Stross's Laundry series is one of those concepts that is maddeningly obscure and yet awesome: Take equal parts Lovecraft Mythos, James Bond, and Bastard Sysop From Hell, season with British black humor and computer science jokes, pulp and that's the Laundry and it's brilliant.

In this novella (post-The Jennifer Morgue, pre-The Fuller Memorandum), Bob is up against flesh-eating alien parasites that look like horses and spread via mind-controlled girls. In short, unicorns, and they're out for murder. A novella is the perfect length for a Laundry series: Stross can spin a great yarn where the stakes of a small English town (and Bob Howard's tasty brain) is enough to keep you reading, the absurdity English bureaucracy is on full display, and the world-ending tension of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is safely backgrounded.