Iron Warriors Omnibus review

If you are a reader of Black Library novels, you will already be familiar with the name Graham McNeill. He is the author of many previous novels set in the Warhammer universe, including the bestselling Ultramarines series featuring the impossibly heroic Uriel Ventris.
This collection gathers together McNeil’s stories of the Chaos Marine chapter The Iron Warriors, which can be seen as a spin-off from the Ultramarines series. Each of the tales in this collection features the character Honsu.
Honsu is an interesting character. While he is cast as the arch enemy and opposite of Uriel, he has a streak of honour in him that suggests to this reader at least that they are not quite as diametrically opposed as they would like to think.
On the face of it the first story in this collection, the full length novel Storm of Iron, seems like an impossible task. It is the story of a castle siege, which doesn’t sound like something that could be sustained for a few hundred pages. Add to that the fact that your lead character and all his supporting cast are utterly Evil, I was expecting this to be a hard read.
How wrong I was! There is real tension in this book as McNeill flips the story between the Chaos Legion on the outside and the beleaguered Imperial Guard army within the walls.
Such is the skill of the writer I genuinely could not decide who I wanted to ‘win’ in the end, and found myself rooting for whatever faction I was reading about at the time, while simultaneously worrying what was happening to the other side.
After this comes the story The Enemy of my Enemy, which follows on nicely from this one, and allows us to visit some of the characters from the novel and see what happened next for them, after the rather bloody ending to Storm of Iron.
I’ll not break each story down here, but I will say that each of them is excellent. The novella Iron Warrior and the final story in the collection, are particularly good, and the latter leaves the reader desperate for more.
McNeil says in his forward that he doesn’t think he’s finished with this character yet, and I for one am looking forward to reading what he gets up to next.

Path of the Renegade review

I’m sure that at least some of you are familiar with the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
We have dipped into it before in this blog with our review of the game Space Marine. And of course, those of you who have attended Hi-Ex! Will no doubt have looked into our enormously popular games room, if not actually taken part in a game or two yourself.
It is a universe that is a lot of fun, but one that can be daunting to the outsider.
One of the best ways into this world, and in fact one you can enjoy without having to be into the games, is the Black Library.
This is a publishing house that is a spin-off of Games Workshop, and publishes an enormous amount of Warhammer based novels.
Path of the Renegade is the first in a series focusing on a race called the Dark Eldar. In 40k, the Eldar are the elves, and the Dark Eldar are, as the name suggests, their evil (or rather, eviler) counterparts.
All these races have a brilliantly rich and vibrant backstory for the writers to draw upon, and Andy Chambers, the author of this particular book, does so with obvious glee.
The Dark Eldar themselves are delicious fun.
Chambers has a bit of an uphill struggle from the beginning with the very nature of the race. Because they are all Bad, then we logically cannot have a hero, a Good Guy for the reader to root for. And while this is true to an extent, it also makes for a very interesting read as we sit back and enjoy a group of characters who are all Evil trying to out-scheme and out-manoeuvre each other for political power.
While all this is going on, there is also a ‘proper’ plot going on, and one that left me nicely wrong footed at the end. Because this is the first book in a series, I as a reader had figured out the pace the major plot elements were going to unfold in my head, so when these things happen when you do not expect them, it makes for a pleasant surprise.
As I mentioned, this is the first in a series, and while I am a bit annoyed the second book is a year away, I will certainly be looking out for it when it is published.