A Conventional Boy
core novel 2025 The Laundry Files
Record
| First published | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.16 (1,448 ratings, collected 2026-10-28) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781250357847 |
| Internal chronology | 10 |
Synopsis
In 1984, at the height of the Satanic panic, teenager Derek Reilly and his Dungeons & Dragons group were arrested by the Laundry in the mistaken belief that they were practising real magic. His friends were eventually released, but Derek, who had learned too much, stayed in the prison known as Camp Sunshine for decades, picking up genuine occult skills from his fellow inmates and running a game by post. When he reads about a gaming convention nearby and his dice give their approval, he breaks out to attend, unaware that cultists will be there as well. Stross describes it as an interstitial novel that fills in the back story of characters who appear elsewhere in the series.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Laundry Files
- Series: The Laundry Files core; position 10 of 15 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Charles Stross
Notes
- A full-length novel set between the earlier books. The UK edition also includes the short stories Down on the Farm and Overtime, which are registered separately as Expanded works.
- From the series record (The Laundry Files): The main sequence about the Laundry, Britain's secret occult intelligence agency, from Bob Howard's first field mission to the agency's end.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Laundry Files: position 14 of 15: previous Escape from Yokai Land (2022) · next The Regicide Report (2026)
- Internal chronology, within The Laundry Files: position 13 of 14: previous The Labyrinth Index (2018) · next The Regicide Report (2026)
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Laundry Files
- Wikipedia: Charles Stross bibliography
- Reader ratings: Laundry Files series page
- Tor Publishing Group: A Conventional Boy
← The Laundry Files dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.