Russell Letson Reviews Season of Skulls by Charles Stross

Season of Skulls, Charles Stross (Tordotcom 978-1-25083-939-8, $28.99, 384 pp, hc) May 2023.

You never know what revelations lurk in the To Be Reviewed pile. This month, a pair of novels by quite dissimilar writers traverse a range of semi-connected genre spaces and bounce off each other in unexpected ways.

In the case of Charles Stross, genre mix-and-mashing is exactly what is expected, the more mischievous or subversive the better. Stross’s acknowledgments at the end of his new novel recount how he came to explore the possibilities of the romance form, specifically a mash-up of the Regency gothic and the Lovecraftian horrors and intrigue-thriller variations of his Laundry world. The result is Season of Skulls, a close sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming and Quantum of Nightmares, which constitute an extension of the original Laundry sequence, with a new set of continuing characters and an even stronger dystopian-catastrophic atmosphere, thanks to the demonic New Management that now governs the UK. To this mix he adds elements of the time-travel adventure, particularly the kind that sends a contemporary protagonist back in his­tory armed only with modern understandings (a possible advantage) and sociopolitical attitudes (often a problem). Such a project has a long his­tory in SF/F, going back at least to L. Sprague de Camp’s comic-optimistic Lest Darkness Fall (itself indebted to Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) and Poul Anderson’s much darker ‘‘The Man Who Came Early’’.

At the end of Quantum of Nightmares, Eve Starkey thought that she had safely disposed of her hideous boss (and high priest of a blood sacrifice cult), Rupert Bigge, by sending him off into the alternate-history ‘‘ghost roads.’’ But a great villain like that, you don’t vanquish him all at once, and Rupert – or a disintegrating, undead version of him – shows up with the un­welcome news that he still has some power over her. And then the even more hideous boss of the New Management takes notice of his potential rival’s not-quite-expired status and tasks Eve with delivery of Rupert’s completely dead head, or dire else. So, loaded down with geases and a supernaturally enforced medieval marriage contract and an offer she can’t refuse, Eve is off to a gothick-romantic version of 1816, a ‘‘romance-fueled pocket universe’’ generated in part by real history but even more by archetypes and tropes from ‘‘the shared universe of Regency fiction.’’

In this notional 1816, Eve is (as she would have been in the real one) a distressed and solitary gentlewoman, which means that she has nearly zero independent legal status and limited social autonomy. Eve already knew that ‘‘living in a Jane Austen setting… [would] be more problematic than any number of starry-eyed fans assumed, and [she] was never starry-eyed at the best of times,’’ but that doesn’t make it any less galling to endure crinolines and laces and being ignored unless there’s a man present to speak for her and being condescended to if she does get heard. In fact, much of the book depends on em­phasizing the extreme unpleasantness of Eve’s trip to the romantic past, from chamber pots to cannon fire. Then there are the genuinely harrowing adventure-tale conventions she endures: of being drugged, kidnapped, imprisoned, robbed, and of stowing away in a trunk on a sailing ship.

But her 21st-century feminist atti­tudes make her anything but a helpless damsel, however confining her official status might be. And in a metaverse where magic is real, she retains her personal sorcerous skills and powers, including pyrogenesis and telekinesis, which means she can set your hair ablaze or send her faux pearls into you at firearm veloci­ties. Nevertheless, she bounces from one hazard and nasty situation to the next, including an asylum for inconvenient wives and daughters and a Regency-adapted version of The Village from the 1960s television series The Prisoner. Nor are Eve’s troubles entirely randomly generated, as she discovers as she digs into the connections among the spies, assassins, cultists, and collabo­rators while tracking and untangling Rupert’s operations. It’s all about wresting control of the narrative away from Rupert, of preventing him from generating a real future from this ‘‘pinched-off fistula of false history.’’ It’s a magical version of a time war, as Fritz Leiber or Poul Anderson would understand immediately.

The book pays particular attention to the often unacknowledged grubby sides of the historical romance world, the ordinary discomforts and inconveniences of the period – tedious, tooth-rattling coach rides, terrible food, louse-ridden bedding, restrictive clothing, inadequate shoes, ubiquitous abject poverty – and Stross really rubs our noses in the sensory assault of the Regency’s great metropolis:

London stank of coal smoke and sewage, which barely covered the even more noisome stench of decaying food waste. It also rang with shouts, screams, the bellowing sales pitches of barkers, the complaints of sheep and cattle being driven to the slaughterhous­es, and the conversations of a million people.

Since this is a gothic Regency of the collec­tive imagination, it is also a gathering place for transmogrified versions of its archetypal figures – unhinged scientists, vampiric noble­men, deposed emperors, secret agents, piratical sea-captains, sinister cultists, street urchins, starchy aristocratic matriarchs, dashing heroes – overlaid on the Lovecraft-infected secret-agentry of the Laundry world. And since Stross is in the business of interrogating, deconstructing, inverting, satirizing, and generally messing with genre recipes while fulfilling our appetite for them, the whole carnival of marvels, myster­ies, and monsters, of horrors and (sometimes uncomfortable) laughs looks right back at the reader with a crooked, knowing, ironic grin. Or is that a grimace?

This review and more like it in the May 2023 issue of Locus.

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