Review: What do unicorns, tentacles and snails have in common?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 14, 2013
EQUOIDS: A LAUNDRY NOVELLA, by Charles Stross does for unicorns what A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET did for dreams.  Bob Howard is assigned to investigate reports of yet another incursion from beyond space and time code named (all Laundry jobs have code names) "EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN", which as most of the code names, is remarkably apt despite sounding nonsensical. The mission briefing contains a "story" by H.P. Lovecraft about his run-in with a unicorn as a young man. Stross does a wonderful job in this pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft's "purple prose" writing style in describing the horrors of a 1 ton carnivorous adult male unicorn that is born of the fusion of a conical snail, a horse, a young human female and a tentacled seething mass of other worldly protoplasm with hive mind spell casting abilities.  The life cycle of the unicorn is described in some wonderfully creative H.R.Geiger x Lovecraftian biologically icky detail.While there is an above average amount of gore and carnage, the only well-known Laundry character is Bob himself, with nary a mention of anyone or anything else. There are a few mentions of the typical administrative Laundry snafus, but only as brief asides. The story length (32 pages) as cited on the Amazon Kindle ad is wrong.  This is a full novella that clocks in at 113 pages of text on my iPad when set to normal book font size.Not the place for those uninitiated into the Laundry mythos to begin, but well worth the $1.99 for long-time Laundry fans.  As always, looking forward to the next Laundry novel.Recommended.J.M. Tepper