Dead Lies Dreaming

Written by Charles Stross

Narrated by Gideon Emery

When magic and superpowers emerge in the masses, Wendy Deere is contracted by the government to bag and snag supervillains in Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross' Dead Lies Dreaming: A Laundry Files Novel.

As Wendy hunts down Imp?the cyberpunk head of a band calling themselves “The Lost Boys”? she is dragged into the schemes of louche billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge. Rupert has discovered that the sole surviving copy of the long-lost concordance to the one true Necronomicon is up for underground auction in London. He hires Imp’s sister, Eve, to procure it by any means necessary, and in the process, he encounters Wendy Deere.

In a tale of corruption, assassination, thievery, and magic, Wendy Deere must navigate rotting mansions that lead to distant pasts, evil tycoons, corrupt government officials, lethal curses, and her own moral qualms in order to make it out of this chase alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781980098768

Charles Stross

Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

Reviews for Dead Lies Dreaming

[Rick Casady · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While Stross no longer involves Bob and Mo in his plots, I still find his novels witty and engrossing. This one entertained me. You Laundry Files followers may like it, too.

[macha_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

welp. i probably would have liked this spinoff series Tales of the New Management better if i hadn't come to it after reading right through the brilliant original series The Laundry Files to which it is only very vaguely connected. but anyway i did, and comparisons became inescapable, and this one was merely clever. the house at the center of it as a medium for time travel was an interesting idea, the rooms in the maze leading them backward in time. and the characters were kinda neat, although framing them within the Peter Pan story was a good bit over the top, and sadly the author seemed to lose interest in them all anyway once they arrived in 1888 Victorian London and it became more of a gangster caper grafted onto an espionage novel, with a bit of evil magic in the background to draw on if the author painted himself into a corner. i'll try the next book in the series, but i would not call this a good beginning.

[yarmando_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

With the Laundry dismantled under the new regime, the story veers into a new direction, exploring the consequences of ubiquitous magic in the world. Imp leads his band of Lost Boys (a central casting collection of queerfolk) into the Neverland spaces of his family home to steal a Necronomicon concordance. Gideon Emery continues to excel as the performer of this series, and I'm glad that Recorded Books continues to put out productions of these titles alongside the Hachette Audio UK production with Homer Todiwala.

[sarcher-3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I like the author and I like the world he's built. This book didn't really work for me, but for really indistinct reasons. I don't think the Lost Boys trope, which the author talks about pulling from for this book, is engaging for me personally.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A complicated caper gets personal and deadly under the new management. Sort of the inverse of the cop finds the case is compounds their own past. The fringe body count is quite messy and quite high but this is lovecraftian lite brew. Our old buddies are all absent and the laundry almost entirely bleached out.

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was probably inevitable that "The Labyrinth Index" was going to see the series end up in a state of entropic nihilism, as all real hope was apparently lost in the Strossian "Laundry" universe. However, that doesn't mean we've reached the end of the road with this exercise. Whether Stross would have turned the satire up to "11," without Brexit and the follies of the current British government is another question, but in this novel we have assorted teams of dubious people trying to get their mitts on a very special book, with a plot where various cozy chunks of British culture have been thrown on a roaring bonfire. The real theme is that just because the avatar of one mad god has wound up in control of the British government, this doesn't mean that the devotees of other mad gods have thrown in the towel. This is a long-winded way of saying that I liked this book more than I thought I would (without giving away any of the plot) and l think most long-time "Laundry" readers will too.

[schant-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Set in the Laundry Files universe, but with a bunch of petty criminals as main characters instead of Bob, Mo and the rest. It's a pacey and entertaining read as expected, but Stross has really let his love of old spy novels get the better of him with a bit too much double-cross, triple-cross, and heavily armed cannon-fodder goons in this one. I enjoyed it, but hope for the Laundry bods in the next one.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Changing one of the basic premises of a series is risky; when Stross had the stars come right, the Laundry Files faced some major narrative challenges, and he’s chosen to start with a bunch of new characters, mostly criminals-but-not-so-bad, along with an ex-police officer turned private investigator/enforcer-type now that the New Management has eliminated most public functions. It’s hard not to see the narrative shift being affected by Brexit and the pandemic, too; the general idea is that most people keep on doing their ordinary things even as the extended public executions begin and there’s no longer any pretense of the law binding the rich and powerful too. But that’s background to the more specific caper: there’s a scary book, a codex to the Necronomicon, and a number of nasty types are competing to get it, along with our protagonists, who mostly work for one or another of the nasty types (or are said types themselves, in one instance). I’ll go with it because I’m invested but I really wish I knew what was happening to Mo and the old crew.