Every so often I come across a book so laden with obscure references that only my own particular predisposition to trivia sees me through to the other side. Charles Stross has accomplished just such a feat with The Atrocity Archives, a bewildering, fascinating, and very funny look inside the bureaucratic world of top-secret British occult espionage.

If I had to capture the tone of the Atrocity Archives in one sentence, I'd describe it as three parts Men In Black, two parts The Office, and two parts of the "Lovecraft Mythos." The stories (as the book is actually comprised of two separate narratives) center on The Laundry, the ultra-secret branch of Her Majesty's Government responsible for keeping the Things Beyond Our Reality from invading and destroying the world. The comedy of the book draws heavily from the juxtaposition of supernatural horrors (from Nazi occult torture engines to bodysnatching dimensional travelers) with the mind-numbing dreariness of government office politics (from paper clip audits to matrix management).

The brilliance of Stross' world is also the thing most likely to confound the average reader: the book's reliance on a tightly-woven tapestry of fairly obscure esoterica. The reader has half a chance of being on top of the constant references if they (a) have read the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft, (b) have also read the complete works of Lei Deighton, (c) have taken at least one upper-level computer science course, (d) have a broad familiarity with mythological creatures from a half-dozen cultures or more, (e) have read A Brief History Of Time once or twice, (f) know their way around the lexicon of a Crowley-style occultist, (g) know twentieth-century European history fairly well, and (h) watched the Saturday morning cartoons of the mid-90s. But even that might not be enough.

Like Men in Black, The Atrocity Archives is an action comedy at heart, so knowing the background of every little tidbit being thrown the reader's way isn't necessary. The books does a good job of holding the reader's hand while explaining the basics of modern magic (which turns out to be a mix of applied mathematics and physics) and the alternate history surrounding the occult cold war currently raging. But the references come so fast and furious that I honestly don't know how this books would look to the uninitiated. Which is a shame, because (knowing what I know) the story is consistently engaging and often hilarious.

I enjoyed Stross' world quite a bit, and I can firmly recommend it to anyone who would also enjoy it. The only trouble is that, as richly borrowed as that world is, I'm not exactly sure who, precisely, to recommend it to.