'The Red Hours' – Evan Dicken (Black Library)

On Saturday. I had my favourite kind of walk in the countryside; the kind where I make it out of the car park and about as far as the nearest picnic table, there I sit and read while everyone else does the actual walking. Everyone is happy, but most of all me :o)

I'd been meaning to read more of Evan Dicken's 'Age of Sigmar' stuff ever since I read (and enjoyed) 'Fangs of the Rustwood' back in July. My reading schedule is fluid though, to say the least, so I never actually got a chance until a couple of days ago when the rest of the family were little dots on the horizon and I suddenly remembered that I had 'The Red Hours' waiting patiently on my Kindle. So of course I settled down to read it and 'The Red Hours' ended up being worth the wait. I love it when everything works out like that :o) 'The Red Hours' isn't the novel length tale that I wanted but there is plenty there to entertain and chill in the meantime...

At the bleeding edge of Chamon sits a lone outpost: The Grave of Heroes. Once a great fortress, it’s now no more than a thinly disguised prison for soldiers the armies of Sigmar would rather forget. Into this oubliette comes Byrun Hess, disgraced Captain of the Sigmarite forces, who finds himself buried in a dead-end posting with a tiny garrison, ranging from the undisciplined to the almost heretical. While Hess attempts to instill some measure of discipline, one of Chamon’s brutal shardstorms quickly shifts his priorities to simple survival. Things go from bad to worse when the garrison’s Warden is viciously murdered in a bloody scene that shows signs of dark sorcery, and tempers flare as the survivors accuse each other of the crime. Not sure who to trust, Hess' disquiet is compounded by the chilling discovery of a newly exposed ancient vault in the mountainside that once confined a terrifying supernatural force – the likes of which these mortals have never seen before.

As you can probably tell from the blurb, 'The Red Hours' wears the influences of 'The Thing' very proudly. A little too proudly? Maybe, but if you're like me (and love 'The Thing') this isn't a huge deal as I felt that not only was it a homage that didn't detract from the story itself, Dicken sits his tale right in the middle of a setting that doesn't let the story overpower it. So far so good.

As with 'Fangs of the Rustwood', there is a sense that there's more story to 'The Red Hours' than we get here. I'm not sure how these things work (do you pitch a novella to the Black Library or are you invited to pitch a novella idea?) but the length of 'The Red Hours' feels like a bit of a weight around the the neck of a story that wants to go into greater depth. There's a bit of a rush to get through the mystery and onto the final fights when the story,as a whole, would have benefited from extra time spent in the claustrophobic innards of The Grave of Heroes, in terms of atmosphere and plot.

That's not to say that 'The Red Hours' doesn't do its job though, far from it. It wants to tell more story but, at the same time, the story that it does tell is tightly woven and ebbs and flows in all the right places so that the story flows and carries you with it. The mystery is a good one and breeds an air of mistrust that is vital to the atmosphere that the story successfully creates. And given the relatively short time that we have to get to know everyone, Dicken doesn't stint on his fleshing people out, giving us characters that we can really root for and in some cases, mourn.

And the ending... I loved the ending, a neat little twist that will grab you just when you think everything is sorted and it is so in keeping with what is discovered lurking in The Grave of Heroes...

I read 'The Red Hours' and came away feeling that this was a story that really wanted to open up and tell itself in greater depth. At the same time, 'The Red Hours' does everything asked of it and does it all very well indeed. A winner on two fronts then as I'm left wanting more 'Age of Sigmar' from Evan Dicken, please can we have a novel next time...?