#Review - Season of Skulls by Charles Stross

Season of Skulls
Charles Stross
Orbit, 18 May 2023 
Available as: HB, 373, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356516967

I'm grateful to Orbit for providing me an advance e-copy of Season of Skulls to consider for review.

Oddly, Season of Skulls was one of three books I read in a row that featured vampires, and one of two taking place substantially in the late 18th/ early 19th cent (sort of). Not deliberate, but it did make me reflect on the spread of vampires in popular culture - they are such a fitting metaphor for predatory, manipulative authority figures such as exploitative bosses, and indeed for late stage capitalism overall. 

I'm sure their current prevalence and popularity isn't a coincidence, and as ever Stross is abreast of both the overt and the implicit aspects of current culture. The third part in Stross's New Management sequence, following events in the UK after its takeover by an ancient evil (any resemblance to recent real events is entirely deliberate) Season of Skulls focusses on Eve, a smart and ruthless company executive who has unfortunately found herself the thrall of a cultist and necromancer. She thought she'd disposed of Rupert in the Ghost Roads that begin in her ancestral home in Knightsbridge, but now he seems to have returned, and she risks falling back under his domination...

Which is only the curtain-raiser for a frenzied, funny and rather dashing story riffing off the Regency romance, as Eve is transported to a twisted version of early modern England complete with stagecoaches, highwaymen, ship's captains and a swarm of would-be Napoleons. It shouldn't make sense but it really does, Stross serving up the sort of convoluted wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels plot that characterises the very best of his writing.

The stakes are, as we learn high - for Eve, her personal liberty and identity are under threat, but for Britain and, indeed, for Earth, the event known as Case Nightmare Green accelerates. If Rupert isn't thwarted, the planet will be left with a choice of evil or worse evil.

I loved the choreographed incongruity of this book, the central action taking place in a sort of weird Regency version of The Prisoner and forcing Eve, a thorough modern young woman, to contend with the conventions and restrictions of a deeply patriarchal age (a theme running through the story as Rupert gained power over her by enacting feudal law as a ritual magic, turning Eve into his literal possession). I thought I saw similar themes to Stross's SF novel Glasshouse - with the difference however that Eve's "escape" only takes her into a wider world in which she has, literally, no personhood.

An excellent addition to the entire Laundry/ New Management sequence, and I have to say that in literally having an eldritch god assume the role of Prime Minister these books do escape the tendency for UK politics and public life to leapfrog the strangest imaginings of writers. 

At least, I hope so.

For more information about Season of Skulls, see the publisher's website here.