June Book Haul

Normally I do this on the 20th but I happened to run into some delays this month. Serious delays, I'll have you know.

      It's not as if I took the pictures and then promptly forgot, no, no. There was some serious stuff going on, man.

Anyway, as you can see, this month it's a very varied batch, running the gamut from sci-fi, horror, classical history and even an extended opinion piece on the epic Fantasy genre as it was in 1987.

First up the latest Hack/Slash omnibus comic, even though the fifth was supposed to be the last one.

I'm not complaining though, as I really enjoyed this one.

It was a lot of fun to catch up with Cassie, especially as, since this one came out of the blue, given the rather definitive ending of the last omnibus, I just let any and all reservations go and just ended up really enjoying myself.

Expect an actual continuation of the overall storyline, and as long as you weren't married to the status quo at the end of omnibus 5, you're probably going to like it. This one practically does not give a shit and does what it wants, and I actually enjoyed that. Which is very unlike my usual self.

Judge Dredd is up next, with the Complete Case Files nrs 28 and 32, which I'm still a ways off of in my read but these were off by more than 35 percent, which together with a 10 percent discount almost halved the original price. Yay! Go me!

Also, I love the cover for Case File 32. A one-panel joke typical of Judge Dredd.

As always, click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Here, from the dread halls of the Black Library comes the reprint of the entire 5 books of the Liber Chaotica. You can easily find these online in a PDF format, of course, but I had been wanting to have the original editions on my shelf for a while, and so in lieu of that I picked up this one instead. It was only 55 euros, after all.

I'll be honest, I don't really understand the low price. Because this thing is magnificent in its presentation alone. Full-colour throughout, countless pieces of artwork, short stories everywhere, and, as they deal chiefly with the Chaos Gods, some of these are gratifyingly nasty and horrifying.

I've already read a bit, and honestly, if you're into the Chaos forces of the Old World (may it not rest in peace, and instead return to us, praise Sigmar), this thing ends up reading like a dark and twisted Bible.

The short historical Epic The Sea, The Sea.

Collected in this slim volume (84 pages) are actually only 2 books of a much larger narrative (7 books); the Greek expedition by Xenophon also know as the Anabasis.

I picked this one because, as I'm going to slowly work my way through the Penguin Epics collection (5 done, 15 more to go), I'm on the look-out for connections to current reads, and though this one doesn't actually connect to anything right now, this one's title nonetheless caught my fancy do I just went and bought it regardless. When it finally arrived I realized that I had already read 2 works inspired by it: Paul Kearney's The Macht trilogy and Valerio Massimo Manfredi's The Lost Army, and I immediately got stuck in.

Like most of these older works, it gets bogged down in names and speeches sometimes, but the scene from which the volume gets its title was pretty powerful.

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Hobbits, wizards, Tolkien-lovers, assorted Orcs and Uruk-Hai, hang on to your butts, because the king of the opinionated writers is here, and he's out to tear you a new one. Yes indeed. It's Michael Moorcock 's Wizardry and Wild Romance novel, the book of his gathered essays wherein he just lets go and laughs at and criticizes every work of Epic Fantasy of his day.

I bought this one both as it's been on my list forever, and because I was hoping to also run into Moorcock's opinion on Gardner's Grendel, foolishly forgetting that this book is solely about Epic Fantasy and that Grendel absolutely does not qualify for that.

Ah well. I've got it now, at least.

Also, look at this. Sad and poignant.

But anyway, it's been 30 years, so you can't really tell what happened with these two.

Up next, Vastarien 1.2 and 1.3.

Vastarien is an award-winning magazine in its second year of publication under the Grimscribe Press publisher, founded by Jon Padgett. As the name alludes, Grimscribe Press is a publisher dedicated to and inspired by the work of Thomas Ligotti. The magazine itself takes its name from the short story of the same name, which just happened to be the first work of Ligotti's that I had read, collected as it was in American Supernatural Tales, one of the 6-volume glossy Penguin Horror Hardback series.

I had already read the first issue somewhere last month, and I was impressed enough that I bought 2 and then, when that one arrived and had been read, 3 and am now halfway through it. There's no way that I'm not going to read 2.1 now. The Magazine has besides a bunch of short stories in the vein of Ligotti's work, also poems and non-fiction essays. The essays have so far all been hugely interesting and informative reads, bar 1, and I won't say which one. And the Eraserhead as Anti-natalist Allegory in particular, from volume 1, which, besides being insightful and informative, was also straight-up horrifying.

There's currently 4 issues out now, with issue 5 (2.2), the Summer 2019 issue, announced just today. I'll be getting that when it comes out in the coming months.

You can see I've been on a Horror and Weird binge lately.

Michael Cisco's the San Veneficio Canon is a book collecting his The Divinity Student and its sequel The Golem. I bought this because after reading the Traitor I found it... special and enduring. See here my review of The Traitor. It remember it being a strange read, and I was hoping for something more of the same, but maybe less impenetrable and this one's blurb stood out to me.

Struck by lightening, resurrected, cut open, and stuffed full of arcane documents, the Divinity Student is sent to the desert city of San Veneficio to reconstruct the Lost Catalog of Unknown Words. He learns to pick the brains of corpses and gradually sacrifices his sanity on the altar of a dubious mission of espionage. Without ever understanding his own reasons, he moves toward destruction with steely determination. Eventually he find himself reduced to a walker between worlds - a creature neither of flesh nor spirit, stuffed with paper and preserved with formaldehyde - a zombie of his own devising. The line twixt clairvoyance and madness is thinner than a razor blade. In 1999, The Divinity Student captured the attention of fans of dark fantasy everywhere, eventually winning the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. Now, The Divinity Student has been paired with its sequel, The Golem, for a must-have book - The San Veneficio Canon. Michael Cisco has created a city and a character that will live in the reader's imagination long after this book has been read... 

You have to admit, it sounds pretty cool.

And lastly, the 20th anniversary edition of William King's Space Wolf, the first ever Warhammer novel that I read.

I couldn't not buy it, but now that I have it I kind of question the worth of this edition.

Sure, it looks all manner of impressive, but there's not much in here.There's a number of colour artworks included that have graced the Ragnar Blackmane novels in the past, but besides the slight introduction by King himself there's nothing really new in here.

It's a beautiful edition for newcomers, but for old hands you're better off sticking with the omnibi or the individual novels.

The Crying of Lot 49

This isn't a review, and instead it's more a barrage of my thoughts, me just trying to order what happened, trying to make it clear for myself. There's more than enough reviews on this novel, about 50 years worth of it, and there's about 4000 reviews on Goodreads alone. This is also a reminder to myself that I don't always enjoy doing reviews, and that I should do what comes natural. For this one that means just spouting out whatever comes to mind. That does mean spoilers, somewhat.

Oedipa Maas has been made the executor of a an ex-lover who has recently passed away. Wealthy and eccentric, Inverarity Pierce has left behind him a massive amount of assets to be appraised, sold and auctioned off. Despite not having any experience in the legalities of the situation, and now living with her husband, Oedipa makes the journey to Southern California where, in the course of her duties she stumbles on what could possibly be a massive world-wide conspiracy. As she tries to piece together the clues concerning the mysterious Tristero organization, and its secret war with the Thurn and Taxis postal system, with allies disappearing and dying around her, and with signs tying everything she sees into a massive web of deceit, she has to confront the likelihood that she's become insane.

Depending on who you ask The Crying of Lot 49 is either a classic Postmodern work, or a classic work that parodies Postmodern works. But either way, it's become dated, or at least, to someone not living in the USA, the horde of Americana it references; the characters, politicians, brands, and concepts can be quite bewildering. There were a lot of times where I just did not understand what was being referenced, where I felt left out and frustrated. That being said, it never became too insurmountable, in reading sometimes you have to accept that the small hang-ups don't matter and do not necessarily detract from the whole.
The Crying of Lot 49 was a strange but interesting read, most of the time funny and engaging, but also at points quite irritating and a bit of a slog to get through, especially at the start.

It's got a high barrier of entry, but after a certain point it really ends up becoming quite an engaging read. Once Oedipa finishes watching the play, 'the Courier's tragedy', I felt myself quite involved, and interested in the mystery of the W.A.S.T.E./ Tristero - possibility, and likely for quite a different reason than most people would expect, which I'll outline below as an addendum after the main thing.

The entire last third of the novel is riveting and its ending is pretty brilliant, in a postmodern sense.
The central question that drives to the plot is of course the mystery whether or not there is a Tristero entity that was/is in a quiet war with the Thurn and Taxis company, that has gone underground and is doing its best to suppress any and all information about them, using any means necessary.
     By the end of the novel, the possibilities have been offered that either the thing is true, or that Oedipa has gone insane, or that she's just fantasized all of the connections, or that alternatively it might all be an elaborate joke, with too much money behind it, too many people bought in order to play along, to piece-meal reveal information, to clamp shut at pre-determined points. That it is a joke set up by a disgruntled or love-sick ex, who, aware of his erstwhile lover's mental problems, posthumously takes her for a ride, either in order to hurt her or to gift her with something transcendental. He might even not be dead and, with this elaborate game, be trying to win her back.
      The brilliant thing is that there's no way to really tell, given the novel's ending. Oedipa at the end has either truly gone paranoid, or has had the right of it. But due to how, over the course of the novel, she responds and analyzes the information she's been given, and who has been giving it, she/ Pynchon offers up multiple plausible reasons for those people's actions, allowing them to be puppets moving to the tune of a master puppeteer, but to also at the same time leave room for the possibility that they might just be tenuously linked individuals, all with their own insights into a vast conspiracy.
     The idea that she's fantasized all of it holds no water I believe, mainly as that devalues any type of fiction, but I could certainly admit that various incidents might have been imagined.
     If she's been suffering from a psychosis, then it's a bit of a disturbing novel, as it manages to catch you in its intrigue, and allows you to see all these connections, making you think that indeed there is something here, in this way managing to bring the reader down into Oedipa's psychosis alongside her.
     Either way, there's no clear answer, and not knowing has the effect of making it all the more engaging. Not delivering the answer allows this story to possibly be all of these things, rather than just having it be one of them. It's not really as if you can choose whichever type of story it is, but you can't really say what it isn't either.

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What struck me most is how the Tristero-possibility is gradually revealed, not just as something mysterious, an enigma to be solved and revealed, but also in that the way that the people who seem to be, or might be, in the know refuse to talk about it, with worry and distress written clearly on their faces, as if it is something to be feared, as if even mentioning it might put them in danger from forces unknown, and maybe even unknowable.
Their reactions, their sly hiding of knowledge, whenever the Tristero is mentioned, put me in mind of other tales where similar reactions occur, when words with dangerous or even occult connotations are mentioned, words like; 'Carcosa', 'The Yellow King', 'Necronomicon' and others.
The fact that many of them disappear, and/or die, leaving odd or cryptic warnings behind them adds to it.
Then there are the skeletons of the soldiers at the bottom of a lake, re-purposed, for ink and tourism, the Maxwell's Demon with its Machine for psychic sensitives, the darkly clothed figures, marauders or assassins, using violence to guard their secrets, the strange gathering of night-time children claiming to be dreaming in their closets while they stand in front of a fire happily warming themselves by its nonexistent flames, in fact the whole the mad night that Oedipa spends wandering the streets in thrall to her obsession, and of course the strange, unnerving postage stamps ascribable to the Tristero: all of these could be very well seen as horror elements.

In a strange way, The Crying of Lot 49 might easily fit in with horror literature, at least up until a certain point in the novel, where Oedipa's mental state becomes overbearing and begins to sideline the mysteriousness in favour of plausibleness. But, I can imagine some visionary adapting the novel into a classic horror movie. Like how the Shining adaptation leaves it up to the viewer (mostly) whether or not Jack Torrence is just the only monster in the movie or if there actually might be more things going on in the Overlook hotel. But then inversely, with the mundane origins of the Tristero, effaced the longer the adaptation goes on, to stand at the auction revealed as undeniably supernatural, representative of an Anti-God entity, its existence rightly suppressed by the Vatican, with the Tristero organization as the mad cult hiding their goals, planning for the auction at the novel's culmination where they will kill every person present, with Oedipa Maas either forced to join the cult, or willingly doing so, or falling victim to it as well.

Ah well, it's too hot for rambling. I loathe summer.
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Review: Perdition's Flame (audio drama)

Perdition's flame is the first audio drama from the Warhammer Horror range.

I'm not one for audio books or dramas but, drawn as I am to horror, and in particular keen to explore the 'Horror' aspect to the Warhammer license, I felt obligated to check this one out.

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A tiny bit of a rant here... Feel free to skip if you dislike me harping on about my ideas and negative responses to the audio format.

I dislike audio-dramas/books because it doesn't take much for me to get pulled straight out of the story, my bubble of immersion too easily punctured by even the smallest of things; off-kilter accents, stilted line-delivery, disharmony in dialogue, etc... but in this particular story I'm pleased to announce that I only gritted my teeth in absolute supreme irritation only once. In case you're interested: It is in Chapter 13, right at the 1-minute mark. You can't miss it.

The voice actors do a mixed bag of a job, their accents ranging from the bad to the flat-out excruciating. This might not be because of the actors themselves and rather because of the material they have to work with, the stereotype accents they have to deliver, or it might just be because of an inherent bias on my part, although I went into this story very open-minded and willing to be entertained.

And you know, this is probably what is always going to be my main gripe with audio-adaptations of any kind and the reason why this particular format just isn't for me. Prose can be perceived as perfect for the reader as it requires the imagination to fill in all the possible blanks, while auditory input from another party (not yourself, and thus alien to yourself) can cause, and very likely not in a way that is all that conducive to the listener, associations that might not be expected leading to negative reactions.

Every single one of the characters sounds like a stereotypical cliché, and not even the acceptable kind, and in fact they're all quite dubiously rendered by the voice actors. Our main character and narrator Vosk's thick and distinctly Russian/Vostroyan accent is mildly off-putting at first but due to a kind of stockholm-type syndrome, swiftly becomes comforting. Especially when we veer from his drawn-out tones into the nasal whines of the female characters who you'll be begging to shut the fuck up. Both Captain Brandon and Inquisitor Herryn are awful to listen to. Brandon's gutter-British and Herryn's upperclass entitlement ooze with every syllable out of the actor's mouths. If you're looking for subtle: this isn't it. Commander Treece, with barely a minute of dialogue to his name, isn't much worth mentioning either.

Honestly though, I'm not here to slag these people or their choice in profession off, so I won't be mentioning names, and you can just file all of the above under 'Levi just does not like audio dramas'.

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All of that being said.

The story was ok. It wasn't really worth being made an audio drama out of, but it was at least acceptable.

In a lonely cave, with a howling blizzard raging through the night outside, a Vostroyan guardsman sits in front of a fire and welcomes you to sit with him, to listen to his tale. He'll treat you to a tale of cowardice and redemption aboard a haunted ship, where voices whisper in urgent entreatment, and where the shadows wait in the darkness, patiently waiting for their chance to break free.

It is a tale of terror, of the risen dead spawned by the dark plague come for mankind. It is the tale of those that fight it. And it is a tale of an unknowable horror that can not possibly be contained.

In the grim licensed future of 40k there's not much chance of being surprised. Any and all plot developments must adhere to the rules of the setting, after all. And if you are well-versed in the lore, or if you've read a lot of the novels, chances are you can figure out story revolutions well in advance.
Worley knows this. and uses it to his advantage, managing to wrong-foot lore-enthusiasts and delivers an at least decent twist, in a story that threatened to become quite bog-standard 40k. As it turns out after the drama's close I actually found myself left with some questions, which is a good sign of my engagement with the story, or at least, with this particular lore aspect. I'm not sure how this would float with people completely new to 40k but I appreciated this element most.

As for horror, well... it definitely was not worthy of the Warhammer Horror label. It does make a point about horror in the Warhammer 40k universe (and which relates to the plot twist), but it's not explored enough, and as such, to any new listeners this point would be entirely lost, I think, making me wonder if anyone who's not already into the setting would actually have anything positive to take away from this.

A spoken story that has to last all of 70 minutes has a very limited amount of time to leave a good impression. This is genuinely a tall order. I don't think the Library should be trying to churn these out, and should instead be trying to make something truly unique, maybe something experimental, that'll validate audio dramas, and in particular, Warhammer Horror audio dramas.

 Imagine it: some kind of Barker-esque visionary who could create some new type of Horror, unseen and unheard of before, and drawing in legions of horror enthusiasts. The type of dark prodigy you sometimes read about in horror stories, the type that went mad and died or disappeared, leaving behind a secret, much sought-after body of work.

As it is now, this really isn't it. Hard pass.

Furnace Short Story

Though I debated against it, here's a quick little post on my favourite story (so far) of the Grimscribe's Puppets anthology, a short story collection homage-ing Ligotti's body of work.

Furnace by Livia Llewellyn is so far the most original and arresting story in the collection.

If you're familiar with the name, then well done you, you pervert, but there's no erotica to be had here. It is a very good and horrifying little tale though.

It's about a young girl's experience of growing up in a town that has started to decay in an irrevocable sort of way. The theme will be familiar to Ligotti readers, but Llewellyn does some remarkable stuff with the premise. The above fragment is one of a series of anecdotes compiled by the girl's grandfather chronicling the weird goings-on in the town. They're pretty much all like that; horrifying , violent and shocking. And yet, there was quite a sweet nostalgic feeling at the story's start, reminiscent of Dan Simmons Summer of Night.

I'm unsure about what exactly the ending meant, what it implied and whether or not it held the key to all the town's happenings or whether what was being described was just the last of the town's happenings inevitably coming to a close.

Whatever it meant, this was a very good short story. 

One to re-read.

Review: The Stars My Destination

In the blown-open bowels of a derelict spaceship, tumbling aimlessly through the solar system, a man survives. In a patched-up space-suit he makes quick 5-minute trips through the airless, zero-gravity corridors in search of air canisters and sustenance, with a mantra endlessly repeating in his head.

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation.

Deep space is my dwelling place.

And death's my destination.

Having collected what he needs the man hurries back to the lightless, airtight locker that he has come to call home, where, with desperate, heaving breaths he floods his tiny compartment with oxygen, renewing his tenuous lease on life. He has been doing this for the past 6 months. 

Waiting for a rescue that might never arrive, this man has survived in the loneliest place in existence with nothing other than blind animal instinct to carry him through. He can do nothing but wait.

And when a space-ship approaches his wreck, having heeded his distress signals, he believes that his desperate struggle for survival will finally be rewarded.

But when the vessel, having come close enough to make out its name, begins to turn, and slowly, irrevocably starts to move away from him, leaving him to his horrible fate, something happens to the man. And Gully Foyle, unremarkable as he might have been, becomes something else entirely. Something that will make Terra burn with the fire of his vengeance, and that will alter the very course of human history forever.

Eh. It's alright.

It's not as good as everyone's made it out to be though. It might have been much more when it came out, but almost 70 years on now, it's become a little dated.
Lying at the root of the Cyberpunk genre most of the conventions are present: cyber-enhancements, evil corporate entities working from the shadows, Foyle himself; the unlikable antihero just south of a noir detective doggedly pursuing a mystery, and never shy about using some brutal, "filthy" violence in his quest for vengeance. But he's very unlikable for about the first 90 percent of the novel, and his treatment of the female characters, and the way that those were written, was a bit off putting.

Though Foyle's pursuit of the Vorga is engaging, the mystery of why he was abandoned interesting, and his journey and its mind-blowing finale very epic and even a little mythic, the narrative still moves a little too fast and switches between its busy locations with too much reckless abandon to ever linger or grow comfortable in the reader's mind.
The ideas and the locations don't get time to settle, and though it's clearly the sci-fi son of the Count of Monte Cristo, taking after its dear old dad in a very noticeable way, it maybe should've endeavored to emulate more of that magnificent novel's pacing rather than just copying its story beats.

That last is my opinion though, and you'll probably not find anyone else who would prefer to read that mammoth of a novel to this sleek tiger of a book. Certainly not Neil Gaiman, who in he novel's afterword comes dangerously close to slagging off the father of all vengeance stories in order to defend this novel apparently so dear to him. Yet more reasons to dislike the bastard. Ask my friend, the Ink-Stained Beard, whether or not I'll ever let an opportunity pass me by to dis on Gaiman; no, like the proverbial tiger, I'll pounce. That's twice now: Tiger! Tiger!

So. A bit of a shallow novel, but the ideas and concepts were pretty compelling. Special mention must be made for the ingenious description/depiction of Synesthesia, at the novel's ending.

Too Much

There are so many people these days that every single one of them can find something to read that will cater specifically to them, as weird and outlandish and as fucked-up as that might be. This cannot continue. It is a wild, wild world, it cannot be contained.
I don't know why I think that this cannot continue. I just know that it is too much. It is too chaotic, incomprehensibly so. Surely some revelation is at hand. As the poet said; the centre cannot hold. But this is not a second coming, no. This second birth will be your first death. On the heels of revelation, your destruction will follow.
At a certain point you become aware of your ignorance, of how little you know, and more and more something opens up. Something stands ready there to usher you in. Into a great dark, or a great light.
And the more you learn, you find that there is more you did not, more you did not see, and that this will inevitably increase, to exponential levels. And that abyss gapes larger. The ideas are innumerable, veritable constellations of concept, identities and individuals without count. Because we all change and nothing, nothing at all, can be constant. It all adds up, and it does not stop. But the blank pages of the ledger cannot be finite, even if we cannot yet see the final page. And yet we all scribble, unstoppable and, paradoxically, unthinking. There is so much.
Is this not horror, is this not terrifying: In such a sea of endless change, the numberless horde's ever-increasing movement, you realize that you are less than a fraction of the whole, that you are nothing. And that you can only become more and more of nothing. And that this can ever only increase as they become more and more. As impossible as it is, you become less, nothing in the face of the total, your everything subsumed into the anything. And it is anything, any thing you can think of, and it all adds to the whole, and you have become All.
The opposite of nothing must be the sum total of humanity.
There must come a time, where it must all be used up, where all of humanity's thoughts, their dreams, feelings and works, must stretch the very fabric of reality itself, where it comes close to spilling from the realm of the mind into that of the material world, but instead, one will flow into the other, and annihilation will follow. Because there is simply too much of it. We will drown, or we will burn.
Somewhere, something is going insane.

Roadside Picnic and The Russian Nuclear Apocalypse

Roadside Picnic is one of those novels that, if you aren't an avid science-fiction reader, you might not have heard about but one whose impact has been rather noticable in a lot of fiction that came after it, most notably, these days, the Russian post-apocalyptic Metro series, of which the third game; Metro Exodus is proving to be a blast. After some initial misgivings I now have almost no complaints. Except, really: Fuck that car, although I did run into an amusing glitch with it.

Though the Roadside Picnic influence has diminished with each iteration of the series, there is still an occasional floating electrical anomaly to be found and the 'Stalker' nomenclature is still (barely) in use, but beyond that, the story has moved away from the strangeness to be found in Roadside Picnic and has instead embraced the more approachable nuclear apocalyptic concept so favoured by the masses (though I swear I haven't been irradiated in hours). It's a bit of a shame as I thought this was something the series did incredibly well, where it married the anomaly elements with the nuclear fallout stuff, and which gave the whole thing a rather unique feel.

 Right now, where I'm at, in the Caspian sea, the game has become to feel more Mad Max than what I had come to term 'the Russian Post-Apocalypse'. It's not in any way bad, but I still feel as if the series has been... diminished somewhat, become somewhat more conform, catering more to the mainstream and losing its uniqueness along the way.

Before Metro, there was the Stalker series, heavily inspired by the movie of the same name, and both of which carried the influence of Roadside Picnic much more on its sleeve. And indeed, even now the Stalker movie, 40 years after its release, is still worth a watch if you're into weird and moody (I know I am). In any case, it is a classic of Russian cinema and is nr 185 on Imdb's top 250 movies.
The Stalker game series is notable in that it did away with the origins behind the novel's 'Zone concept', and that it explicitly ties the Zone's creation to the Chernobyl disaster. And if you have been living under a rock, or in a fall-out shelter, and are unware of it, the recent HBO mini-series Chernobyl is a very good way to brush up on your history. It's very well researched, impeccably shot and scored, the acting is compelling, and the overall effect of the thing is just... devastating.

There is such a sense of doom hanging over every scene of the series that it becomes almost oppressive. And as you watch the various characters; the scientists and engineers, the firefighters, the miners, the soldiers and others, get closer and closer to the scene of the incident you are acutely aware of their inevitable fate, which you then also get to see. And if you've been amused by the response from Russia to the show itself, where they've announced that they'll be making their own show according to the 'true' story behind the incident; when you watch in the show how the government deals with some of the consequences to the disaster, and how they press down on the spread of information concerning the danger, in order to uphold their reputation, it's not hard to understand their response to the show, but it also is quite scary.
Chernobyl is horrifying and even depressing, but it is honestly a must watch. It's only 5 episodes, less than 5 hours in total. There really is no reason not to watch it, and you'll be richer for it.
Anyway, I got a little off track here, but I thought I'd share the reasons for why I searched out the novel before I write about it. I've been reading and watching Roadside Picnic-influenced fiction for at least a decade now, so I thought I'd go ahead and give it a whirl. And it turned out to be an awesome and very compelling read.

Redrick Schuhart is a Stalker, one of those individuals who risk their lives and their sanity by making harrowing treks into 'The Zone', the off-limits area riddled with the detritus left behind by a visiting alien race, the place that they left behind where the laws of the natural world, of reality itself, don't always apply. It is a dangerous and inhospitable place, likely to kill a man as soon as he sets foot inside its boundaries, but it is also a place filled with wonder and riches.

Inscrutable and even dangerous as these riches might prove to be, they command improbable sums from the black marketeers who profit off of them, who sell them to scientists or simply to those who have enough money, and so there are many who venture into danger for a taste of the wealth. But there are not many to last long in the strange and lethal environment.

Over the fifteen years since the aliens' Visit, many legends have sprung up surrounding the strange phenomena to be found. The strangest of which is 'The Sphere', an object capable of granting the beholder their most innermost wish. And though Redrick has lasted longer than any other Stalker in the Zone, due to his almost preternatural sense of the dangers ahead and a ruthless pragmatism, he'll soon feel himself forced to seek out the very strangest and most dangerous of what the Zone has to offer in order to have his most desperate wish fulfilled.

Roadside Picnic is a very engaging  novel, its bad-ass, down-to-earth protagonist easily drawing the reader into his views and his world, swearing at the stupidity and greed of mankind all the while. The novel is divided into 4 parts over a few years time, and we see Redrick, usually from his point of view, as he travels into the Zone and navigates its dangers and deals with his resulting stress, fear and anger. We watch as he tries to outrun the bad consequences of his excursions, or as he deals with the upheaval caused by the influence of the zone, be that the mutations and the resurrected dead, or the police force determined to arrest the various stalkers.
We see his concerns and understand his lamentation for mankind's condition, as he tries to bury his loathing for its incurable greed, and the hate he carries for perpetuating it. He is a good man, strong, outspoken and intelligent, kind but capable of extreme ruthlessness.
It's very strange, because I'm usually not a character person, but I found Redrick fascinating, enviable even, and I honestly would've loved it if this whole story had been longer. Not even fully through the novel I found myself wishing there had been a few hundred pages more.
Apart from Redrick, the Zone itself is also a huge draw, of course. The horrifying and wildly varied anomalies and objects to be found within its perimeter were hugely inventive and colourful.
The last part of the novel has some odd beats, specifically; it ends in one of those dialogue endings that can be hit or definite miss and which I'm usually quite annoyed by. It's a testament to the novel that I didn't mind this one, as it left much food for thought, not simply in what Redrick says, but also in the situation that he's in when the novel ends, both physically and psychologically. It's unclear, and though the back-blurb to this edition makes it seem pretty definitive, I didn't think this was the case. Or, at the very least, I didn't want it to be.
As I said, I really wish this one had been longer. Very much recommended.

Review: Drachenfels, Kim Newman

"The hours flew by.

In the play, and without, the forces of darkness gathered."

Man, I had forgotten how good Drachenfels is.
Try as you might to efface it, there is a certain stigma attached to the Warhammer label. People from outside of the setting are quick to dismiss it as adolescent drivel, riddled with bad writing, worse characterization and a lamentable catering to a business model not conducive to originality or plotting. And they're not entirely wrong. But occasionally there comes a novel that blows those preconceptions out of the water.

The Genevieve novels were written before the entirety of Warhammer was set in grimdark stone, and though it still is dark and horrifying at times it very much has a different feel to it than wat came later. There is no real desperation here, no sense that this world is doomed; instead this is a world that, though there might still be hardship and evil and violence, is also filled with joy and love and art. There's barely anything to do with battles or war and instead the first novel's narrative revolves around the staging of a play.

20 years after he vanquished the great enchanter Constant Drachenfels, crown prince Oswald engages the services of the down-on-his-luck greatest artist the Old World has ever seen.

And though he rather have nothing to do anymore with the fickle nobility, frequently unappreciative of the works of true genius, Detlef Sierck, stuck in debtor's prison, has no choice but to accept and stage a play based on the prince's past exploits.

Swayed by the inspiring Oswald and his companions, the beautiful immortal Genevieve Dieudonné especially, Detlef is soon swept up in the passion for his work, and in spite of the rumours of bad luck and portents of doom, he slowly begins to create a production that has the potential to be one of the greatest works of the age.

But soon after they begin to arrive at castle Drachenfels, where the play will be held in front of the richest and most powerful rulers of the the Empire, as the prince's friends begin to turn up gruesomely murdered, it swiftly becomes apparent that a great darkness is stirring once again.

The characters are hugely likable and memorable, Detlef and his associate Vargr Breughel especially, and the story is riveting and quite original, certainly unprecedented or unfollowed within the setting. The narrative is engaging and moves swiftly, even as it is filled with surprises and mystery, tons of humour, black or not, and, since this is Warhammer Horror after all, a fair amount of horror.

After some initial misgivings, on re-read it became apparent that even though the impact of the horror elements might have been defused a little bit too much for the entire read to classify as pure horror, the sheer variety of them fully make it deserving of the label.
Insanity, sadistic serial killers, a haunting here and there, vampires haughty and humble, body horror and murder tableaux, insanity, unceremonious and shocking death, brooding, gothic castles, and so on.

But horror is more than just its trappings, and even back then a student of horror, Newman knows that it hits all the harder as it doled out sparingly, offset with humour and wit. He is one of those natural writers, somehow capable of imbuing his narrative with colour and vibrancy, while effortlessly fleshing out his setting and characters with seemingly inconsequential information that frequently turns out to be more important than first expected. He uses some writers tricks perfectly and here in Drachenfels, the spectacular fifth act of the play itself is simply brilliant.

A hugely enjoyable and very satisfying novel.

     -Small note, having read the short stories recently. Drachenfels overlaps with Newman's short stories in the earliest Warhammer anthologies. Both No Gold in the Grey Mountains and Ignorant Armies take place in the 20 years between the ending of the quest to end Drachenfels and the beginning of the Detlef Sierck storyline.

     -Lastly, because I just couldn't leave it be: Another note, this time on Warhammer compatibility.

In many ways Kim Newman's Genevieve does not fit at all in the Warhammer Old World as it came to be. It breaks too many of the settings' rules, and in more than a few cases the lore has evolved to actively exclude some of Drachenfels' main story elements. The locales don't always add up, there are some curious outdated details on cultures, races, historical events, the traits and capabailities of certain characters are outdated, and so on.

But the novels are so good, that even though they don't actually fit in the setting anymore, virtually any reader of Warhammer, dedicated to the concept of overall continuity as they may be, will gladly close an eye to any inconsistencies they might find.

     Now, with the Warhammer Horror label, gathering the darkest tales of their properties under its imprint, the Black Library quite smartly took the opportunity to republish the Genevieve tales. They stand on their own quite well and no further reading is required (or indeed, encouraged) to make sense of the world that they inhabit.

Review: Valkia the Bloody, Sarah Cawkwell

Valkia the Bloody belongs to the Warhammer Heroes range, completing the trifecta of the three characters whose stories were collected in the quite bad-ass Champions of Chaos omnibus.
It's an acceptable novel that starts out a bit weak but that ends up delivering quite a lot of cool Chaos imagery.

     The first 150 pages or so are a bit of a wash, not delivering much new in the 'Rise of a Chaos Warrior' trope in Warhammer; some random battles, the gifted child that slowly grows into a superlative warrior through dedication and fervour, leading to an unstoppable rise to power and the slow expansion of the warrior's native tribe, and so on.
     It's all been done before in Warhammer fiction and I was pretty unimpressed. Couple that with a few memorable instances of annoyance where I thought that the writing itself felt off, and I began to feel a bit down about the whole thing.
But then, it's an origins novel so I should've gone a bit easier on it at the start. With tales like this we already know that at a certain point there will have to be something quite out of the ordinary to upset the leisurely upward curve. So in order to take Valkia from the path of becoming just another warlord to the one where she will end up becoming the Consort of the Blood God himself, there had to be something momentous that would radically push the narrative into a new direction.
     Enter Locephax, the Slaaneshi daemon sent to tempt Valkia away from her patron lord and to the God of Pleasure and Pain. At first there's some games being played but as she finally understands the nature of her enemy Valkia ignites in a rage and what follows is an exceptionally fun and cool couple of chapters that lead to the rest of the novel being a pretty compulsory read.

     As for the overarching narrative of the Schwarzvulf tribe: Though Cawkwell does her best to write a compelling set of characters to support (and antagonise) our anti-heroine with, they can't help but become un-interesting if you realize that Valkia is going to outlast all of them. No matter how much they might scrabble for position and power. There are still a few surprises here and there though, and the ending of each character arc is at least satisfying or sadly poignant. The only one whose actions bothered me a bit, or at least gave me pause, were those of Valkia's half-brother, who veered from the determined, to the cowardly, to the flat-out heroic, to the cowardly again.
I understand what Cawkwell was going for, but there maybe should've been a little more exploration of his character to make it seem less jarring.

But all in all, it was actually a decent read.

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     Lastly, a small note: Depictions of the Chaos Wastes are always some of the most fun things to read in the whole of Warhammer and though it here felt a bit bland, the Khornate imagery that follows on its heels is exceptionally compelling. It's always surprising, and a little bit dangerous, when larger than life events from the lore are explored in a novel, but Cawkwell knows not to overstep the mark and to allude rather than to show outright. Valkia's title of Consort to Khorne always rang a bit improbable and 'out there' to me, but when we get down to those scenes it's pretty impressively done, intimating that Consort wouldn't necessarily have the connotations that you would expect it to have, especially when you're talking about a God of blood and violence.

Scan from the Warriors of Chaos rulebook (2009).

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After I had read the novel, I also picked up the Champions of Chaos omnibus in order to read Cawkwell's other Valkia stories. There are four in total and all of them, if you like your Warhammer, are very fun and intelligent reads wherein Cawkwell quite succesfully manages to engage the reader with different approaches.

     Bloodraven is the, kind of obligatory, story of the event that put Valkia the Bloody on the map, the act of atrocity that brought her to the attention of the world at large; her invasion of the northernmost Dwarven stronghold in the World's Edge Mountains, where with an insane Khorne army she besieges and ultimately destroys the keep of Karak Ghulg, gifting every single dwarf, dead or living, with the titular Blood Raven; an obscene and cruel practice whereby the sternum is shattered and broken to then have the ribs splayed open in imitation of a raptor's wings.

     Though the story is barely over thirty pages long, Cawkwell manages to make it feel suitably epic, delivering her fast-paced story through 4 points of view; the doomed Dwarven king and his eldest son, Bothvar the champion and leader of the Kharnate host, and Valkia the Bloody herself, who has been sent to see if any of the Dwarves are willing to see continued life and bloody glory under the banner of Khorne.
     There's not much else here except warfare, as one might expect from Warhammer fiction but the Dwarven king and his sons were delivered with some surprising nuance, given the page count. Cawkwell's writing skill also seemed to have improved quite a bit since the publication of the novel 2 years before, leading to a noticably fluid narrative that doesn't outstay its welcome.

     The next one up; Blood Blessing, isn't so much of a short story as it is a monologue of about a page and a half, spoken by Valkia to a dying warrior.
It is an interesting bit of dialogue in that it muses on the offer of 'Death or Glory' that Valkia usually delivers to the mortally wounded followers of Khorne, and she makes, honestly, quite a compelling argument for the listener to choose either offer. Though glory seems to be the self-evident choice, at the end of the story she will have made you see that death very well has its own reward (beyond that of 'hey, at least it'll be peaceful and stuff'). Impressive.

     Reaper I had already read in the Black Library Live chapbook of 2012. I remember It was the one that made me so enthusiastic way back when, about trying out some more Valkia and Cawkwell stories... Well... it took forever to get here, I suppose, but I finally got round to it.

Reaper is still a good little tale about a fallen Empire captain who is the last survivor of a long and bloody conflict between Empire and Kharnate forces. As he lies bleeding, near to death, he is visited by a winged daemon, who offers him 'death or glory'. There's a twist or two to be had here and the conclusion to the story is a memorable one (even though I'm still a little unsure of where exactly it leads).

Harbinger rounds off the Valkia tales, and it's a bit of a pity then that Valkia is only indirectly involved. However, this one does actually manage to flesh out the world that she inhabits, making it feel alive and populated, opening us up to the hierarchy of the warriors under her command, what they do, and the new and interesting ways in which Kharnate armies wage war. It takes a step back from our heroine and makes us feel confident that even though we might not ever end up seeing her again, she's still out there, reaping skulls for the Skull Throne.