Book Review: A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

Breaking out the D20s and introducing a Dungeon Master into the Laundry Files.

The ‘Satanic Panic’ that erupted in the early 1980s possibly has to have been lived through in order to be actually believed. Thousands of unsubstantiated accusations of ritual abuse and worse, best selling books, and much more. It was a moral panic of the first order and had no basis in reality. Swept up in this crusade (and I use that term carefully) was Dungeons and Dragons, which was identified by some of the proponents of the panic as leading to witchcraft, Satan worship, and more. Tom Hanks’ first starring role was in a movie that encouraged this point of view, Mazes and Monsters. In some ways the Satanic Panic’s echoes still exist to this day (hello, Pizzagate). The Satanic Panic shows the power of belief turned to poisonous and wrong ends.

This has everything to do with A Conventional Boy, the latest Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross.

With the Laundry Files universe and its titular focus and worry about magic, Elder Beings, and the like, you can see how the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s might wind up intersecting with their remit. Derek Reilly, an enthusiastic autistic D&D player (nay, a DM) gets swept up in the Panic and winds up at Camp Sunshine, the locale where the Laundry Files deprograms cultists. Thanks to a series of bureaucratic events, Derek never gets released. Decades pass. He becomes a “trusty”, even allowed to edit the camp newsletter, and to run his play by physical mail game. (But even so, paper and pencils and the like are highly restricted at Camp Sunshine and you can forget about computers or the Internet.) But when Derek finds out that a D&D convention is happening nearby, and that the Camp is being temporarily rehoused, he does the unthinkable, and decides to escape to attend it. Derek has been paying attention, and despite the enormous dangers in trying to leave Camp Sunshine, he manages it. But the convention he goes to has a dread danger all of its own, one that Derek is equipped to recognize, and possibly deal with. Roll for initiative, Derek...

And so lies a story.

The titular story is a love letter to Dungeons and Dragons, specifically its early AD&D incarnation. (Derek hasn’t been able to get later editions at Camp Sunshine, after all). So the book is replete with lots of nerdy references, in-jokes and the like about Dungeons and Dragons, the nature of the game, some shade thrown on various modules, and the like. For someone who grew up on the stuff, it's catnip and a lot of fun¹

Like me, for instance.

Having grown up playing Dungeons and Dragons under the Satanic Panic, and being a GM for play by email games for a long time, Derek and his plight also hit me in the feels rather hard. Mind you, there is an irony in the theme and how things play out that while Derek was scooped up accidentally and wrongly and kept in Camp Sunshine basically by accident (and Derek not knowing enough to challenge it), the theme and logline of the book is one that Derek doesn’t quite realize himself--that he does, in fact have magical power, in those dice that he carries along. Derek doesn’t admit to himself that he is doing magic, but we, the reader, can totally see how and what his dice do, magic wise. But it is not just his dice, because when he gets to his convention and we see just his D&D campaign and one-shot are like, it is a :blink blink: moment for those who have been following the entire series. It made me stop and think and then read carefully to the end to see if I really got what was going on here.

A scene at the end, however, made it clear what has happened and what is happening, but it does reinforce for me that this is a book that, conceptually, a reader new to the series could possibly start it here. There is enough here, and given Derek’s isolation, Stross clearly seems to be reaching for that sweet spot where someone could parachute into his massive 13 book series right here. I think the above :blink blink: moment might then be an invitation to read the rest of the series having started with this book. It’s a very tricky balancing act and I think he manages it partly, and it is somewhat of a disappointment to me (but an understandable one) is that A Conventional Boy is short. It’s not a meaty thick Laundry Files novel, but rather a novella. It thrives on that length, and really, for it to be longer would make it wear out its welcome. If you are trying to get people to try a big 13 book series, a shorter entry has its advantages, though, and that seems to be what Stross is going for, here. He’s tried this before, but A Conventional Boy feels like his latest, most forceful attempt to bring new readers to the series.

The format of the book, though, is not just the titular story. There are also two additional stories after A Conventional Boy, and they are “early” stories of the original series protagonist, Bob Howard. These stories don’t just pad out the book to a publishable length (or else this would just fall under the rubric of a novella) but also tie in thematically and parallel A Conventional Boy, even if Derek doesn’t show up in either of them.

In “Overtime”, we get to see Bob Howard on a night watch duty on Christmas Eve, where he winds up having to tangle with an extra dimensional entity taking advantage of the power of belief. This story also has the value of clarifying a bit the end of A Conventional Boy, and closes the loop on it (although to be clear, Derek does not appear in any way). And again, thematically, ties into the narrative of belief fueling magical power.

The final story in the volume, “Down on the Farm”, again finds Bob Howard (again, in a relatively early part of his timeline) going to a psychiatric institution for people with magical abilities. A message has been smuggled out and Bob, precisely because he is not magically strong (again, this is way before Bob becomes a badass), he is a safe person to go investigate doing there. This story, too, has counterpoint to A Conventional Boy in that they are dealing with magical or potentially magically dangerous people, in an enclosed bottled institution. What Bob faces there is really like a magical-amped Laundry Files version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, with some nasty secrets and some clever magical workings going on inside.

Taken all together, then, A Conventional Boy doesn’t hit the heights of some of the Laundry Files novels, but its character and his plight and nature definitely hit me on an emotional level. I had to ration out reading the book a bit as a result. I was not expecting such emotional resonance in a Laundry Files book, but it does go to show that the dice, once again, are in my favor when reading a Charles Stross novel.

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Highlights: 

• Book is actually the titular novella and two short stories. 

• Possibly an entry point for those new to the series. 

• If you lived through the Satanic Panic and know your Thac0, pick this one up.

Reference: Stross, Charles, A Conventional Boy, [Tordotcom, 2025].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

1. Fun fact that you may not have known. Charles Stross is (via the Fiend Folio) the creator of several D&D monsters and races. Most famously these days, thanks to Baldur’s Gate III, Stross created the Githyanki. Stross does involve an incestuous cross reference, there are no Githyanki or any of his other monsters in this book. That might have been too much.