So, my next novel, A Conventional Boy, is coming out in two months time. (The publication date is January 7th; in the USA it's going to be published by Tor.com, and in the UK, EU, Australia, and NZ it'll be coming from Orbit.)
In the 1980s evangelicals fomented a moral panic around Dungeons and Dragons, claiming it was corrupting children and leading them onto a slippery slope to Satanism. But this is the world of the Laundry, and Lovecraftian Elder Gods are very real. When the Laundry collided with Dungeons and Dragons, Mistakes were Made (and swept under the rug, in true bureaucratic fashion). Thirty five years later one of those mistakes, named Derek Reilly, has been thoroughly institutionalized in Camp Sunshine, a centre for deprogramming cultists. Everyone takes him for granted: everyone's forgotten him. But Derek hasn't forgotten the outside world. And when he hears about a gaming convention that's coming to the nearest town, he finally has a reason to activate his foolproof escape plan—he's going to go to his first ever con.
Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy ...
This is Derek the DM's long-overdue origin story (in the works since 2009). Originally it was going to be a novelette (an overgrown short story) but it just kept growing and growing and growing until it turned into a novel in its own right. If you've ever wondered what would happen if I wrote a Laundry Files LitRPG/progression fantasy? This is for you: it's published here for the first time, along with two other Laundry Files novelettes (the Hugo-shortlisted Overtime, and Dowm on the Farm), and an afterword about the history of the 1980s Satanic D&D Panic.
Purely by coincidence this very week the Satanic D&D Panic is back in the news in the UK: the D&D stuff is about five paragraphs down in this news item. I wish real life would stop stealing the most dystopian pieces of my work! But in the meantime, please buy my book? I mean, Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review: "This is urban fantasy with its tongue firmly in its cheek, and it reads a bit like Terry Pratchett trying his hand at Lovecraftian horror," so it can't be that bad!
Here's a universal ebook link (to all US ebook stores that list it for sale).
(Small print: The universal link, via Books2Read.com, is experimental and sometimes breaks. It's particularly iffy if the book is published with different ISBNs in different markets, like A Conventional Boy. If it doesn't work for you, you can search your preferred online bookstore for "Stross Conventional Boy" to find it: I'll try and update later. (Obviously I'm trying to stop prioritizing Amazon over other bookshops.)
