On the good side, more Laundry Files! On the downside, more Laundry Files. Bob Howard is back, and this time he's facing off against American Evangelists/Cthulhu Cultists who have very serious plans towards the End Times. But unlike the previous Laundry books, which took used Stross's deep knowledge of various arcana (bureaucratic IT, 20th century occultism, James Bond movies) to add depth to the high concept premise of the series, The Apocalypse Codex is just kinda... generic. It's not at all bad, (particularly compared to books where Stross is really rushed), but central Colorado is an endless series of suburban motels and mega-church complexes (note: this may be accurate...) rather than a coherent locale, and for insane cultists, the villains don't inspire much dread or revulsion, or even unfamiliarity. This might just be an example of Poe's Law, since to this liberal atheist, normal Evangelicals are already indistinguishable from Cthulhu Cultists, but either way, for a horror series un-horrifying villains are a fatal flaw.

Hopefully book 5 will have Bob returning to Merry England, and to an enemy that Stross is intimately familiar with.