A Couple of Warhammer Short Reads…

Well, this was going to be a (slightly belated) New Year’s Post but then I realised that the prospect of a whole New Year is bringing no small amount of dread and panic to this Graeme and you don’t want a whole post of me trying to keep it together so… Lets take a look at a couple of Warhammer Short Reads that have seen me through the journey to work (back in the office today) and through most of my lunch hour too. You’ve probably noticed that it has been a while since I last posted a review (Christmas and all that…) and I’m trying to get my head back in it so quick thoughts are once again the order of the day, at least for today 😉 With that said, lets head back (or forward, depends where you’re coming from) to the 31st Millennium and a couple of major turning points in the Horus Heresy…

 


‘The Nine’ – Justin D. Hill

With the loyalist blockade of Mars broken and the Emperor’s hierarchies shattered, Sota-Nul – a potent Adept of the Dark Mechanicum – makes her play for power as this new order spreads across the Red Planet and the Warmaster’s forces surge closer to Terra.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I tend to steer clear of the Mechanicum stories but was keen to check out ‘The Nine’ once I saw Hill’s name on the cover. As it turned out, I should have probably re-read ‘Mechanicum’, at the very least, before reading ‘The Nine’. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘The Nine’, far from it. There’s enough going on in the background to keep things interesting (I’m not sure if you can call full on warfare ‘background scenery’ but I really want to and it pushes things along at a nice rate of knots) but the plot is mainly geared towards introducing and setting up Sota-Nul for appearances in other books. There’s nothing wrong with that at all but I couldn’t escape from the feeling that Sota-Nul might have resonated a bit more if I’d read those stories first. That’s on me though, not ‘The Nine’. I enjoyed ‘The Nine’ for what it brought to the setting in terms of lore and extra little details; if you know Sota-Nul already then I think you’ll get a lot more out of it.

 


‘The Last Loyalist’ – David Guymer

The events on Isstvan III in the early years of the 31st Millennium are among the darkest in the history of humanity and brought about the start of a galactic civil war, the ramifications of which are still felt 10,000 years later. Following the traitorous assault, a handful of shell-shocked loyalists remain, but their efforts to survive are ultimately in vain, as an unseen enemy walks amongst them.

Luckily for me, I’ve read the ‘Isstvan III’ books so I knew what I was getting myself into here. I was really keen to get into it in fact and that feeling was justified, the shattered world of Isstvan III is ripe for new stories to be told and Guymer really delivers the goods with ‘The Last Loyalist’. If you think you can see the ending coming… Well, you’d be absolutely right but that’s not a bad thing here, just a necessary culmination of all the work that Guymer puts into his lead. You’re right there in the head of a Marine mentally exhausted from killing his own but in a body that just won’t stop doing what it was built to do. It’s a hell of a struggle and I couldn’t help but keep reading, not so much to see how it ended but how that ending came together, if you know what I mean.

Add in a near constant battle with traitor elements and ‘The Last Loyalist’ became a story that is nudging me towards looking for more of Guymer’s 40K work, any recommendations?

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