Black Library Weekly – W/C 20/02/17

Hello and welcome to the latest Black Library Weekly, my weekly look through what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. This week has followed a similar pattern to last week; Monday saw a fun new short story, but then nothing much happened until the weekend. As always, let’s start at the beginning and work our way through the week…

Monday
If you’ve read this blog before, there’s a good chance you’re already aware how much I love Blood Bowl stories…so I was VERY pleased on Monday to see a brand new one. And from Guy Haley, no less, featuring a goblin team! If you haven’t already, I suggest you go RIGHT NOW and buy Hoppo’s Pies, available as an ebook for a measly £2.49. It’s everything you could hope for, and another example of why Blood Bowl deserves more stories!

Fun fact: it’s the first non-40k short story of the year!

Midweek
My theory of there being a pattern of midweek news seems to be a non-starter, as there was very little newsworthy this week – no cool new boxed set, no updated Coming Soon details. The one piece of news was confirmation that the final week of Audio Month is to feature the audiobook of David Annandale’s Space Marine Battles book (consisting of three novellas) Overfiend for half price, which puts it at £14.99 in MP3 format. There have been some good bargains during this promotion, if you’re an audio fan! Don’t forget that you can still pick up the Black Library Audio Sampler for free – I’m assuming that it’s only going to be available in February, although that might not be the case.

Weekend
On to the one new novel released this week – Mephiston: Blood of Sanguinius by Darius Hinks. Available as usual in hardback (£18) and ebook (£9.99) formats, it’s the first of two Blood Angels novels due out in close succession – Guy Haley’s Dante is due out next weekend. It’s the first 40k novel to come from Darius Hinks – previously he’s only written Warhammer and Age of Sigmar books – and you’d think Mephiston might not be the easiest character for him to pick as his first choice…so this should be quite interesting.

That was the only brand new title, but Saturday also saw three other releases…beginning with the audiobook of Hereticus by Dan Abnett. The third book in the legendary Eisenhorn trilogy, it’s available as an unabridged MP3 only – £24.99 for a little under ten hours of audio. As with the first two audiobooks it’s read by Toby Longworth, so I think it’s safe to say it’s going to be brilliant!

The final releases of the weekend were two books in paperback format – the Age of Sigmar novel Warbeast by Gav Thorpe (book six in the Realmgate Wars series, and recently nominated for a Gemmell Award) and the anthology Deathwatch: Ignition featuring eleven stories from nine different authors. Both are available for £8.99, and are shipping from next Saturday, the 4th March.

Thoughts on the week
After a great start (did I mention how much I love Blood Bowl?) to the week, things quietened down considerably with very little happening until the weekend. You might say we should consider that to be the norm, with any additional news, announcements etc. to be bonuses, but there seem to have been so many interesting extras popping up in previous weeks that it can’t help but feel a little quiet without anything similar.

The weekend however saw some interesting new releases, not least Darius Hinks’ Mephiston novel. Whether there’s going to be enough interest from fans to justify an £18 hardback of a novel from someone who hasn’t written a 40k story before…remains to be seen. The Blood Angels undoubtedly have a huge fanbase, but it’s definitely going to be interesting to see how well this one is received.

As always it’s nice to see new paperbacks, but for me it’s the audiobook of Hereticus that’s more interesting, finishing off the audio versions of one of the best 40k series around. Arguably one of the best Black Library series full stop.Coming up…
It looks like next week’s main release is going to be Guy Haley’s Blood Angels novel Dante, which is due to come in ebook as well as standard and Limited Edition hardback formats. Some of these LE versions are looking absolutely stunning, and this one’s no exception – £40 is a lot of money, but judging from the photos on the Black Library website it looks absolutely gorgeous.

As always, if you’ve got any thoughts on the week’s news and releases please do give me a shout to let me know!