taken together with the two other stories in the volume it seems a good on-ramp to the rest of the series even if it doesn't break much fresh ground for veterans.

That said, I'm confused what a story about the third-most interesting side character from the mainline books is doing stuck out here at the very end of the series. Is it lost? Does it need help? I'd speculate that somewhere amidst the TTRPG references and somewhat overfamiliar corporate-cultists-trying-to-summon-something-unspeakable plot there's an Important MacGuffin being set up for the finale, but there's otherwise little about this story that justifies why it needed to be told. It might be just fine, but there's nothing here to match the grim inventiveness of The Concrete Jungle, never mind the nightmares-for-weeks chills of Equoid.

Ironically, the most interesting bit of A Conventional Boy is its afterword, which starts as a simple history of TTRPGs but turns into a deep dive into Stross' thoughts on theme and setting. I particularly enjoyed Stross' observation that the 1980s D&D moral panic offers a way to understand why the Laundry Files has quite so many pesky cultist villains running about - they're just an outgrowth of the same Christian fundamentalist impulses that conflated D20s with demons forty years ago. This is clever, but it's a bit frustrating to get such a cool little grace note only well after finishing an otherwise middle-of-the-road story.

The New Management books still showed glimmers of the series' old fire, so I'm hoping Stross can make The Regicide Report sing, but all in all this bit of cute LitRPG isn't all that reassuring.

I’ve enjoyed the Laundry Files less and less with each new book. Somewhere along the line these stories have changed from original inventive pulp romps to a tired cynical sneer at…well, pretty much everything. God knows there is a place for that in this society, but it’s just so wearying to read several hundred pages relentlessly discoursing on why everything is shit. This seemed to reach a peak with the New Management books, which were so biliously misanthropic I almost tapped out. Fortunately this one sees Stross trying to engage with the light-hearted side of the series some more. It’s not perfect (parts of it smack far too much of nerd wish fulfilment for one thing), but it’s given me hope that the series can turn a corner and that maybe there is some actual fun on the horizon.

A Conventional Boy is a more or less contemporary Laundry Files novella set before the events that brought us The New Management. (If you need to be told what all that jargon means, when we are 13 books into this series, you possibly shouldn't be starting here and I'm not going to explain it all because this is only meant to be a short review - although if you do I think you'll soon get the hang of things.)

The protagonist is Derek Reilly, a young boy who, in the 1980s, expressed an incautious love of Dungeons and Dragons and was rounded up by the Laundry, the branch of the British secret services that deals with supernatural threats, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding. As a teenager who was very into D&D at the same time, I can only say, there but for the grace of God...

Well. Decades later, Derek is still banged up, now institutionalised in a shabby camp for - what shall we call them? Ludic prisoners? - situated in the Lake District, England's rainiest region. Rehabilitated to a degree, he's allowed to run his play-by-mail RPGs because the camp hierarchy think he's homeless and don't read what he's producing (if they did they might get some hints about their own futures. In an amusingly meta development we see Derek analysing and puzzling over developments in the Laundry saga that readers of the recent books will be well familiar with).

So far, so OK... till one day Derek learns that a major RPG convention is taking place just down the road and he decides to show up. That involves a fiendish escape plan and then - contact with the modern world - something he's been denied for thirty years.

All of this is slickly handled and amusingly done, I love the vein of co(s)mic horror that Stross maintains in these books, delivered in the deadpan style of a 1950s field training manual, agents for the use of. At the same time there are I think definite barbs aimed at over commercialised RPG companies (or at one in particular, I'm sure you can guess which) with too much money to splash and no love for the games. One such company is up to something nefarious here, and a ragtag group assembles to take them on before something really and can happen to Derek.

Or before he can do something really bad.

Or perhaps, both.

A Quest (of course!) results, as always in the Laundry books, and while I think Stross has dropped the idea of channeling a particular different author or trope in each of these books, nevertheless, the story follows the logic, as it were, of a dungeon crawling RPG with challenges to be solved and dangers awaiting. That's of course playing to Derek's strengths - he's basically been in training for this all his adult life - and he also has help and support. The final third of the book is therefore a no holds barred battle with the danger not just the immediate threat of the dungeon, but a real peril for the visible world as well.

Great fun and a book I consumed pretty much in one reading. Recommended.

Great to be back in the seedy underbelly of the Laundry Files. This was just as much fun as the rest of the series with several laugh out loud moments even as the plot turns the screws on the action. A fantastic romp of d'n'd, low respect jobs and elder gods.

This book was very interesting. At first I wasn't sure how exactly I would enjoy this book. It became something in which I became something very interesting. The way in which the story was told I found it very interesting, and I became to enjoy reading the book. The characters within the book went through some challenges which made the story even more interesting, with how the story ended I am intriuged to see how the sotry developed and changed.

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)