‘The Relentless Dead’ – Steve Lyons (Black Library)

 

Page Count: 300 Pages

These days, what with various bits and pieces going on, I try and make sure that for at least one day over the weekend, I do as little as I can; mostly sitting in my favourite chair and trying to make a dent in my TBR pile. Gives me a chance to recharge ahead of starting over again the following week ;o)

Well, that was pretty much my Saturday and while I didn’t get an awful lot of reading under my belt, I did manage a little.

I was kind of ‘half and half’ about Steve Lyons’ ‘Krieg’ books until he came up with ‘Siege of Vraks’ and all of a sudden, I found that I needed to read more :o) Well, I finally got the chance, over the weekend, with ‘The Relentless Dead’ and…

Five hundred years ago, Oleris III was ravaged by a Chaos plague. Now it is a world of tombs and catacombs. It belongs to the dead.

Colonel Graven and his 401st Krieg Regiment are charged with searching for a missing inquisitor in the bone-filled ossuary tunnels beneath the planet. But the dead are stirring, and down in the labyrinthine darkness his kill team comes face to face with unspeakable horrors.

As whispering spectres seed fear and suspicion, turning allies into foes, the colonel has ghosts of his own to battle. Haunted by a tragedy of his own making and unable to trust anyone, even the most resolute Death Korpsman might start to doubt himself. But on this world, it could be the death of him.

The ‘Warhammer Horror’ line is now a thing of the past (I think…) so I appreciate it when a 40k writer takes the time to inject a little horror alongside all the ‘grimdarkness’ of the far future. And that is exactly what we get here with a chilling blend of horror and the supernatural all set against the kind of background you’d only get in this setting. It’s not a perfect read but it does the job when it needs to and to be honest, that was all I needed for some lazy Saturday reading…

So I’m saying ‘not a perfect read’ but its only a couple of minor quibbles really. As you’d expect, a little bit of ‘detective work’ needs to be carried out, over the opening chapters, and while that was fair enough (questions to be answered and all that), the Death Korps of Krieg just don’t feel like those kind of soldiers, not to me anyway.

Things felt a little bit stilted then and when events led underground, I got pretty lost trying to work out where people were in a whole load of tunnels that looked exactly the same. To be fair, that’s on me though. I’m not great at reading maps as it is, let alone mapping out tunnels in my head. Your mileage will, no doubt, vary ;o)

It’s not all bad though, not in the least bit.

As the supernatural, and horror, elements come to the fore, ‘The Relentless Dead’ grabbed my attention pretty quickly and held it for the rest of the book. All of a sudden, it was very easy to read and keep reading.

Like I said, ‘The Relentless Dead’ is a little bit supernatural and horror; Lyons does really well to balance these, giving us a tale that haunts but also shocks and scares exactly when it needs to. Those tunnels were easy to get lost in but they were also great at hiding all sorts of things that you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark tunnel… Lyons is great at drawing out the tension, almost to breaking point, and then releasing it along with something nasty, and touched by the warp.

If that wasn’t enough, Lyons unleashes a zombie plague the likes of which I haven’t seen since Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s ‘Cadian Blood’. If you didn’t know already, I’m a huge zombie fan so the resulting pitched battle(s) were just the thing for me. Absolutely epic and ‘crewed’ by a cast that you will have come to know and cheer on. And that, for me, is where this book gets really interesting.

Steve Lyons is the ‘Krieg expert’, for Black Library, and uses that knowledge to add a much needed human touch to what is literally a horde of faceless soldiers. The life expectancy of a Krieg soldier is naturally very short so for those few who make it through a handful of engagements, how do they live with some of the acts that they have either committed or been party to? A Krieg soldier is literally bred to be a certain way so the answer is fairly straightforward but there are gaps for Lyons to work in and he does, tying it very effectively to the main thrust of the plot.

‘The Relentless Dead’ took a while to really find its stride (at least for me) but when it finally did, it swiftly became a book that demanded I finish it. Lyons may be the annalist for the Death Korps of Krieg but he never stays in one place for long. That’s a shame as there is still a tale to be told on Oleris III and a certain Death Korps regiment should have been allowed to have the final word.