‘Blades of Atrocity’ – Mike Vincent (Black Library)


Page Count: 27 Pages

Amazon is jammed full of Black Library short stories but right now, I’m running out of ones that I’d be happy to pay £1.99 for so this will probably be the last one I buy for a while. I’ve got a few anthologies that will keep me going in the meantime.

So it’s that time of the week, again, where everything catches up with me and my reading slows down to a crawl. Just one more day to the weekend though, we can do it :o) While we wait for Friday to sort itself out, lets have a little talk about my last read of the week…

Dalchian Rassaq, the skin-taker, leads his Night Lords warband – the Blades of Atrocity – in a lightning raid on an Adeptus Mechanicus facility. Abandoned by their supposed allies, Rassaq must massacre his way out of the facility if he has any chance to exact revenge.

Sometimes, you find yourself at the end of the week and all you’re after is a short, sharp burst of mayhem to get you through the day; like an espresso in book form ;o) If that’s what you’re looking for then ‘Blades of Atrocity’ pretty much has you covered. It is wall to wall mayhem, violence and betrayal for twenty seven pages, with a cast of nasty bastards who are just out doing what they enjoy. You wouldn’t normally find me saying this about Chaos Space Marines but there’s a real sense of honesty here that I was totally on board with. Vincent really captures the feeling that this is how the Night Lords have always been and they’re just acting according to their nature. I also liked Vincent’s brief but effective exploration of how the Long War has really left the Night Lords on the edge, forced to scavenge and take on what are essentially suicide missions, just to survive.

If you’re after a little more than that though, ‘Blades of Atrocity’ might not be your thing. While it does its job, the tale is a little too reliant on things just happening for it to really work for me. I’m thinking about one bit in particular where I thought, ‘they came all that way and that just happened?’ I wish I had that kind of luck in my job…

‘Blades of Atrocity’ was a fun read though and given how it ended, I couldn’t help but wonder if we might just have seen the start of a regular ‘Warhammer Serial’. If that’s the case, I’d read it :o) In the meantime, ‘Blades of Atrocity’ isn’t the tale it perhaps wants to be but it has enough going for it to be a more than half decent read.

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