The Atrocity Archives

Bob Howard is a computer hacker who now works for the Laundry, a secret branch of the British civil service. In this version of the world, applied mathematics can open doors to the horrors Lovecraft wrote about, and the Laundry exists to keep those doors shut.

Bob would be happy with his paperwork and his IT problems, but a missing colleague and a trail of dangerous mathematics drag him into fieldwork, where he meets Mo O'Brien, an Irish logic professor, and a detective from Milton Keynes who is asking the wrong questions.

The book combines spy fiction, cosmic horror and workplace satire, with a narrator who is as worried about the meetings and the budget as about the monsters. It collects the short novel The Atrocity Archive, first serialised in 2001, and the novella The Concrete Jungle, which won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novella. It is the first book in the Laundry Files series.