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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Stross does it again, 7 Sep 2007
The Jennifer Morgue is a direct sequel to The Atrocity Archives which I reviewed earlier this year (and loved).
When billionaire, Ellis Billington, tries to get his hands on a piece of forbidden technology that's been hidden in the depths of the sea for millenia by things with too many tentacles and not enough arms (aka aliens!), there's only one man good enough to stop him.
That man is Bond, James Bo... Erm, Howard, Bob Howard...
As usual with Stross, this book is packed with plenty of ideas. It's also much more laugh-out-loud funny than The Atrocity Archives.
"I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsche's and Mercedes'."
There was perhaps, a bit too much info-dumping with regards to mathematical stuff and computer... stuff. Maths and computery-stuff are to me, what Marmite is to a jellyfish: meaningless, but avoidable. There wasn't too much though, and the story soon pulled off like an Aston Martin DB9 being chased by demon-possessed zombies...
The Jennifer Morgue didn't quite end right for me, though. The penultimate chapter concluded very satisfyingly, tying up loose ends and leaving a natural resolution to all the plotlines that Stross had (yet again!) woven into an excellent and richly developed story. I fully expected the story to end there. Instead, there was another chapter that seemed largely unrelated to the rest of the book and would have, I think, made a suitable opening chapter for another Laundry book. Nothing wrong with that particular chapter, just out of place.
Stross did though, escape the trap of filling the reader in too much on earlier events. Sure, there are lots of allusions to happenings in The Atrocity Archives, but I really think The Jennifer Morgue could be read as a stand-alone. That said, why would you want to miss out on any work of Charles Stross?! 8 out of 10.
For more fantasy/SF reviews, regular amazing competitions, and author interviews, visit: www.thebookswede.blogspot.com
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Readable, funny, but not quite as good as Atrocity Archives, 1 Dec 2007
Bob Howard, SysAdmin and Occult Ops. field operative for The Laundry, continues to have an interesting life. Here, his destiny is entangled with a demon, and he's charged with stopping a billionaire megalomaniac from awakening the Old Ones at the bottom of the ocean, and hastening the onset of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN - and all without blowing his expense account. If you've read The Atrocity Archives, you'll know some of what I mean; if not, I haven't spoiled anything for you and you have some pleasantly diverting reading to do.
Stross's writing style is very accomodating without being patronisingly simple, and I read through this over the course of a few day's worth of train trips. Bob, his main character, has an amusing inner monologue which portrays the clear contempt Stross has for modern executive corporate work practises (and handily serves as a narrative since the book is basically a first-person account), and somewhat oddly this is also a book about how mathematics and physics are actually the basis of demonology (the "demons" in these books are actually extra-dimensional aliens, albeit highly dangerous ones who aren't always sentient). The plot begins to creak a bit once the major plot exposition is underway around the final third of the book, and although this strays into sci-fiction horror, it actually begins to become slightly ridiculous rather than engaging - slightly "schlock", if you ask me. I didn't like where the "James Bond" theme was going, and it kept going right up till the afterword.
The previous novel, The Atrocity Archives (actually a collection of related short stories), is the better bet here, in my opinion. The Jennifer Morgue isn't a bad book, and I enjoyed reading it - but the prequel is better, I think.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Another very entertaining book from Charles Stross, 15 Oct 2007
The Atrocity Archives was put together following it being issued initially as a series of serialised stories and although a good read this fact showed in the books plot and sequencing. The Jennifer Morgue is a more complete story. It is very funny, I enjoyed the science, and the overall plot is daft but entertaining. I look forward to another Bob Howard book.
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