I'm not sure even where to begin. I think you should take this book, and trade it in for the James Bond movies. You'll have a much better time and get some eye candy to boot. But I think you'd need several of these monstrosities to be able to trade in for 1 movie.
Our main character is Bob Howard who got drafted into the super-secret branch of a UK government known as "The Laundry". Not only does he have buddies who make all these cool gizmos, but at one point they even say his code signal is 007. Puh-lease. He's the exact opposite of Bond, James Bond. There are no women fawning over him. He's not tall, dark, and handsome with a license to kill. Howard is a bumbling idiot who doesn't even have the clearance to take a gun into the field.
The concept behind the stories are good. The magic is that there are different realms all connected by magic. Computer hackers and gamers stumble on what is referred to a Turing's Theorem, a combination of mathematics that let you do a lot of cool stuff... you know, like accidentally summoning demons. The Laundry's job is to police and control all aspects of the occult and to either keep people away from Turing's or draft them into service. I liked the concept, but the author barely even touched on it. At one point in The Jennifer Morgue Howard set up a mathematical string of code in a computer game that allowed him to enter the game itself. Cool, cool idea, but the author never let the mathematical aspect to evolve into anything at all.
When I started in on The Atrocity Archive, there was more than one time that I thought I started into The Jennifer Morgue because the story was so disjointed that there was no other option for my brain to find reasonable. The author seemed to put tiny mini stories on the beginning and ending of each major story and failed to connect them. It felt like watching a movie and catching 5 second glimpses of the build up until the last half hour when the battle went down.
The Jennifer Morgue was much better than her brother, Atrocity, even though it was like watching a bad James Bond film that was grainy, out of focus, with an ugly James Bond. Granted, he is mindlinked with a really hot demon (well, her level 3 glamour is drop dead gorgeous anyways) but the best thing going for the story magic-wise is the really hot demon, zombie seagulls, and a hero-complex ward that tries to make our crappy main character into a young Sean Connery. Believe me, I'm not going overboard with the Bond references as the entire book is nothing more than Bond Bond Bond Bond. Wait, scratch that. The whole 'evil-villain-is-going-to-control-the-world-using-makeup' fits in there too. Too bad the Makeup Villain was used in Catwoman and was less than entertaining.
The concept behind the magic was interesting, but please, go watch some Double-0-7 with some hot chicks and a good story line.
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