The Banality of Eldritch Evil
When the Machines of the State Run on Mana
The Obligatory Disclaimer
This essay openly discusses the conclusion of The Laundry Files, including major spoilers from The Regicide Report, which has only just been released. If you care about encountering that ending uncompromised, stop here and come back later. This piece is about what that ending means, not about preserving surprise.
Cosmic horror used to announce itself.
It arrived as incomprehensible gods, screaming voids, geometries that made the mind fracture on contact. Its power lay in the reminder that the universe did not care about human meaning — that we were small, contingent, and ultimately irrelevant.
That version of horror feels… quaint now.
What unsettles contemporary readers isn’t the unknowable. It’s the legible. It’s the thing that can be explained, justified, documented, and defended in committee. The horror that no longer roars, but circulates through policy memos and exception clauses. The monster that doesn’t smash the system, but runs it.
This is where Charles Stross’s The Laundry Files quietly transforms from satire into diagnosis.
The early books play a joke that felt clever in the 2000s: what if Lovecraftian cosmic horror had to be handled by a British civil service? What if eldritch threats were subject to procurement rules, expense reports, and performance reviews? The comedy came from the collision between ineffable terror and beige bureaucracy.
By the time The Regicide Report ends, as Morrissey once sang, that joke isn't funny anymore.
Not because the stakes escalated — but because reality did.
The final movement of the series doesn’t depict a world conquered by monsters. It depicts a world governed by them, through perfectly ordinary constitutional channels. The eldritch doesn’t overthrow the state. It inhabits it legally, using the same machinery that already existed.
This is not a story about corruption. It’s a story about compatibility.
One of the most useful observations about British governance came from Lord Hailsham, who remarked in 1975 that the UK was effectively an “elective dictatorship.” Once elected with a parliamentary majority, a government could exercise extraordinary power between elections, constrained less by law than by custom, convention, and restraint.
For decades, that sounded like an academic warning. Something that mattered only if norms failed catastrophically.
What The Regicide Report shows — with uncomfortable calm — is what happens when norms erode gradually, and the machinery never has to change shape at all.
In the series' conclusion, the Black Pharaoh remains Prime Minister. Marble Arch continues to embiggen a monument of skulls not because the law has collapsed, but because the law has been reinterpreted under permanent emergency conditions. Governance continues. Payroll runs. The Civil Service adapts as if it were just another reorg.
The apocalypse arrives not as rupture, but as equilibrium.
This is the central move of Stross’s ending: eliminating the fantasy that moral clarity is available at scale. Every alternative to the Black Pharaoh’s rule is demonstrably worse or simply impossible. Every “clean” option results in annihilation, not salvation. The system does not choose good; it chooses stability. Harm minimization becomes statecraft.
This is why Fabian Everyman’s installation in Downing Street matters so much. As the avatar of Nyarlathotep, He may be terror incarnate, but this charming man-who-is-anything-but is acceptable. A man whose greatest strength is that reality will not tear itself apart under his administration, even if there is a literal butcher’s bill footed by the populace who unsurprisingly nod along to the axe man.
That is not triumph. It is load balancing.
Michael Armstrong’s role follows the same logic. He does not defeat Nyarlathotep. He blocks this configuration of catastrophe while leaving the underlying dynamics intact. The eldritch retreats, not because it has been judged and found wanting, but because the system has been reweighted to make a different failure mode preferable.
The horror here is not that evil wins.
The horror is that evil doesn’t need to win — it only needs to fit.
What The Regicide Report ultimately presents is a functioning dystopia. Not a broken one. Not a melodramatic one. A system that works exactly as designed under conditions of permanent crisis, replete with KPIs, slide decks, and all the accoutrements of mundane bureaucracy.
Judgment has not disappeared; it has become administrative. Power has not become irrational; it has become procedural. Responsibility has not vanished; it has been diffused so thoroughly that no one can touch it without tearing the system apart.
This is why the novel’s conclusion lands so hard for contemporary readers. After decades of watching emergency powers normalize, protests regulated into irrelevance, cruelty justified as necessity, and legitimacy hollowed out without formal coups, Stross’s ending can feel less like exaggeration than recognition.
Nyarlathotep does not rule because he is monstrous. He rules because he is compatible with the machinery that already exists.
That compatibility — the ease with which horror becomes governance — is what gives this version of cosmic dread its power. Not the unknowable, but the operational. Not annihilation, but continuity.
The terror is not that the system breaks.
The terror is that it keeps running.
Judgment Becomes Infrastructure
One of the quiet revolutions these stories track is not political but moral.
Judgment, once imagined as terminal and metaphysical, has become continuous and procedural. It no longer settles accounts; it manages behavior. It no longer culminates; it iterates.
This shift is clearest when hell itself stops being a destination and becomes a service.
In Iain M. Banks' Surface Detail, damnation is not divine punishment but hardware. Virtual Hells run on machines owned by contractors, governed by agreements, defended by process. Torture persists not because anyone believes in its moral necessity, but because dismantling it would violate obligations, destabilize institutions, and set precedents no one wants to touch. The Culture opposes Hell on principle — and then agrees to abide by the outcome of a procedural war determining whether it may continue.
Hell survives because it is operationally embedded.
Stross’s maneuver in The Regicide Report is darker because it removes even the pretense of metaphysics. Mana is not sin made manifest; it is belief converted into energy, a currency. Religion is not sacred; it is a reaction chamber. Monarchy is not symbolic; it is a battery. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s gambit — using the reluctant and principled Vicar Pete to turn a poisoned Queen Elizabeth II into a vampire — is shocking not because it is blasphemous, but because it is legible.
Everything still has a name. Nothing keeps its meaning.
Once judgment becomes ownable — once someone can run it, meter it, optimize it — it becomes economically and politically interesting. At that point, morality ceases to be a constraint and becomes a justification layer. You don’t have to believe in Hell to profit from it. You don’t have to be evil to maintain it. You just have to keep the machinery running.
This is the pivot where eldritch horror becomes banal. Not because suffering is ignored, but because it is routinized. Evil does not need zealots. It needs administrators.
Agency Under Asymmetry
At this point, an obvious objection surfaces: where does individual agency fit into this picture?
After all, people still make choices. They choose to protest, to comply, to resist, to refuse. Surely responsibility has not vanished.
It hasn’t — but it has been localized in a way that makes global outcomes profoundly misleading.
Modern systems routinely demand global moral results from local control. They ask individuals to bear responsibility for outcomes shaped by architectures they neither designed nor can meaningfully alter. This is where the language of choice becomes corrosive.
The snark “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” said about those harmed by systems is not merely cruel; it is structurally dishonest. It assumes a game with shared rules, symmetric risk, and informed consent. But the situations that phrase is deployed to explain rarely meet those criteria. More often, one side arrives with norms, visibility, and the belief that documentation constrains power. The other arrives with weapons, institutional immunity, and optional discretion. Calling that a game is already a lie.
Worse, the rules are are often clarified only after someone dies.
This is why “what are we supposed to do then, roll over?” appears as a desperate, grief-stricken question rather than a prescription for systems that act like steamrollers. It is not advocating submission; it is recognizing that the action space has collapsed. Resistance does not fail here because it is wrong, but because it is mis-specified — aimed at a version of the system that no longer exists.
Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series makes this explicit. Resistance becomes content. Visibility feeds the spectacle. Refusal is monetized. There is no move that does not stabilize the machine. The system is not threatened by opposition; it feeds on it.
In that context, survival is not heroism. It is denial of throughput — not a strategy to be adopted, but a condition imposed by systems that metabolize collapse more easily than persistence. It is refusing to provide the system with a clean narrative endpoint — martyrdom, deterrence, closure. Survival keeps the ledger open.
That is not inspiring. It is merely accurate.
Survivors, Not Heroes
There is a further discomfort these stories refuse to soften: they are survivor narratives.
Carl survives because he is exceptional. Bob and Mo survive because they transformed far beyond human limits. The people who can tell these stories are, by definition, the ones who were not erased.
This creates an unavoidable selection bias — and the texts do not pretend otherwise.
Survival does not imply merit. It does not confer moral authority. If anything, it distorts judgment. Survivors gain leverage at the cost of complicity. They become legible to the system precisely because they have aligned with its constraints.
This is why these works must be read as diagnostics, not prescriptions.
The tabletop role-playing game Paranoia understood this decades ago. Alpha Complex is not terrifying because it is irrational, but because it functions. Everyone is complicit. Innocence is impossible. The humor works because the structure is airtight: you cannot win, you cannot opt out, and the system will always explain why the outcome was your fault.
Dungeon Crawler Carl strips away the joke and leaves the mechanism exposed. Endurance looks like resistance only because collapse would be easier to narrate. The system prefers you alive, legible, and grinding.
These stories do not privilege survival as virtue. They show how survival is often the least awful option left, and how quickly it can be mistaken for endorsement.
Which sets the stage for the most devastating move of all — the moment when survival itself requires becoming something other than human.
Becoming Infrastructure: Bob, Mo, and the End of the Human Category
By the end of The Regicide Report, the question “are we the baddies?” has stopped being rhetorical.
Bob — or un-Bob, or the Eater of Souls wearing Bob’s continuity — and Mo do not merely act monstrously. They cease to qualify as human in any meaningful sense. Not as punishment. Not as corruption. As a requirement.
The system they are embedded in demands affordances that humanity cannot provide at scale. Speed without hesitation. Perception without trauma. Continuity without mortality. Judgment without exhaustion. Human limits are not morally inadequate; they are operationally inconvenient.
So those limits are bypassed.
This is the most poignant realization in the entire series, because it is not framed as tragedy or triumph. It is framed as recognition. Bob and Mo do not console themselves with the fantasy that they remain “good people at heart.” They do not pretend that awareness redeems what they have become. They simply acknowledge the line they crossed — and that the line was real.
They are no longer agents acting within the system. They are components that remember being agents.
That distinction matters.
The system does not ask them to believe in it. It does not ask them to approve. It only asks them to continue functioning. Their humanity becomes a vestigial feature — morally significant to them, irrelevant to the machinery.
This is the mature form of existential horror these books arrive at: not the loss of meaning, but the reclassification of meaning as non-essential. Humanity is not erased; it is superseded where inconvenient.
And yet, the memory persists. Bob still remembers why the question “are we the baddies?” mattered in the first place. That memory does not absolve him, but it prevents total moral erasure. It keeps the cost visible, even as the system runs on.
That is not redemption. It is the last dignity available.
Why This Is Not Nihilism
At this point, it would be easy — and lazy — to read this entire argument as despair dressed up in systems language.
It isn’t.
The thesis here is not that nothing matters, or that all choices are equally corrupt. It is that modern systems increasingly present people with non-redemptive choice sets, and then punish them for noticing.
The lesser of two evils is still not good. Harm minimization is not virtue. Survival is not justice. These stories do not pretend otherwise — and that refusal is precisely what gives them ethical weight.
What they reject is the more corrosive lie: that suffering can always be a virtue, that outcomes are the natural result of personal decisions, that responsibility scales neatly with agency.
Awareness does not absolve harm. But refusing misattribution still matters.
Refusing the story that says “this was your fault” when the architecture guaranteed asymmetry matters. Refusing the comfort of thinking that martyrdom is inherently transformative matters. Refusing to let the system narrate your destruction as inevitability matters.
This is why “survival is a form of resistance” is not a slogan here. It is not advice. It is not virtue signaling. It is an observation about denial of throughput.
Systems that metabolize opposition rely on clean endpoints: deterrence, martyrdom, closure. Continued, inconvenient existence — especially existence that refuses to internalize blame — is harder to process.
That refusal is small. It is fragile. It is metabolically expensive.
It is also real.
And importantly: none of this asks you to admire the survivors. It asks you to see the machinery clearly, and to stop confusing endurance with endorsement.
To State the Bloody Obvious
None of this should be read as ingratitude or nit picking. The Laundry Files represents an extraordinary amount of sustained work, imagination, and care, and it has given readers countless hours of genuine enjoyment. More than that, it has quietly encouraged critical thinking: about bureaucracy, power, technology, and the stories institutions tell themselves to justify harm. If this ending unsettles, it’s because the series taught its audience how to notice what was already there. That’s a rare and generous gift from an author.
Conclusion: The Horror of Things That Keep Running
Cosmic horror once asked what would happen if the universe did not care.
The banality of eldritch evil asks something worse: what happens when the universe cares only about continuity?
In The Laundry Files, the monsters do not win by destroying civilization. They win by inhabiting its procedures. Judgment becomes infrastructure. Belief becomes fuel. Humanity becomes optional. The system persists not because it is just, but because it is stable.
Michael Armstrong’s intervention — and sacrifice — does not end the cycle. It selects a less catastrophic equilibrium. Fabian Everyman does not restore legitimacy; he stabilizes a system on the brink of tearing reality apart. Bob and Mo do not save the world; they become load-bearing abstractions sustaining a machinery whose defining feature is persistence.
Nothing here guarantees that the next iteration will be better.
That is the point.
The true horror is not annihilation. It is systems that survive their own moral collapse. Systems that absorb critique as input. Systems that normalize emergency until it becomes governance. Systems that can explain — calmly, correctly, and at length — why something indefensible was necessary.
Eldritch evil no longer needs to be unknowable. It only needs to be operational.
And the question these stories leave us with is no longer “how do we defeat the monster?”
It is this:
How do we live, choose, and refuse misattributed blame inside machines that will keep running no matter what we believe?
There is no clean answer. There is no exit.
But there remains a difference between being crushed — and being complicit with open eyes.
How long even that difference can survive is, as ever, unclear.