The Atrocity Archives

This satiric Lovecraftian horror/SF thriller collects two related, previously published novellas, "The Atrocity Archive" and the Hugo Award-winning "The Concrete Jungle." George Smiley's Circus has nothing on the Laundry, the super-secret British intelligence agency where Bob Howard works. After mathematician Alan Turing proved that certain mathematical equations could summon unearthly forces from other universes, the government founded the Laundry both to codify such summonings and to ensure that others did not deliberately or inadvertently tear holes in the space-time continuum. Laundry operative Bob Howard can just about manage to triumph over the slimy tentacled beings from another dimension that he confronts on a regular basis...but the bureaucracy and nasty office politics prove to be more difficult and dangerous obstacles.