Jonathan's Reviews > The Annihilation Score

I really wanted to like this book. I love this series to death, but this novel has so many problems. First, the plot continues the trend of getting less Lovecraftian and less interesting that the previous books suffered from. The entire super hero plot straight up abandons all that made the original Laundry Files great. Worse, Mo absolutely sucks in this novel.

I like Mo. Mo was a neat character. She is a scary bad ass with a crazy demonic violin. You get only glimpses of her in the other novels, but they are welcomed glimpses when you do. This novel destroys Mo as an interesting human. It relegates her abilities to administrative work and fighting with her violin in a very boring way. It was better when her full talents were a mystery. Knowing the boring inner workings of the violin was worse than leaving me to imagine them. When Mo isn't infrequently pointing her violin at stuff, she is doing administrative work. She apparently is utterly useless without the violin. Way to turn an interesting bad ass into a glorified secretary with one worthwhile weapon and barely the wits to use it.

Worse than making Mo an unskilled hack, they made her personality awful and boring. She is basically talks in the same cynical voice as Bob, but without the wit or humor. Her personality consists of swooning after big boring muscle guy, complaining about being invisible, and being tired from doing too much really boring administrative work. She has not a drop of wit or humor. She is just a bland and tired complainer who happens to have a bad ass and now very boring weapon.

Stross was trying to make Mo her own person that exists when Bob isn't around, and he utterly failed. I understand what Stross was going for, and I like the concept of fleshing or Mo into her own person, but he failed miserably. He took an interesting and likable character and made her utterly bland and boring. Uhg.

This mess is a dumb and boring plot that trashes all the fun Lovecraftian elements that makes the Laundry Files great, and it destroys what was once an interesting character. Give this one pass and hope that Stross finds his muse again. I would hate to see this great series end on such a flat note.