Quantum of Nightmares

The New Management, Book 2

By: Charles Stross

Narrated by: Imogen Church

It's a brave new Britain under the New Management. The Prime Minister is an eldritch god of unimaginable power. Crime is plummeting as almost every offense is punishable by death. And everywhere you look, there are people with strange powers, some of which they can control, and some, not so much.

Hyperorganised and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. Now she's in charge of the Bigge Corporation, just in time to discover the lethal trap Rupert set for her long ago....

Wendy Deere is investigating unauthorized supernatural shenanigans. She swore to herself she wouldn't again get entangled with Eve Starkey's bohemian brother, Imp, and his crew of transhuman misfits. Yeah, right.

Mary Macandless has powers of her own. Right now she's pretending to be a nanny in order to kidnap the children of a pair of famous, Government-authorized adepts. These children have powers of their own, and Mary Macandless is in way over her head.

All of these stories will come together, with world-bending results....

©2022 Charles Stross (P)2022 Hachette Audio UK

Critic reviews

"For all of Stross's genuine ability to spook and dismay, The Laundry Files are some of the most tremendously humane books I've ever read." (Tamsyn Muir, author of Gideon the Ninth)

It's very very loud

The book is fine, what would be expected from Charles Strosa these days, nothing spectacular but a solid delivery.
The delivery of it through voice acting is, painful. The amount of screaming and shouting is just too much. it's a pity since 95 % of it is really good and engaging.

great sequel on the dead lie sleeping

story is great with the unexpected and megalomaniac schemes that Stross excels in. enthousiaste performance with much dynamics in volume but sometimes that makes it difficult to hear when whispering and you are in a car. finale is perhaps somewhat flat almost with a relatively weak final stand.

Strong stomach advised

Quantum of nightmares is a sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming in the Laundry-files-adjacent suite ‘The new management’. I’m thoroughly invested in The Laundry Files and was curious when DLD came out.

Having read both now I feel these two books should have been one narrative-wise. I understand that the author pastiches Peter Pan in one book and Mary Poppins in the other but I felt the story in DLD was a bit thin.

The story in Quantum of Nightmares however is meatier and would have been an excellent complement to Dead lies dreaming. Yes there’s a pun there, I suggest you deal with it.

I don’t think many will go into this book without having read the Laundry files, but this is an excellent book on its own. It’s a depiction of what British life would be like under an Elder God as the Prime minister. But it’s also a good allegory for how precarious life is for disenfranchised individuals wanting/needing to get back into work life.

Imogen Church is amazing as a narrator, and heightens the experience very much. I think this my first book of hers, but I will be interested in searching out more of her work based on her smashing work here.

Full of preachy real world topics at the cost of story

This book feels like bad fanfiction.

The previous Laundry Files books had interesting characters of all sorts and colors, or sexualities. Great females characters, great male characters, and rarely a clichee in sight. The focus was telling an exciting Story.

Not so much this book. To be honest, I am shocked by how instantly a good writer can sacrifice His awesome storytelling ability to an agenda.

This book tries to showcase and preach certain political topics, thinly disguised as the Laundry Files stories I loved so much.

Nearly every heterosexual man in this book is either cruel, insane, dumb, ignorant, criminal, a perv, or a wifebeater. If he exists at all. The only slightly sane men in the book are either homosexual, or trans. Nothing wrong with different sexualities, but this book has overdone it in such an exaggerated way that it feels like "Revenge on the male reader". "White men are horrible" seems to be the moral of the Story. Inclusion is great, so is tolerance, but this book is a cheap chlichee.

Aside from that, the book has an extremely slow Intro and takes ages to become interesting. And when it does, the book uses this hightened interest in the finally emerging Plot... to include the next reason why white men are supposedly horrible.

If you make it through all the preachy stuff, and the harsh, high pitched and sadly over-acted voiceacting, you find some cool bits of the old Laundry files flair in there.

I want my fun back. My Reading books to escape certain depressing real world problems. If I want real world politics and guilt tripping I don't need to buy a book...

Simply a very, very big disappointment.