A Conventional Boy

What happens when the moral panic over Dungeons & Dragons turns out to be justified — just not quite in the way the concerned parents imagined? In A Conventional Boy, Charles Stross plants us squarely inside the life of Derek Reilly, a middle-aged man who has spent decades institutionalized after a teenage misunderstanding with forces the British government would very much prefer stay theoretical. His world is small, his privileges limited, and his ambitions modest — he just wants to attend a local gaming convention. That wanting, so ordinary and so human, is what pulls you in, even as the stakes quietly metastasize into something far larger and stranger.

Stross writes this entry in the Laundry Files with a tighter, more intimate lens than the series sometimes employs, trading sprawling bureaucratic dread for the particular texture of a single, constrained life. The prose is warm beneath its dry wit, and Derek makes for an unexpectedly sympathetic center of gravity — neither hero nor villain, just someone trying to roll a decent outcome from a very bad starting position. Readers who enjoy horror comedy with genuine emotional grounding will find this one earns its laughs.