Five Books With the Worst and Weirdest Office Jobs - Reactor

What if mathematics could rip open holes in reality and pull forth alien horrors? That’s the premise that anchors the Laundry series by Charles Stross, which centers around a clandestine British government agency known as—you guessed it—the Laundry. They’re tasked with monitoring researchers who might inadvertently stumble across a particular computational theorem, first discovered by Alan Turing, with the potential to attract eldritch Lovecraftian beings that would love nothing more than to devour our universe.  

The Atrocity Archive follows Bob Howard, a computer scientist who was forcefully inducted into the Laundry and now finds himself trying to save the world. Unfortunately, he has to do so while contending with bureaucratic red tape, endless mandatory training seminars, and a mounting avalanche of emails. Stross himself was an IT worker for years before he started writing full-time, and it shows. He has an uncanny knack for juxtaposing the never-ending indignities of office life with occult conspiracies and literal Nazis.

Harris’ debut novel initially presents as both biting workplace satire and slow-burning thriller. Its protagonist, Nella Rogers, works as an editorial assistant at Wagner Books, an influential publishing house in New York City. She’s also their only Black employee, a lonely and alienating experience made worse by the oblivious microaggressions of her white coworkers. 

Cue the arrival of “the Other Black Girl.” Hazel-May McCall is confident, personable, and skilled at code-switching, able to finesse her Blackness so she comes across to her white colleagues as a non-threatening token of diversity instead of an uncomfortable reminder of systemic racial inequity. Rather than being the ally Nella needs, however, Hazel actively undermines her at Wagner while at the same time offering community and fellowship within a network of Black professional women, all of whom found success after assimilating into white-dominated workplaces. I won’t give away the twist that comes late in the story, but it centers around homemade hair grease and a far-reaching conspiracy going back decades. This is what turns the book from a darkly satirical examination of workplace discrimination to something fantastical and deeply unsettling.

It’s hard to imagine a more literal corporate hellscape than the one presented in Claudia Lux’s Sign Here, which reimagines Hell itself as a realm of stifling bureaucracy and endless drudgery. Peyote Trip, known to everyone as “Pey,” has spent eons working his way up to the fifth floor and a job in the Deals Department, where he now convinces gullible or desperate mortals to sign away their souls in exchange for petty favors. The problem is, Pey hates his job. Hell sucks. Sure, the fifth floor is better than the gruesome tortures he suffered Downstairs, but the music up there is always a little too loud, the coffee is terrible, and the only booze available is Jägermeister. 

Fortunately, Pey has a cunning plan. He’s learned of a loophole that will free him from Hell, and it revolves around the Harrison family. They have a swanky lake house in New Hampshire and also a bunch of dark and sordid secrets, making them ripe for some opportunistic deal-making. Pey’s schemes are complicated by the arrival of a new coworker named Calamity as well as his own history with the Harrisons, and there are some truly dizzying twists and turns as the story heads toward its climax. Pey is a compelling and relatable protagonist, but it’s Lux’s bleakly humorous vision of corporate Hell that will stay with you.

As workplaces go, J.W. Wells & Co. is… weird. Paul Carpenter realizes this almost as soon as he starts working there, despite being the kind of clueless person who generally notices very little. Maybe it’s the mysterious claw marks gouged into the wall of his miserable little office, or the stapler that keeps popping up in the unlikeliest of places. But hey, it’s a job. This unassailable fact, coupled with his falling head over heels for the other new hire, the prickly Sophie Pettifer, induces Paul to stay at the company despite its weirdness. As a result, he’s plunged into a world that is both very strange and frequently terrifying. 

Beginning with The Portable Door, the hugely prolific Tom Holt has continued to mine this strange and terrifying world for fantasy gold. His J.W. Wells & Co. series currently stands at eight books, all of them revolving around an ancient company run by corrupt and megalomaniacal sorcerers. There are shapeshifting goblins, rogue dragons, and disgraced employees transformed into sentient office equipment, with Holt seemingly trying to one-up the zaniness with each subsequent book.

This may not look like speculative fiction at first glance, but Max Barry’s satirical take on corporate life is so nuts that—for me at least—Company veers all the way into the realm of absurdist fantasy. 

We follow the young and bright-eyed Stephen Jones as he starts a new job at Zephyr Holdings, a massive corporation that does…well, something, presumably. Only, Stephen can’t figure out what that “something” is. He’s placed first in Training Sales, where no one will tell him what they actually sell. The office environment is soul-crushing in its conformity, its employees fixated on the pettiest of problems. When a doughnut goes missing at the start of the book, its absence snowballs into mass paranoia, ruthless witch hunts, and team accountability drills. Even by the nonsensical standards of end-stage capitalism, this is strange. 

The more Stephen questions the purpose of Zephyr Holdings, the more deeply enmeshed he becomes in the company’s inexplicable functioning. When he encourages his colleagues to push back against the system in which they’re trapped, management reframes his “disruptive thinking” as leadership potential and promotes him. There’s a terrible gravity at work in Barry’s fictional office, and as readers we can only watch helplessly as Stephen is pulled further and further into the horrifying reality of Zephyr’s nihilistic goals. More than any other, this book will make you shun office jobs for life.