A Conventional Boy: A fun welcome-back to the LAUNDRY FILES

A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

I haven’t read a LAUNDRY FILES story in at least a couple of years. Charles Stross’s latest, 2025’s A Conventional Boy, is a fun novella and a nice welcome back to the series. The book is filled out by two short stories, “Overtime” and “Down on the Farm,” featuring Bob Howard. It was great to spend time with Bob again, but Derek Reilly, the protagonist of A Conventional Boy, was the real star.

The charge of Britain’s “Laundry,” a part of their intelligence and security services, is to keep our dimension safe from incursions of the Old Ones or the Elder Gods, denizens of nearby dimensions. In this world, magic is mostly math, and with the popularity of computers, magic started happening faster and much more powerfully at the end of the 20^th century. In 1984, a convergence of security concerns and “Satanic Panic” led to the arrest and incarceration of Derek Reilly by the Laundry. They thought he was a mad cult leader determined to bring an Old One into our dimension. In reality, he was a fourteen-year-old Dungeon Master.

By the time things got straightened out, he couldn’t be released for security reasons, so now, thirty years later in the story, Derek is a forty-something “trusty” at Camp Sunshine. He publishes the camp’s newsletter and has the run of the place, as much as that’s possible, although he can’t leave. Derek even runs a table-top role-playing game by mail (after the letters are reviewed by the censors), and has made a set of dice from the pebbles he picked up in the camp’s yard, right next to the dimensional rift that forms the physical security barrier. Then, Derek learns that Camp Sunshine is going to be demolished and refurbished. The place that, for good or bad, has been his home for three decades will be gone. At the same time, he learns of a role-playing convention coming to the nearby town. Derek decides to escape, hoping to attend a real convention, and maybe play one more face-to-face role-playing game in his life.

If you’ve read other LAUNDRY FILES books, you’ll know the drill—even if you haven’t, once you join Derek at the DiceCon convention, you’ll smell a rat, or maybe an orc, when you see the glossy, commercial game that has sponsored the convention. Mostly, though, like me, you’ll just enjoy watching Derek, who has never seen the real internet or owned a mobile phone, trying to fit into this brave new world. And when the truth is revealed, he may be the dungeon master the world needs.

The story is funny and fun, with lots of Stross’s dry wit and eye for the absurd. The Laundry springs into action, when another “trusty,” Iris Carpenter, is given, well, work furlough, I guess you’d call it, to track down Derek. Frankly, I was much more interested in the convention, the people Derek meets, and how he confronts the true cultists ready to wreak bloody mayhem on the innocent gamers.

Stross dedicated the book to “old gamers everywhere.” I’ve already recommended it to two table-top role-playing gamer friends, and it is accessible enough that you do not have to know the Laundry Files story to follow along.

The two short stories are more classic fare. In “Overtime,” Bob, who’s been assigned Night Officer Duty on Christmas Eve, scrambles to stop the grinchiest Elder God ever from cancelling Christmas. “Down on the Farm” takes him to the Laundry’s mental institution, where a cadre of mechanical nurses care for the residents. What could possibly go wrong? Both are witty and entertaining.

Derek and his adventures in the modern world is still my favorite though. This short read provides a few hours of humor and escapism, something sorely needed these days.