Review: Maledictions

For the First of the Warhammer Horror range I chose to dig into Maledictions. There's eleven short stories in total here, 7 of which take place in the 40k setting, 4 of which in the Age of Sigmar. People's favourite stories seem to vary from person to person, so, needless as it is to say, all of what comes next is my subjective experience. The ones I consider true horror will have the word bolded in their respective write-ups.

   The first one up; Nepenthe, is a genuinely good Horror tale. I got flashes of Event Horizon here, with body horror, a strange and mysterious mood that was definitely unique and inventive, and heaps of shocking violence. Nepenthe is exactly the kind of stuff that I want to read when I'm looking for space horror.
    Guided by a mysterious voice, two tech-priests close in on a space hulk adrift in the void. After decades of searching, revelation and glory is at hand. But the drifting vessel harbours many much more than they're prepared for.
   This is it: the best story in the collection and one worthy for the Warhammer Horror imprint.               Cassandra Khaw, despite choosing a faction and a setting with a high barrier of entry for new readers, nonetheless manages to easily engage and horrify. Though not excellently written, this one sets a high bar for the rest of the stories to come. Alas, the license problem holds this one back from being perfect; as a host of creatures is being described I found myself riveted, trying to make sense of the horrifying creatures attacking our protagonists, only to find myself deflated as soon as they were named; all the detailed description driving my imagination fell away in favour of the familiarity of the known. Still, a very good opener.

   Richard Strachan and his The Widow Tide have the dubious honor of being my first brush with the fiction of the Age of Sigmar. I've held off for a long while, but with the promise of stories written with the express intent to deliver horror to the adventurous reader, I could restrain myself no longer. But alas, horror this really was not.
   Half a year now, a young widow has been spending her days staring out over the ocean where her husband has gone missing. Though she knows he must be dead, and the villagers urge her to get on with her life, she still can't let go of him and when she finds a wounded alien creature, washed up on the beach, she takes it in her home and tries to nurse it to health. But in a superstitious village, secrets have a habit of not staying hidden.
   A confusing, unsatisfying ending to a story that is as rote as it can be. I mean, for pity's sake, the Wolf Riders short story collection, the very first Warhammer short story collection, had stories very much like this one. It's almost as if a shoreline setting has a great potential to suddenly introduce a huge change in the daily life of a village or something -hmmmm?-. If in all the Mortal Realms a village by the sea is what you're choosing for your setting, and if the plot of your tale is uneventful as the plot here then you're doing something wrong. Hard pass.

    On the bottom level of a hive, a few children from an orphanage find a man wasted away to the point of death. They decide to bring him back with them, and nurse him back to health. As the man convalesces he slowly begins to repay them their kindness by healing the sick in their halls. All seems well, but they'll soon find out that No Good Deed goes unpunished.
    Graham McNeill is probably the big draw for this collection as he has already made his name with a lot of pivotal Warhammer fiction and it's pretty disappointing then that this little tale wasn't all that memorable. It's pretty rote as far as 40k goes even, and I also got the idea that this one tied into Mcneill's earlier fiction. Lastly; it's horror in the way that all things Nurgle, the dark god of decay, are: Pretty horrible but it does not stand out at all, especially as the other Nurgle tales in this collection were vastly more engaging and memorable.

   Lora Gray is different than other writers in this collection as they are the only one to embark on an Age of Sigmar story while going full out-on the lore, making this one inextricable from the Mortal Realms setting. As someone who has not kept up with the evolution of the Games Workshop's fantasy setting I found myself pretty bewildered by the idiosyncrasies of the Sylvaneth faction. Gray, though being a new writer to any of the licenses, must be very passionate about the particular faction, as the background for Crimson Snow is really quite necessary to understand its plot, and I had to look up what was what after its ending.
   At the edge of a battlefield, a young Dryad, anxious to help out her kinsmen who are battling for the survival of their grove, helplessly looks on as her Sylvaneth kin fight the Rotbearing Chaos forces. As figures stumble from the melee, the lines between ally and enemy are blurred as she finds herself confronted by an Outcast, one of those Sylvaneth driven insane by a mysterious contagion, craving indiscriminate bloodshed. As their eyes meet and she wonders what could have turned a once noble warrior into this unstable monster, little does she know that she'll soon find out.
   Even though the amount of lore can be quite detracting from an easy reading experience, the body horror in this one makes it stand out from others in this collection. Memorable and visually entertaining.

   Last of the Blood is a bit of an odd one. I didn't think it was bad, but neither did I think that this one had enough horror to merit being in this collection.
That being said, though seemingly rote, the story was engaging enough as CL Werner is an old hand at Warhammer fiction and pretty good at writing engaging storylines.
   Under rumours of death and persecution, the last members of the Nagashiro family gather at the behest of the head of the family, who reveals that they are being hunted by a vengeful ghost in retaliation for an old grievance. He reveals that he has brought them to his castle to stave off their curse by the use of a dark necromantic ritual. But as the ritual begins events immediately take a turn for the worst and soon it seems that the time of the Nagashiro bloodline has run out.
   I confess I find it strange that there is a story in an Age of Sigmar setting that might as well have taken place in the Old World, but that this same story nonetheless never would have been allowed to be written, given Games Workshop's ban on fiction to do with their Japanese-influenced factions. Not bad, but not stand-out either.

   In Predations of the Eagle we follow a company of Guardsmen stationed in a meat-grinder-war on a hot and humid jungle world. As more and more of their company go missing in their fights against the orks, morale starts to ebb, and as their missing comrades start to show up in gruesome displays; with bodies maimed and cannibalized, and contorted in mad imitations of the Imperial Eagle, the desperation starts to grow.
   I loved this one. Peter Mclean has the attitude of a Guardsman down pat, and even injects some welcome humour here and there, though as you might imagine, the longer the story goes on, the less humour remains, to make way for a more tense little affair. There were some nice moments of horror, and this short story is probably the best-executed of the tales in here. Likable characters, believable characterization and a tight plot. I had no niggles when it was done, and I'm certain that this one is accessible to any newcomers. Top-tier.

   The Last Ascension of Dominic Seroff, despite having a cumbersome name, proves to be one of the better ones. On a backwater hive world, the last stop for those fallen from grace, a has-been inquisitor and a disgraced lord commissar find solace in each other's misery, as they toast to the imagined destruction of old enemies. When they bear witness to an object crashing down somewhere in the city they set out to investigate, realizing that something in the object's trajectory made it stand out from the usual rain of debris and meteors. They soon find themselves face to face with true horror.
   Though this story does rely a little too much on name recognition and reader investment in what has come before (license and other stories), as someone who hasn't read anything else by David Annandale, I found that this wasn't a problem as I was swept along by the lugubrious developments and wild descriptions as the Inquisitor and the Commissar flee from the nastiness gibbering at their heels.
   A very well-known name to the 40k universe shows up, and does so in a way that makes you realize that some of these characters have become figures of true terror to the galaxy at large, that they have become boogey-men, monsters with the statures of well-know horror movie villains, and Annandale, bless him, treats them as such. Very satisfying.

   An ex-guardsman made governor of a planet is slowly going mad because of strange dreams, but as things begin to escalate, as his dreams begin to impinge on reality, it becomes clear that there is something more going on.
   Triggers by Paul Kane is not really good, because even though events can be horrific enough for our protagonists, they will not always be so for us as observers.
More than that; in the world of 40k, we, as the readers, will be most of the time generally aware of the names behind entities, creatures and phenomena, and too-clear descriptions or flat-out revelations, names splashed on the page, can be quite deflating. A good story, and great authorial skill, can still keep going despite of it (see Nepenthe) but this one, even though not always divulging names, suffered in another aspect in that it seemed to mix and match what it wanted from the lore, at the very least bending the rules if not breaking them outright, in the manner that made it feel like a very old Warhammer 40k story. Outdated and very definitely less than thrilling.

   Probably the most enigmatic story in this collection, A Darksome Place is engaging enough while at the same time also managing to easily garner some interest in the Age of Sigmar. In the sewers below the city of Greywater Fastness some foul thing seems afoot. The rats have disappeared and the occasional patrol as well, and strange singing has been heard. Padmar Tooms, one of the Underjacks who safeguard the dark waterways, out to investigate with his patrol, searches for his mentor and the root of the sewers' ills.
   Now, this feels like a unique realm that lives and breathes outside of its bloody but stale battlefields. Josh Reynolds is a prolific writer of Black Library's own stable who currently has the most work out in the Mortal Realms. He's a huge influence apparently and it's visible here as well: He's quite comfortable in this place, and he's the only one of the four Sigmarite writers in this collection who made the setting itself come alive.
He's also clever enough, the only one in this collection, to know that if he were to name the antagonistic force he would dispel a lot of the horror that has built up over the story.
   A Darksome Place reminded me quite a bit of Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train; with an ancient power brooding in the darkness beneath a buzzing metropolis, hidden and secret, worthy of veneration yet inexplicable. It is horrific, but is it horror? I'm going to say yes.

   The Marauder Lives is a tense little story that while not being really horror at all did manage to keep me reading at a fast pace.
   In an asylum, an inquisitorial agent convalesces after her years-long captivity. But the past and the sadistic tortures of the Dark Eldar are always with her, and leave her unable to even begin to heal the scars of her mind. The asylum is a safe place, but on the horizon storm clouds gather and she is certain there is still danger to come.
   J C Stearns' story is rather well written, and the paranoia of its main character, coupled with the nature of the Dark Eldar faction, leaves you guessing whether something is really going on or whether it might all be in our protagonist's head. Tense.

Life in the Cradle is beautiful and slow for the orphans. Sent here to live away from The World Beyond,  in the vale they are under the protection of the horned deity, and they are kept safe and blessed by his grace. But only for as long as they uphold the law, give veneration where it is due, and above all: Never leave the cradle.
   But young Cade has a friend who has dreams of seeing the sights of the world beyond, and she tells him she's sure that the tales the villagers tell are just that; tales of boogeymen, stories to frighten children. she's sure that The Nothings aren't real. And then when, one evening he returns from a hunt to find the village in an uproar, with Abi missing, he knows that the tales are about to be put to the test.
   Alec Worley's short story probably should have been at the forefront of the anthology, as it manages to ease the reader into a familiar and comfortable setting (at least ostensibly) while gradually introducing more and more intriguing and mysterious elements to the story until it finally pulls the rug out from under them. Readers with mileage in the various settings will probably sniff most of it out quite early, but the story is at least written in an easy, engaging manner.
   As for horror: there is some, though it isn't enough to write home about, apart from some existential dread there at the end which, even though the licenses usually have heaps of that stuff, this particular segment was written quite well, with almost an almost nightmarish, apocalyptic quality to the imagery. Pretty good.

    An interesting collection of short stories, and a good journey into the realm of genuine horror for Warhammer fiction. But is this it?

    Madness and disease are the usual suspects, and the gore is welcome as well, of course, but barring Nepenthe, most of these were just slight exaggerations of what can be found in other Warhammer fiction. The Black Library will have to up their game if they want to stand out.

Don't be afraid to shock, guys.

Bring it on. Everybody wants it.

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