The Nightmare Stacks

Alex Schwartz was an investment banker until an algorithm turned him and his colleagues into vampires. Dependent on the Laundry — Britain's secret counter-occult agency — for his continued existence, he has little choice but to accept a role as an operative-in-training. His first assignment sends him home to Leeds, to help assess the cost of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker into the Laundry's new headquarters.

What he finds there is Cassie, a student who is not what she appears, and the leading edge of Case Nightmare Red: an incursion by magical beings from an alternate Earth where Elvenkind rules. What begins as bureaucratic drudgery escalates into open conflict between modern military technology and ancient magic, fought across the streets of Yorkshire.

Charles Stross's seventh Laundry Files novel steps away from series narrator Bob Howard, trading office comedy for a full-scale invasion while keeping the series' blend of Lovecraftian horror, spy fiction and civil-service satire.