The Laundry Files Books in Order: How to read Charles Stross’s series?

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So, The Laundry Files is a series of science fiction spy thrillers written by British author Charles Stross (the author of The Merchant Princes series). The story is about Bob Howard, an I.T. consultant who is now a field agent for the British government agency known as The Laundry. This organization deals with occult threats (with a Lovecraftian influence) and is set in a world where a computer and mathematical equations are just used for calling up other dimensions.

How to read The Laundry Files Series in Order?

The Laundry Files is a mix of novels and novellas not published in chronological order. This Laundry Files reading order follows Charles Stross’s recommendations, it’s not in publication order, but in chronological order.

  1. The Atrocity Archives - Bob Howard is a low-level computer tech working for the super-secret government agency known as The Laundry. His work was dull but it was keeping him from trouble. Now, everything is about to change.
  2. The Concrete Jungle - Collected in The Atrocity Archive. Bob Howard has just discovered that someone has hacked into his organization’s extremely deadly alien prevention network. As he re-traces the intruder’s steps he comes across more and more wild information regarding Gorgonism, secret Nazi experiments, the true reason for DRM, a camera network that can kill instantly and an internal coup involving bizarre agents of the underworld.
  3. The Jennifer Morgue - Bob Howard must stop a ruthless billionaire from unleashing an eldritch horror, codenamed ‘Jennifer Morgue’ from the ocean’s depths for the purpose of ruling the world…
  4. Pimpf – Collected in The Jennifer Morgue. Bob Howard must help an intern who ends up getting himself stuck inside a MMORPG which Bob created in order to capture dungeon designers who have accidentally designed programs that would lead to problems.
  5. Down on the Farm - Bob Howard must investigate strange doings at another obscure, moth-eaten government agency – evidently a rest home for Laundry agents whose minds have snapped…
  1. Equoid - Bob Howard must travel to the quiet English countryside to deal with an outbreak of one of the worst horrors imaginable. For, as it turns out, unicorns are real. They’re also ravenous killers from beyond spacetime…
  2. The Fuller Memorandum - Bob Howard is catching up on his filing in the Laundry archives when a top secret dossier known as the Fuller Memorandum vanishes along with his boss, who is suspected of stealing the file. Bob must find the missing memorandum before the world ends up disappearing next.
  3. Overtime - The Laundry is on a skeleton staff for Christmas – leaving one bureaucrat to be all that stands between the world and annihilation by the Thing That Comes Down Chimneys.
  1. The Apocalypse Codex - Assigned to External Assets, Bob Howard discovers the company (unofficially) employs freelance agents to deal with sensitive situations. When Ray Schiller – an American televangelist with the uncanny ability to miraculously heal the ill – becomes uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister, External Assets dispatches the unpredictable Persephone Hazard to discover why the preacher is so interested in British politics. It’s Bob’s job to make sure Persephone doesn’t cause an international incident.
  2. A Conventional Boy - Coming one day, not yet written though.
  3. The Rhesus Chart - When traders employed by a merchant bank in London are showing signs of infection, Bob Howard must investigate and uncover a blood-curdling conspiracy between men and monsters… While his department is tangled up in bureaucratic red tape (and Buffy reruns) debating how to stop the rash of vampirism.
  4. The Annihilation Score - An antique violin made of white human bone was designed to produce music capable of slaughtering demons. Dominique ‘Mo’ O’Brien, the wife of Bob Howard, is the custodian of this unholy instrument. It invades her dreams and yearns for the blood of her colleagues – and her husband. And despite Mo’s proficiency as a world-class violinist, it cannot be controlled…
  1. Escape from Yokai Land – Bob’s been assigned to work with the Miyamoto Group, checking the wards that lock down Japan’s warded sites―a task previously handled by his predecessor Dr. Angleton, the Eater of Souls. This mostly involves policing yokai: traditional magical beings, increasingly grown more annoying and energetic (previously titled Escape from Puroland).
  2. The Nightmare Stacks - After stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires, Alex Schwartz was drafted by the Laundry. Dependent on his new employers for his continued existence, he has little choice but to accept his new role as an operative-in-training. For his first assignment, Alex is dispatched to Leeds to help assess the costs of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker for use as the Laundry’s new headquarters.
  3. The Delirium Brief - Following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob Howard is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize. Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.
  1. The Labyrinth Index - Since she was promoted to the head of the Lords Select Committee on Sanguinary Affairs, every workday for Mhari Murphy has been a nightmare. Mhari’s most recent assignment takes her and a ragtag team of former Laundry agents across the pond into the depths of North America. The United States president has gone missing. Perhaps it has to do with the Nazgûl currently occupying the government and attempting to summon Cthulhu.
  2. Dead Lies Dreaming – As Wendy hunts down Imp―the cyberpunk head of a band calling themselves “The Lost Boys”― she is dragged into the schemes of louche billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge. Rupert has discovered that the sole surviving copy of the long-lost concordance to the one true Necronomicon is up for underground auction in London. He hires Imp’s sister, Eve, to procure it by any means necessary, and in the process, he encounters Wendy Deere.
  3. Quantum of Nightmares – It’s a brave new Britain under the New Management. The avuncular Prime Minister is an ancient 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. Hyperorganized 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.

  1. Season of Skulls – Hyperorganized and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. At least, she has reason to hope he’s dead. But though she’s now in charge of the Bigge Corporation, she’s not free of him yet. Through the fecklessness of her brother Imp, combined with the intricate feudal law of a tiny Channel Island, it would appear that unbeknownst to her, she was married to Bigge–and that proving his death and releasing herself from his arcane bindings will take years and cost millions. Then an emissary of the Prime Minister arrives with an offer that she absolutely can’t…well, you know.

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