Review: Ancient Blood, Robert Earl

Now that I've shown the original bad-ass cover, here's the version I read:

This is a limited omnibus released under Black Library's rather misleadingly named Print-On-Demand range. PoD it says, but you'll be hard pressed to find it anywhere these days.

Inside you'll find:

2 novels, 3 short stories and the last one; Blood Brothers is a short little vampire comic.

I had read every single thing in here before now, except for the Ancient Blood novel, which I finally got around to doing this week. So without further ado. Let's get cracking.

In the time of the Three Emperors alliances need to be wrought with care, and the Elector-Count of Stirland sits down to forge one with his equal; Averland.
But subject to their wildly different characters and the instability of Averland, the newly born alliance quickly starts to fray.

Stirland is forced to make concessions to the dangerous ideas of his ally and soon a pogrom is launched against the travelling Strigany caravans.

Bound by tradition and isolated by the local peasant superstition, the caravans have no idea of the violence that's about to be unleashed on them.
But they have a long and bloody history and are used to a life of adversity and this,
this is just the latest in a long line of hatreds. 

But violence begets violence, and there's no telling where it ends.

 And soon, stirred by a boy's need and the gift of his blood, an ancient evil will come crawling out of the shadows in pursuit of vengeance.

So then; Ancient Blood is pretty rote as Old Warhammer goes.

There's some battles, occasional in-fighting and backstabbing, villains and heroes in dire straits, all manner of monsters and beasties and of course... romance.

ROMANCE? I hear you gasp disbelievingly. Yes, indeed. The early Warhammer novels were alot more fun and a whole lot less grimdark as everyone might have you believe. I say early but they're mostly all along that line until very late in the setting's history.

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I remember being quite shocked when I finally read the Swords of the Empire omnibus by Chris Wraight. They had turned my beloved adventure setting into something just as unwholesomely grimdark as 40k. Those novels were written as an early precursor to the End Times, though I confess that, as I only read them after the End Times had already come to pass, I am a little biased.

I'm sorry, okay, I didn't want to adress the bleary-eyed behemoth in the room but no-one can just read old Warhammer fiction without the great big looming shadow that is the utter destruction of the Old World hanging over them! It's impossible! All these characters that you're rooting for now have already died in utter defeat in the future! Games Workshop ruined it! They ruined it all to hell!!

Ahem.

Back to Ancient Blood.

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As should be (maybe not) obvious by the cover, this novel is about vampires.
In the warhammer world there are 5 great vampire bloodlines all descended in a roundabout way from the blood of Nagash, the first and still greatest of necromancers. Their characteristics, powers and idiosynchrasies are for the most part inspired by historical or literary sources. As follows:

Dracula/ aristocratic vampire, Nosferatu/ solitary magic-users, Lamia/ female vampires, the honorable Vampire knights who abstain from blood-drinking, and lastly those vampires who have become more beast than human.
I'm being extremely reductive here and I've shortened those explanations quite a bit and I've also left out the actual in-world names to minimize the geek-level but at the very least you get the general idea.

This novel follows, but not as much as I'd like, the last of these aforementioned vampires: The Strigoi. The ones who have become so monstrous in appearance because of their subsistence on vermin and the occasional lone traveller. For the most part they hide away from the face of man and more importantly; from the other vampiric bloodlines.

There's not as much slap-dash violence as I'm used to from the Library and though we've had a few isolated moments where Empire mercenaries clash with the Strigany and one very memorable scene of vampire horror set in a beast lair, it's only when we're about 150 pages in before the carnage well and truly begins. The slow set-up (for warhammer) starts to pay off in a scene that is a nicely written bit of drawn-out tension where a small company of men and their retainers are trapped in their barracks by unknown forces. Nothing seems wrong except that nobody who goes outside returns, and nothing comes back inside except for one terrified scream. Then the torches start to go out.
Of course we know what is going on but I confess I found myself grinning in malicious delight.
It's been a while, you see, and I had forgotten how much I love scenes where shadowy things stalk the darkness beyond the torchlight. It's a nice touch then that all of this carnage is set in motion by one person's mental instability arising from his childhood denial of his mother's sexual proclivities. (a nice touch, but it doesn't seem to matter that much in the long run.)

There's a few times where Robert Earl blurs the line between the Warhammer World's acceptance of literally just about any type of fantasy element within its stable of genre clichés and tropes and the more mundane demons that are present in our own world. In this realm, where nothing is too out there mental instability and superstition work subtly hand in hand to add a nice level of ambiguity. The characters accept the likely presence of ghosts, because their world does in fact accomodate it, whether those ghosts are here in this instance or not.

Robert Earl has chosen here to go with the Strigany culture to weave his vampire tale around, and the Strigany are obviously based around the wandering Romani culture. He handles this with respect and weaves the vampire lore straight into the backbone of that of the Strigany.

This is hinted at in the slight details on every carriage and the writings above every door, the traditions of the elders and the elaborate 'game plans' for every village that they visit. It can be seen in its nuanced characters that might seem one dimensional at first glance but the longer we go on the more their flaws and qualities begin to be offset by their humanity. Don't expect too much of it though: this is still stuff that is meant to be easy to digest.

But where the book excells is the times that it delves into the deep mythology of the general Warhammer setting. Most of this comes from a scene where the glories of the Strigany Bloodline are revealed. Where at the end of a slaughter, a Strigoi steps out into the sunlight, bathing in light and fire, and through pain is reminded of a time before the bestial violence and bloodshed. Of a time of a benign empire openly ruled by vampires where its people where happy and content under their lords of the night. An empire stretching far and wide, one of the largest ever built within the confines of the Old world. Of its eventual downfall and destruction at the hands of invaders and the betrayal of the other vampire bloodlines. Of the human survivors fleeing the destruction of their once great cities, never stopping, never settling. And of their royal masters slinking off into the wild, dwindling and degenerating into mindless monsters.

Out of this scene awaken the ties that bind the surviving master with the mortal descendants of his empire and it was quite an intriguing thing to see in WH vampire lore. Usually we have the predator/cattle dynamic but here, stemming from the echoes of a more enlightened age, there is wary but respectful subservience and a sense of protectiveness blossoming into vengeance and duty. Quite a nice change from the normal dismissal of the prey that is present whenever vampires enter fiction.

Incidentally, in a nice bit of serendipitous coincidence: This novel ties directly into the short story that I read a little while ago: The Master of Mourkain (short story 3)
Which really is kind of a big coincidence if I think about it.
The vampire in the book is the same as the one in the short story, which means that the short story takes place right before the rise of that empire the vampire in the book remembers in this novel.

Despite its problems, including not too much depth to the Strigany people's enemies; the men of the empire with their rather clichéd cobbled up-mockery of a mercenary army, a slightly rushed ending with loose ends, not enough vampires to my liking (though, hide the beast as much as you can and when you do show him, he will shine), slightly too easy and predictable a romance,

it was the Old World as I remembered it to be.

Fast, fun, occasionally violent and with gory horror in the dark. A good palette cleanser before going back to more serious types of literature.

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Bonus Blood Brothers pictures!

An older, maybe not canonical, comic about another of those vampire blood lines; the Blood Dragons.