the top. Publishers Weekly was somewhat mixed in their review saying that "though the characters all tend to sound the same, and Stross resorts to lengthy summary explanations to dispel confusion, the world he creates is wonderful fun". The Washington Post called it "a bizarre yet effective yoking of the spy and horror genres". Stross states that his inspiration for the spy in these novels is closer to the out-of-place bureaucrats of Len Deighton than to the James Bond model. He also mentions that when he began writing the series in 1999, he chose as villains "an obscure but fanatical and unpleasant gang who might, conceivably, be planning an atrocity on American soil"; but that by the time the novel was to be published in late 2001, Al-Qaeda was no longer obscure, so he chose a different group to use in the novella. In the afterword to the Science Fiction Book Club 2-in-1 edition of The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, Stross notes that friends warned him against reading the novel Declare while he was working on The Atrocity Archives due to the strong parallels between the two works. Stross also mentioned the similarities between the novel and the Delta Green role-playing game, similarities referenced in the short story "Pimpf" included with The Jennifer Morgue; Delta Green is also about elite government conspiracies working against villains who attempt to wield power derived from the Mythos, as well as rival conspiracies. The Jennifer Morgue The Jennifer Morgue is the second collection of Laundry stories by British author Charles Stross. It is set in 2005 and was published in 2006. It contains the title novel The Jennifer Morgue, the short story "Pimpf", and an essay titled "The Golden Age of Spying". The collection is a sequel to the stories published in The Atrocity Archives. Billington, the billionaire antagonist of the book, intends to repeat a 1975 CIA attempt to raise a sunken Soviet submarine in order to access the Jennifer Morgue, an occult device that allows communication with the dead, in spite of the hazard of awakening the Great Old Ones. Bob Howard thwarts this attempt with the added help of "Mo" O'Brien and an American counter-occult agent. Where 2004's The Atrocity Archives is written in the idiom of Len Deighton, The Jennifer Morgue is a pastiche of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and refers to the real-life Project Azorian (incorrectly