Escape from Puroland
A novella.
The next installment in the popular, award-winning Laundry Files series, a unique blend of cosmic horror and bureaucratic farce.
Regular reader of the Laundry Files might have noticed Bob Howard's absence from the events of The Nightmare Stacks, and his subsequent return from Tokyo at the start of The Delirium Brief.
Escape from Puroland explains what he was doing there.
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.
But then Bob's simple trip turns into a deadly confrontation with the ultimate yokai. It's massively powerful. It's pink. And it says "Hello."
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Charles Stross
Charles Stross doesn’t just write science fiction—he reverse-engineers the future. Whether unraveling the complexities of AI, economics, or cosmic horror, his stories feel less like speculative fiction and more like eerily plausible roadmaps to tomorrow. A former software developer and technical writer, Stross brings a hacker’s mindset to storytelling, dissecting the machinery of reality and exposing the glitches beneath.
Born in Leeds, England, Stross grew up surrounded by the last vestiges of the Industrial Age, a landscape that would later inform his fascination with systems—both human and technological. Before becoming a full-time author, he dabbled in everything from pharmacy to computer science, experiences that lend his work an uncanny level of authenticity. His early exposure to computing and online culture made him one of the first sci-fi writers to deeply explore the implications of a hyper-connected world, long before the tech boom turned cyberpunk into a reality.
Laundry Files
The multiple Hugo Award-winning Laundry Files series follows the exploits of a former tech support worker now-turned field agent, Bob Howard, at the Laundry, a top secret British intelligence agency dedicated to protecting the cosmos and human race from nefarious supernatural phenomenon beyond spacetime. Starting off with The Atrocity Archives, witness Charles Stross infuse each genre-bending novel with a blend of dark fantasy, bureaucratic humor, and the pacing of a hardcore thriller. An innovative spin on H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos,” the Laundry Files is perfect for fans of weird fiction and bureaucratic humor with a technological twist.
Laundry Files consists of eleven primary books, and includes three additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads and considered as a complete series. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
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