It takes a bureaucracy. Only they can make life so difficult, even for super secret special spooks. Bob works for the Laundry a rather special division of Britain's intelligence service. How he became a spook is rather complicated having lots to do with very esoteric mathematics that apparently would have opened a gate to another, parallel universe and would have blown up a small town, and then his unwitting presence in a workshop where he saves the day by preventing a demon from manifesting in the room. In this world higher mathematics creates more issues than it solves by allowing demons and other supernatural creatures to come through to our world through gates and pentagrams (although that usually requires a sacrifice of some sort, the bigger the demon the greater the sacrifice)and the Laundry helps keep the people of the British Isles safe. But for every super-secret organization there is TQM and Matrix management and someone who needs to make sure that the paperclips aren't being wasted and so the Atrocity Archive (and the Concrete Jungle - a previously unpublished novella that is included in the kindle edition at least) has their foil the penny pinching, back stabbing, power hungry, devious civil servants who would like nothing more than to see Bob and the Laundry division he works for fail. It truly is Lovecraft meets Len Deighton bizzare occult meets the mundane and spies meet bureaucracy. It isn't laugh out loud funny but the juxtaposition of a spy who gets called out for not filling out the right forms before calling in a supernatural swat team to save the world is priceless.