Black Library Weekly – W/C 26/02/18

Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of Black Library Weekly, my regular look at what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. After last week’s sort-of excitement, this week has been unusually Warhammer-focused and something of a blast from the past. There are some interesting things to talk about this week, so let’s dive straight in.

Monday
It was back to a single Digital Monday short story this week, after the six stories in last week’s Necromunda Week collection. This time around Black Library dipped into the Warhammer archives with Bloodwalker by CL Werner (£2.49 in ebook), a Malus Darkblade short story that as far as I can tell had only previously been published in an event-only anthology back in 2012. You can read my review here. There’s something lovely about getting hold of a surprise story like this; it’s almost like a forgotten treasure, and a reminder of just how good a character Darkblade was.

Midweek
There were just a couple of newsworthy items during the middle of the week, one from the Warhammer Community site and one from Black Library’s Facebook page. First up was a new cover reveal, with Neil Roberts’ final cover for the next Space Marine Conquests novel – Phil Kelly’s War of Secrets – confirmed on Facebook. Here’s that artwork – it’s something a little different from Roberts compared to his usual Horus Heresy style, but I rather like it. I’m also really pleased to see this sort of post coming from Black Library, providing a little snippet of interesting news as and when it becomes available. I’d love to see more like this in future.

The second item was a Warhammer Community interview with Josh Reynolds, where Josh talked a little about his new book Lukas the Trickster and about the character of Lukas himself. If you haven’t already, I’d definitely recommend having a read – it’s an interesting insight into the way Josh sees this character, and if you haven’t yet picked up the novel then this might just persuade you to.

Weekend
The main release for the weekend was Josh Reynolds’ Age of Sigmar novel Nagash: The Undying King, which after having a Warhammer World-exclusive hardback and a Christmas digital-only release is now finally available in hardback (£12.99) and MP3 (£9.99) editions. Those are slightly unusual prices so I’ll be interested to see exactly what the hardback looks like in person – it’s not the longest of novels, but Black Library have released plenty of short novels at ‘full’ prices before, so this seems like an interesting choice. You can read a Rapid Fire interview with Josh talking about this book here, or alternatively check out my review here. Suffice to say, this is probably my personal favourite Age of Sigmar novel so far.

Off the back of The Undying King there’s also a digital collection of Nagash stories, featuring five novels from both Josh Reynolds and Mike Lee. Nagash: The eBook Bundle comes in at £25.99 for those five ebooks (working out at just over a fiver per book), and includes The Undying King as the only Age of Sigmar novel, along with Josh’s End Times novel The Return of Nagash and Mike’s classic Time of Legends (or Warhammer Chronicles, these days) series – Nagash the Sorcerer, Nagash the Undying and Nagash Immortal. It’s a bit of a weird mixture with almost pre-Warhammer, the End Times and then Age of Sigmar, but there are some cracking books in there. If you’ve not yet read these, you could do a lot worse than pick this collection up.

That wasn’t the only bundle, and nor was it the only old-school Warhammer release. I was a little surprised at the Darkblade short story coming out on Monday, but it made a bit more sense after the release on Saturday of all of the Darkblade books as print on demand paperbacks. Like the Necromunda titles released at the end of 2017, these paperbacks are only available for a limited time – until 31st March – and at £7.99 each (mostly) they look to be the small mass-market paperback format. They’re available either as individual titles or in a bundle – here’s the full list of titles:

• Darkblade: The Graphic Novel by Dan Abnett & Kev Hopgood (£11.99).
• The Daemon’s Curse by Dan Abnett & Mike Lee.
• Bloodstorm by Dan Abnett & Mike Lee.
• Reaper of Souls by Dan Abnett & Mike Lee.
• Warpsword by Dan Abnett & Mike Lee.
• Lord of Ruin by Dan Abnett & Mike Lee.
• Deathblade by CL Werner.

The bundle is priced at £59.93, so again like the Necromunda bundle there’s no discount – it’s the total cost of all six books bought together. While it would be nice to get a discount, at least it means that the decision is simple – if you don’t have any of them, and do want them all, buy the bundle. If you only want or need certain volumes, then get them individually; there’s no temptation to get the whole bundle unless you genuinely need them all.

If you’re not fussed for physical copies, you could alternatively pick up Darkblade: eBook Bundle which is a collection of the six novels (but not the graphic novel) as ebooks and is priced at £30.96. That’s actually quite a good price – to buy the ebooks individually would set you back £44.94 (five at £6.99 plus Deathblade at £9.99), so you’re saving a third. It’s a bit of a shame that the graphic novel isn’t available as an ebook – I think I’ve still got all my old copies of Warhammer Monthly with the original comics in them, but if you didn’t get them first time around, and you prefer to read comics/graphic novels on an e-reader, then it looks like you’re out of luck.

Thoughts on the week
If nothing else, it’s really cool to see Black Library focusing so heavily on Warhammer stories – both Age of Sigmar and old-school Warhammer. If it were me, I think I’d have made a bigger deal of it and talked online about this being ‘Warhammer Week’ or something similar. There’s still a lot of love from fans for the old Warhammer stories, so I think bringing Darkblade back as print on demand is a great idea, and I imagine these are probably going to be pretty popular. Dan Abnett does tend to have that effect.

I am, however, slightly surprised that of all the old Warhammer characters, it’s Darkblade that gets the first print on demand treatment. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a fantastic character, but I’d have expected Gotrek and Felix to have been tackled first. As far as I can see you can only get physical copies of the final two books at the moment – none of the William King/Nathan Long novels are available in paperback. Perhaps there are just too many of them, or maybe Black Library are holding those off to release when David Guymer’s Realmslayer is released.

Whatever the reason, it’s cool to see Darkblade getting some love again. Considering that the Weekender anthology must have only ever had a few hundred copies printed, the short story Bloodwalker is about as close as we’re likely to get to a genuinely brand new Warhammer story any time soon. The obvious question now is whether Darkblade might return in Age of Sigmar – I sort of hope he doesn’t, not because he isn’t awesome (he obviously is) but because I think there are only so many old characters that can be brought back to life before it all starts getting a bit pointless. Who knows though…perhaps plans are afoot to bring him back. I’m sure we’ll find out, if so.

So it’s definitely felt like a Warhammer week, with the exception of Josh’s interview about Lukas the Trickster. That’s absolutely fine by me, although if you’re a 40k or Heresy purist then it’s obviously going to have felt like a bit of a dry week. I’m sure that will be rectified soon enough, however – and if you’ve never read any of the old Warhammer stories, perhaps now’s the time to check some of them out?

As always, here’s the list of what I’ve posted so far this week:

• QUICK REVIEW: Dirty Dealings by Rachel Harrison.
• QUICK REVIEW: Bloodwalker by CL Werner.
• Ashes of Prospero by Gav Thorpe.
• Monthly Highlights – February 2018.
• RAPID FIRE: Josh Reynolds Talks Nagash: The Undying King.
• Lord of Undeath – CL Werner.

Coming up…
From what I can see, next week should bring with it the paperback of Cult of the Spiral Dawn by Peter Fehervari. Sadly that’s not a brand new novel, but rather a repackaged edition of Peter’s Genestealer Cults novel along with the short story Cast A Hungry Shadow. Great to see this get a proper release and a proper title! As the first full week of March, we should also see June’s new releases confirmed on Wednesday.

As always, if you’ve got any thoughts or comments on the week’s news and releases please do get in touch via the comments section below or on Facebook or Twitter.