2008 modern occult secret service novelette, between The Jennifer
Morgue and The Fuller Memorandum in the Laundry Files series. Bob
visits the asylum where broken Laundry agents go; all, unsurprisingly,
is not well.
This means there's an awful lot of atmospheric setup, and
relatively little conclusion. The setup turns out to be setup for Bob
too, as it was mostly a lure to get him to come and investigate, but
the atmosphere of a facility full of people who've been damaged by
magic is well drawn. I didn't find the clockwork automata entirely
convincing, since they felt rather out of genre, but they're a
pleasingly baroque touch nonetheless.
Playing around with the order of the narrative, delaying the reader's
knowledge of information Bob has had from the point he turned up at
the asylum (and with the plot turning on a point that Bob knows all
about but has never bothered to mention in the narrative), is rather
more blatantly synthetic. What the long-term residents are really up
to is rather more interesting, and I'd have preferred more of this and
less of the main story. Many of the characters could have been much
better served by the space available in a full novel.
Freely available at tor.com.
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