A Couple of Black Library Short Reads (Warhammer Horror)…

I go through phases of picking up my Kindle and trying to work my way through all the books that I leave on it (my Kindle is actually the biggest TBR pile in my flat and it takes up the least room, funny that…) but I’m not so hot at posting about them afterwards; especially the shorter reads that I read at ridiculous hours of the morning and fall asleep afterwards. This week then is a bit of an attempt to catch up with a slight backlog that has built up and we’re kicking things off with a little Warhammer Horror…

Over the last year and a bit, I’ve gone from ‘Aren’t all Black Library books Warhammer Horror?’ to ‘Ooh, more Warhammer Horror that I must read’ (sometimes you just have to drop the attitude and just read, you’ll miss out otherwise) and there have been plenty of short reads for me to get stuck into. Here are a couple…


 ‘Miracles’ – Nicholas Wolf

Strange things are happening in Praxis Hive. Miracles are occurring – like a blind Astra Militarum trooper who can suddenly see again. But where there is light, inevitably there is darkness – and a corpse with its eyes missing may just have a link to the so-called miracle… All that ordinary citizens, like manufactorum worker Jacen Hertz, can do is pray to the God-Emperor and hope for the best. But when a miracle happens to Jacen, he ends up in more danger than he could have ever imagined…

 As a father of two, ‘Miracles’ had me on the edge of my seat; as a horror fan, it was cool to see Wolf not back down from the darker corners of ‘Miracles’ and really do the concept justice. The ending can perhaps be seen a little too far off but ‘Miracles’ is about the journey, not the destination, and it is brutal and unsettling in equal measure. With a limited number of pages, Wolf shows that he has a great handle on ‘Hive Life’ (especially how short it can be) and is more than adept at hiding something chilling in its alcoves and alleyways. And those enforcers… Horror is everywhere in the universe of 40K and Wolf brings it all to life (and in some cases, un-life…); if Wolf writes more in this setting, I’ll happily read it.

‘He Feasts Forever’ – Lora Gray

In distant corners of the Mortal Realms, life goes on as normal, far from the horrors of war and the desperate struggle against Chaos. Yet horror is never far away, as Dedric, cook to a king, discovers. As he prepares a great feast for his lord's homecoming, his sleep is disturbed by visitations that threaten to reveal a secret long hidden, buried so deep that even he cannot remember… and when he does, Dedric's life will be forever changed.

I’ve read a few ‘Age of Sigmar’ books now but I hadn’t come across any horror ones (I know there are some, just haven’t picked them up yet) so was pretty interested to see what ‘He Feasts Forever’ would be like. The short answer is very good and I polished it off in one sitting. ‘He Feasts Forever’ is only 25 pages long so that shouldn’t have been too difficult anyway but short books are just as easy to quit as longer works and Gray makes sure that doesn’t happen with a sympathetic character facing a intriguing mystery that wrong-footed me at least twice before the ending grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and gave me a good shake. I enjoyed the open-ended nature of the ending as well, there’s nothing quite like knowing that something utterly vile is set to happen off-screen and you can’t warn anyone about it…

I’m really hoping that we see more of Lora Gray’s work in the ‘Warhammer Horror’ line in the future; I would love to see what they could do with a longer novel.

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