The Rhesus Chart

The Rhesus Chart  is the fifth novel in Charles Stross's Laundry Files series, published by Ace Books and Orbit in 2014. Like other books in the series, it blends elements of the Cthulhu Mythos with the spy thriller and bureaucratic office comedy genres; this entry expands the genre-blending to include modern vampire horror.
Set in spring 2013, the novel tells the story of Alex Schwartz, a programmer at a high-powered investment bank who turns himself into a vampire-like creature by feeding an advanced dataset into a fractal visualizer. He then transforms his colleagues--including Mhari Murphy, introduced in The Atrocity Archive as Bob Howard's sometime girlfriend. (Howard is the narrator but not the main character of The Rhesus Chart.)
The story's vampires are known as PHANGs--Photogolic Hemophagic Anagathic Neurotropic mumble-mumble, later explained as Person of Hemophagic Autocombusting Nocturnal Glamour--and are not undead, but rather are hosts for extradimensional parasites. These entities confer superhuman powers at the cost of inducing an inexorable drive to consume human blood, which has the unfortunate side effect of inducing dementia in the blood donor.
The vampire investment bankers are recruited by the Laundry (Britain's occult secret service) as special assets--and find themselves caught up in a struggle between ancient vampires, one of whom has cast a glamour on the Laundry that convinces everyone that there's no such thing as vampires. The confrontation that results when the agency realizes that not only do vampires exist, one has infiltrated the organization for decades, results in the death of Howard's boss, James Angleton.
==Inspiration==
Stross has said that he wrote a vampire-based novel because he "got bored with British spy thriller authors" and decided to start a "new cycle remixing contemporary fantasy sub-genres."Charlie's Diary, "The Laundry Files: An Updated Chronology," Charles Stross.
==Publication History==
The Rhesus Chart was released as a hardcover and an ebook in July 2014, by Ace Books in the United States and Orbit in Britain. The British paperback was published in April 2015 by Orbit, and the US paperback in July 2015 by Ace.Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Title: The Rhesus Chart."
==References==
Category:Charles Stross works
Category:Novels
Category:Expanded Mythos Works