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** In ''The Fuller Memorandum'', {{spoiler|Iris Carpenter}} is a [[Double Subversion]].
* [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe]]: Usually, demon-summoning requires a fair bit of effort. However, when the stars are right, just believing in something will be enough to call it forth from the vasty deeps.
** [[It Got Worse|Worse yet]], in about a decade there is supposed to be a period when just about ''anything'' [[Cosmic Horror Story|can walk right in]] [[The End of the World Asas We Know It|to our universe]] as long as people believe in it. Like, say, ''high-school witchcraft clubs''. {{spoiler|Worse worse yet, the latest novel suggests that this period has already begun.}}
** ''Overtime'' shows exactly how this sort of thing can and will happen. {{spoiler|Belief in Santa Claus allows a cosmic horror that Bob snarkily names "The Bringer of Gifts" to enter the world at the focus of greatest belief in foreign-reality entities: The Laundry. Bob has to "complete the ritual" by mimicking the usual Santa Claus traditions; snack and milk in exchange for a gift and then leaving. If he failed to get the critter it's snacks in time, the entity would be no longer bound to obey the ritual and can do as it pleases. Which does not involve leaving or not eating Bob.}}
* [[Colonel Badass]]: Captain Alan Barnes of the Artists' Rifles.
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* [[Disaster Dominoes]]: Bob notes early in ''Memorandum'' that no disaster is a single event; instead, they're the result of a whole chain of small missteps that all add up in a spectacularly wrong fashion. This comes back as a [[Brick Joke]] {{spoiler|when Iris and the rest of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharoah try to sacrifice him to summon up the Eater of Souls. Unfortunately for them, they've made a chain of missteps and misunderstandings: nothing disastrous individually, but ''in toto...''}}
* [[Dissonant Serenity]]: Angleton in "The Concrete Jungle".
* [[Eagle Land]]: Um...is there a type three? Because while the Laundry and their European counterparts [[Shoot the Dog|aren't exactly]] [[Good Is Not Nice|that good]], they're about as nice as an organization can be in a world where [[HPH.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraft Was Right]]. The Laundry's american counterpart, the [[Names to Run Away From Very Fast|Black Chamber]], on the otherhand, is basically outright ''evil'', as are most other Americans in the story. Basically the Supreme Court in the land of the free has taken [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]] to its most extreme conclusion, by declaring that the Constitution only applies to humans, and ''only'' pure humans at that. The Black Chamber loves taking the "human" out of "human intelligence", using lots of golems, zombies, Deep Ones, and the like, all of whom are said to have had no choice in becoming disposable tools for the organization. And the handlers of the various creatures are just brutal.
** Their handlers ARE human, but are apparently enchanted and geassed up to the eyeballs so hard that they don't have even the minor freedom that the nonhuman grunts have. The only difference is that the nonhuman grunts are conscripts, and the handlers are (implied to be) volunteers.
* [[Energy Beings]]: many summoned beings don't have their own bodies, and so must take possession of an existing one to exist in our universe. If it's a living body, it's often a case of [[Demonic Possession]]; otherwise, some beings--like the Feeders in the Night--will [[Our Zombies Are Different|take hold of corpses.]] Since they're electrical creatures piggybacking the physical nervous system of a real body, though, it does mean they're vulnerable to electrical energy, like tasers.
* [[Eldritch Abomination]]: As you can expect in a [[Cosmic Horror Story]], there's a whole hierarchy of them, coming from the many branches of the Multiverse: there's your average ''prata'' zombie-maker, which is closer to a few lines of necrosymbolic code than an actual lifeform. There are also the Feeders in the Night, which possess multiple bodies at a time and can spread by ''touch''. Near the top of the ladder there are things like {{spoiler|TEAPOT, which is as intelligent as, if not more so, than a human being, and very proficient in the occult disciplines. On the reality-altering level you have the Infovore and the Sleeper In The Pyramid On The Dead Plateau; having one of them summoned/awakened/released from captivity means you can pretty much kiss your ''universe'' goodbye. Above them still, you have The Black Pharaoh himself, Nyar lath'Hotep. Yes, ''[[Cthulhu Mythos|that one]]''.}}
* [[The End of the World Asas We Know It]]: CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. In essence, {{spoiler|billions upon billions of humans doing what we do- thinking, imagining, calculating- is ''very bad'' for reality. Sufficient levels of belief in an entity, or calculations related to an entity, can summon it from one of the countless parallel (and... not so parallel...) universes where an iteration of it exists. In the best of times, the ability to do so is ''generally'' offset by the difficulty. However, a roughly 70-year period is coming very soon -- and probably has already begun -- during which... well, during which the stars are right. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is predicted to be bad enough that an all-out nuclear war was considered, in order to reduce the population and thus the chances of summoning something big and hungry. However, the sheer number of deaths would almost certainly attract equally unpleasant creatures- and that's assuming that nobody dedicates the deaths to their favorite gibbering horror.}}
* [[Evil Is Deathly Cold]]: The Infovore and many lesser abominations suck heat out of the environment. Spells can have the similar effect. In fact, unnatural cold often serves as the most obvious warning that something is horribly wrong.
* [[Evil Is Not a Toy]]: The Nazis learned this the hard way after summoning up something they couldn't put back down.
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* [[Everything Sensor]]: Bob's palmtop.
* [[The Fettered]]: {{spoiler|Angleton}}
* [[Fish People]]: {{smallcaps|Blue Hades}} are an extremely advanced species, living on and below the deep sea floor, that have been around for millions of years. The various occult spy agencies stay in semiregular contact with them via [[Half-Human Hybrid]] go-betweens. To their credit, they aren't hostile towards humanity, which is just as well considering that they could wipe out much of us surface-dwellers via volcanoes and tsunamis. Angleton speculates that they have even more advanced weapons that humans cannot comprehend, comparing it to a soldier pointing a bayonet-tipped assault rifle towards a headhunter (who would only see a [[Blade Onon a Stick]].)
* [[For the Evulz]]: Not all of the [[Eldritch Abomination|eldritch abominations]] in the series, are driven by simple [[Horror Hunger]]. And this will be really ''unfortunate'' for humanity if one of them breaks into out universe. Cultists of the Black Pharaoh have shades of this as well.
* [[Gambit Pileup]]: The Jennifer Morgue -- Billington, the Black Chamber and the Laundry are all counting on each others plotting to achieve their own goals.
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* [[It Came From the Fridge]]: [[Noodle Incident|the reason temporal multiplexers are no longer allowed in the Howard residence.]] Cricket bats are involved.
* [[It Got Worse]]: ''The Fuller Memorandum'' has this in spades. It starts with an utterly bleak prologue, then lightens a bit in the first chapter, but things go rapidly downhill from there. ({{spoiler|That said, the ending turns out to be not quite as bleak as the prologue implied.}})
* [[Killed to Uphold Thethe Masquerade]]: Deconstructed; the predecessors to the Laundry did this to Alan Turing. Since he was, you know, Alan Turing, this merely meant that they lost a potentially really useful resource when they could have achieved the same basic effect ''and'' made use of his skills and intelligence by simply drafting him into the service and making him sign the Official Secrets Act. After kicking themselves thoroughly, the Laundry went on to make averting this a matter of policy.
* [[Lighter and Softer]]: Compared to Stross's two earlier [[Cosmic Horror]] [[Cold War]] short stories "A Colder War" and "Missile Gap", in which {{spoiler|humanity is brought to extinction by an all-out war and in one case, the remnants escape only to die of cold and starvation in an alternate dimension}}, the Laundryverse is downright optimistic about humanity's chances.
* [[Lovecraft Lite]]: For the most part, as long as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn't involved.
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* [[Narrative Profanity Filter]]: gleefully subverted on one occasion.
{{quote| I start swearing: not my [[Cluster F-Bomb|usual "shit-fuck-piss-cunt-bugger" litany]], but ''[[Up to Eleven|really]]'' [[Noodle Incident|rude words.]]}}
* [[No Such Thing Asas HR]]: Averted. [[Pointy-Haired Boss|They're not]] [[Obstructive Bureaucrat|particularly helpful]], though.
** This trope is [[Playing Withwith a Trope|played with]]. HR is often the ''cause'' of the problems that in [[Real Life]] they'd be expected to solve. This is partly just because of [[Rule of Funny]], partly because of the spy setting, partly because no one chose to be there and so they may take it out on each other, also partly because of the [[Ultimate Job Security]] - they can't lose their job until they screw up big enough to get killed.
* [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]]: Bridget, Harriet, pretty much the entire Human Resources department. Some of them aren't above using [[The Starscream|ruthless methods to clear a spot on the promotion ladder]] either.
* [[Oh Crap|Oh Fuck]]: Or as it's known in the trade, an Unscheduled Reality Excursion.
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** {{spoiler|Ramona Random}} says that those like herself are intended to look good and associate with humans more, while the "bumpkin cousins" sporting the ugly half-transformed "Innsmouth look" are decidedly more common.
* [[Our Zombies Are Different|Our Residual Human Resources Are Different]]: They're demons bound into reanimated corpses. The garden-variety are not very clever, and are apparently programmable if you know the [[Black Speech|right language]]. However, there are many types of demons, and accidentally summoning the ''wrong'' kind gives rise to a possessed corpse that can steal souls ''by touch''. Oh, and make all the [[Boom! Headshot!]]s you want. It won't help.
* [[Plot Tailored to Thethe Party]]: ''The Jennifer Morgue'', in keeping with the James Bond theme, features the typical bunch of random gadgets. {{spoiler|[[Double Subversion|Doubly subverted]] - near the end of the story, Bob [[Inspiration Nod|muses]] that he ended up using all the gadgets except for an unmodified Zippo lighter that "he's going to keep". It then ends up playing an essential role in the epilogue.}}
** Ramona also [[Discussed Trope|mumbles about this in a conversation with Bob]], much to his confusion.
* [[Pointy-Haired Boss]]: The woman from the Laundry's cover-organisation who doesn't have a clue what Bob actually ''does'' but, thanks to matrix-management, somehow has a say in how he does it.
** This is thanks to the fact that Bob basically has two jobs in the Laundry. The important one is as a field operative, which involves doing things that are very classified and even being in the Laundry doesn't get you the information without being cleared for it. His second job, during all the extended periods where he's not fending off colors out of space, is as an network technician keeping a section of the Laundry's computers running smoothly. [[Too Dumb to Live|The boss for his second job considers the entire field work division to be unimportant compared to the bureaucratic busywork,]] and constantly rode Bob's ass over it until [[And I Must Scream|Angleton dealt with her.]]
* [[Powered Byby a Forsaken Child]]: Pale Grace Skin Hydromax cream. Made from "100% natural ingredients". There are also various other rituals and artifacts requiring human sacrifices.
* [[Punk in Thethe Trunk]]: Bob gets stuffed in the trunk of a car by cultists in ''The Fuller Memorandum''.
* [[Punny Name]]: Check the quote at the top of the page. Remember the {{spoiler|"many-angled ones"}}? Think of what {{spoiler|Angleton}} breaks down into.
* [[Reasonable Authority Figure]]:
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* [[Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]]: Averted. When Dr. Kringle prophesies that there will be no Christmas party next year, everyone assumes that it's because the Laundry will be overrun by gibbering squamous horrors by then. When Bob asks if they couldn't avert that by just canceling the party themselves, Andy derides the idea as ridiculous.
* [[Senseless Violins]]: Mo's ''actual'' violin in ''The Jennifer Morgue'' is a [[Double Subversion]] into necromantic [[Musical Assassin]] territory.
* [[Shout-Out]]: ''Lots'', ranging from [[HPH.P. Lovecraft]] to ''[[Pinky and The Brain]]''. ''The Jennifer Morgue'' is a [[Whole-Plot Reference]] to [[James Bond]].
** Bob Howard, named after [[Robert E Howard|Robert E. Howard]], collaborator and friend of [[HP Lovecraft|H.P. Lovecraft]] and [[Clark Ashton Smith]].
*** Bob also has a pair of middle names, Oliver & Francis, making his initials [[Bastard Operator From Hell|BOFH]].
** In ''The Fuller Memorandum'', known [[Discworld]] fan Stross equips Bob with a thaumometer.
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* [[Too Dumb to Live]]: Fred the Accountant.
* [[Took a Level In Badass]]: {{spoiler|Dominique, as a result of the Hero-trap geas.}} Bob himself steadily levels through the series, and is acknowledged as a good operative even in the first book. By book three, Mo herself has apparently kept the several levels of badass that she's taken, primarily due to her skills with the [[Artifact of Doom|Erich Zahn-model violin]], that the OCCULUS special forces team willingly accepts her presence on missions.
* [[Trauma Conga Line]]: ''The Fuller Memorandum'' is a type E, made clear from the onset (in the prologue). (Warning: major plot spoilers ahead, obviously). In order, {{spoiler|Bob performs an exorcism that goes bad and ends up killing a civilian. The next day, Mo gets an even more traumatizing job and returns on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Then Bob gets attacked by a zombie, shot, attacked by Cthulhu cultists and narrowly escapes, his office is broken in, he gets an internal investigation set on him, gets suspended, attacked by the cultists again, kidnapped, gets part of his right arm carved up ''and eaten'' while he's fully conscious, and is very nearly possessed by the [[Exactly What It Says Onon the Tin|Eater of Souls]]. The latter ritual involving, among other things, the cultists killing a baby and making Bob drink its blood.}} Mind that the whole ordeal happens within a two-week period. At the end of it, {{spoiler|Bob is a wreck both physically and psychically, as alluded to by both the prologue and epilogue. Though ''Overtime'' suggests that he does recover eventually.}}
* [[Tuckerization]]: Dr Mike Ford, the Laundry researcher with the implausible eyebrows who appears in ''The Fuller Memorandum'', is a tuckerization of author and fan personality [[John M. Ford]], to whom the novel is dedicated.
* [[Ultimate Job Security]]: Everyone in the Laundry has it. They can get themselves killed through treason, failed coups or their own innocent stupidity, but no one is ever fired. This is because Laundry policy is to avert [[Killed to Uphold Thethe Masquerade]] and [[Revealing Coverup]]. To keep people quiet, in most cases they are given jobs in the Laundry (and [[Mind Control]] to make them incapable of discussing it with people without the proper clearance).
* [[Unreliable Narrator]]: For one thing, his name isn't "Bob Howard", for [[I Know Your True Name]] reasons. Also, the characters sound slightly different when he's narrating in first person compared to the independent/"reconstruction"/speculation third-person bits.
** Details of Bob's past, like what exactly disaster he almost caused unwittingly before The Laundry found him also may vary.
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