Escape from Yokai Land (Laundry Files 6.5)
- Author: Charles Stross
- Page count: 96
- Started on: 2025/01/26
- Finished on: 2025/01/27
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
-
Escape from Yokai Land is a lovely bridge story in the Laundry Files series, set in a Hello Kitty hotel and land. The original title of the book was Escape from Puroland, but I guess that didn’t get approved by the Hello Kitty franchise. 🤷
Bob Howard is the protagonist here, after he has become the Eater of Souls, and he needs to free the theme park of magical yokai beings. The story flows well, but I get why Stross commented that Bob got too powerful to write good stories about. “He opened his metaphysical mouth and consumes the evil monster” just doesn’t have a lot of visual appeal to it. 😈
Still it was fun to read about all the typical Japanese/Hello Kitty scenes, and then with terrifying alien monsters in them.
It took me a while before I bought this book in the series, because at $12.99 for <100 pages it is quite overpriced.
