Black Library Weekly – W/C 02/04/18

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. We’re now in the first full week of April, if you can believe it, which means another month’s worth of new releases (although there’s more than usual to talk about in relation to that) along with the usual cool new stuff this week. Let’s have a look at what happened…

Monday
It’s been a week of unusual delays on the Black Library website, beginning with the standard Digtial Monday short story, which this week was Rise by Ben Counter (£2.49 in ebook). This actually showed up online last weekend, on some pages of the BL website, with a link which just redirected back to the same page – it’s like BL were teasing us! As it happened, Monday morning came and went with no sign of the link working, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that the story became available.

Thankfully it was well worth the wait, as Rise turned out to be an enjoyable, dark and old school 40k story which to my mind harked back to some of Counter’s best work back in the early days of Black Library. You can have a read of my review here – suffice to say it’s not the most in-depth of character studies, but it’s really enjoyable nonetheless.

Midweek
As it’s the first week of April I was looking forward to a seeing a raft of new releases pop up on Wednesday to fill up July’s release slots. I don’t think I was the only person to be puzzled when nothing showed up at all – at first I assumed there was another delay, like there had been on Monday, but as it turned out the new releases simply weren’t made available on Wednesday. Now, in the end I was pleased to see July’s new releases show up online on Saturday – more on this later – but whether that was a one-off or the sign of things to come remains to be seen.

With the new releases not happening on Wednesday, there was a gap for a Warhammer Community article, which was filled by this post looking at an impressive diorama based on Robbie MacNiven’s latest novel Carcharadons: Outer Dark. It’s pretty cool, but as more of a Black Library fan than a gaming fan, I think I’d have preferred to see something talking specifically about books. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and all that.

That was it during the midweek period, so let’s move straight onto the weekend.

Weekend
As I mentioned before, the new titles for July showed up on Saturday instead of Wednesday, and I’ll quickly go through those after first taking the usual look at the weekend’s releases. This week there weren’t any brand new titles, but instead there were two omnibus editions and a Horus Heresy mass market paperback. Not the most exciting lineup if you’re already caught up on the Heresy, Gaunt’s Ghosts and old-school Warhammer…but otherwise there’s plenty of good stuff to get stuck into!

Firstly, the Horus Heresy series reaches book 40 in mass market paperback (i.e. the small format) with Gav Thorpe’s Corax, with the £7.99 paperback making it five different editions available for this one – there’s also hardback (£20), trade paperback (or premium paperback as BL call it, at £12.99), ebook (£9.99) and MP3 audiobook (£29.99). One day I’ll get round to writing a full review of this one, including the brilliant (but super dark) novella Weregeld, but until then if you’d like to read my thoughts on it you can check out my individual reviews of most of the component stories – Soulforge, Ravenlord, The Shadowmasters and The Value of Fear.

Next up are two new omnibus editions, both available for £14.99 in ebook or £15 in paperback. For 40k fans, Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Lost collects together books 8 to 11 in the series – so that’s Traitor General, His Last Command, The Armour of Contempt and Only in Death. That’s the third of these omnibuses with the nice new covers, and takes us up to the final arc with one book – Anarch – still to be released. For old-school Warhammer fans, the latest Warhammer Chronicles omnibus is Champions of Chaos, featuring stories by Sarah Cawkwell, Ben Counter and Darius Hinks. It features three novels – Valkia the Bloody, Van Horstmann and Sigvald – along with no fewer than four short stories (all from Cawkwell). That’s a LOT of Chaos goodness, if you’re so inclined.

So those are the weekend’s new releases, but what about July’s upcoming releases? I was a little surprised to see these show up on Saturday, not least because they were at first listed but with links which – like with Rise on Monday – just redirected back to the same page. Thankfully the links did eventually activate, and so these are all available to check out with synopses and covers on the Black Library website:

Vulkan: Lord of Drakes by David Annandale
Book nine in the Primarchs series (half way!), and Annandale’s second contribution after Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar, this one takes a look at Vulkan and the Salamanders at a really early stage in their story. It sounds like it’s going to be all about how Vulkan and his new Nocturnean recruits interact with the original Terran legion, which seems like an interesting premise. It should also be interesting to see another author tackle this legion, which has tended to be covered mostly by Nick Kyme so far. As you can tell from the picture above, this is the beautiful (and expensive, at £40) limited edition version – expect the standard edition in another three months or so.

Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris by Chris Wraight
With the limited edition of this one having been released back in March, there’s a slightly longer than usual wait for the standard edition until July – but if it’s anything like Wraight’s previous Heresy books featuring the White Scars then it should be worth the wait. In case you missed the original release of this one, it’s a Great Crusade-era story which takes in the Khan’s role in the creation of the Librarius. I can’t wait to check this one out, and after hearing Chris read from it at a previous event, I’ve got a great feeling about it.

The Horusian Wars: Incarnation by John French
This is a particular highlight for me – the second novel in John French’s ongoing The Horusian Wars series, after the dark, complex and fascinating Resurrection. There’s no sign at the moment of a limited edition hardback, which would be a real shame considering how gorgeous the LE of Resurrection was, but let’s focus on the important issue here – as long as the book is great (which I’m confident it will be) then that’s the main thing! If you haven’t yet read Resurrection, or checked out the Agent of the Throne audio drama series with Blood and Lies and Truth and Dreams then I really can’t recommend them enough!

Mephiston: Revenant Crusade by Darius Hinks
A second Mephiston novel from Darius Hinks after 2017’s Blood of Sanguinius, this one looks like it’s set in the new Dark Imperium-era timeline, which should throw up some interesting tensions for this important Blood Angels character. For me personally Blood of Sanguinius didn’t quite hit the spot, but I’ll be interested to see what this one’s like.

Hunger by Andy Smillie
I’m a massive fan of Andy Smillie’s short stories and audio dramas, and after The Assassination of Gabriel Seth I’ve been looking forward to seeing what comes next with the Flesh Tearers. The cover of this one alone has got me excited, and hearing Seth and the Flesh Tearers take on genestealers in the cramped confines of a space hulk…that should be brilliant! I really, really can’t wait to check this out.

Callis and Toll: The Silver Shard by Nick Horth
After their debut in the short novel/novella (not really sure how it’s pitched) City of Secrets – which I’ve still to read – and a quick follow up in the short story The Old Ways, Nick Horth’s double team Callis and Toll get their own full novel in this one. It’s so good to see Age of Sigmar continuing to branch out from Stormcast-centric stories, and this is the sort of tale that should appeal to fans of old-school Warhammer while also take advantage of the scale and scope that the Mortal Realms offer. Should be very interesting.

Ulrika the Vampire: The Omnibus by Nathan Long
The first of two omnibuses in July, this one continues the rapid growth of the Warhammer Chronicles series with a collection of Nathan Long’s vampiric tales. If you’re not familiar, Ulrika first appeared in the Gotrek and Felix series before being spun off into her own series (the title of this omnibus is a bit of a spoiler if you’ve not read Gotrek and Felix…). This is one series which I never got round to reading first time around, but it seems to be enduringly popular, so this omnibus might just be the way for me to check it out…

Enforcer: The Shira Calpurnia Omnibus by Matthew Farrer
This one is something of a surprise, but a welcome one. Matt Farrer’s Shira Calpurnia trilogy is consistently excellent, and often held up as another example – alongside Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn – of the sort of ‘domestic 40k’ that takes things away from the battlefield and into the streets of 40k’s cities. I’m pretty sure this has been available as an ebook for a long while, but it’s great to see it get the paperback treatment once again. I might even dig out my old copy and have a re-read of some of these stories!

Unusually, all of these titles – along with everything else listed for May and June – are currently showing up with release dates. That’s great for anyone – like me – who prefers to plan their purchases, and I really hope Black Library continue to give us this information up front!

There’s just one more thing to talk about, and that’s the banner sitting at the top of July’s Coming Soon page on the BL website. I rather like these banners, and think they’re nicely designed – they tend to combine three snippets of cover art from the titles due to be released that month, and they give a bit of colour and character to the website. What’s interesting this month is that July’s banner seems to feature artwork from titles which haven’t yet been released! Take a look at the image below:

The left-hand segment is from the cover to Chris Wraight’s Lords of Silence, the German version of which has been doing the rounds online for the last few days. The middle segment…well that remains to be seen. I did see a suggestion on Twitter that it could be from John French’s next Heresy novel Slaves to Darkness, which would make sense as it appears to be Fulgrim, who I’m expecting to feature heavily in that book. Time will tell! The right-hand segment is – I think – going to be from CL Werner’s next Age of Sigmar novel, which I’m expecting to feature the two witch hunters – Esselt and Talorcan – who featured in his short story The Witch Takers.

Thoughts on the week
It’s genuinely been a bit of a strange week in terms of keeping an eye on Black Library’s website – the usual rhythms have been thrown off quite considerably, following on from a similar but rather less noticeable delay last week with the Monday short story. It’s going to be interesting to see if this is signalling some changes to how Digital Monday stories and each new month’s releases are listed, and ultimately it doesn’t matter as long as everything does show up eventually.

Speaking of Monday short stories, I was pleasantly surprised by Rise this week – I don’t have a particular attachment to drukhari stories, but this was dark and bleak and really reminded me of the sort of stories that used to be published in Inferno! magazine and all those cool old short story anthologies. By which I mean it doesn’t tie into anything else, doesn’t feature famous characters or anything like that, and tells a nicely standalone tale with a typical grim 40k ending. It’s well worth checking out, and I’d love to see more like that from Counter.

The rest of the week’s releases are all very much worth having for anyone who didn’t get hold of them first time around – whether that’s because of avoiding Heresy hardbacks (which is totally fair enough), being new (or new-ish) to Black Library and not having been around when they were first released, or simply by virtue of not having got around to reading them yet. There’s a lot of good stuff in those three paperbacks, and it’s all well worth checking out. Ok, a week with nothing actually brand new means that anyone who’s keeping right on top of new BL stuff won’t have anything to get into, but then it’s nice to sometimes have a break. I mean, I tend to keep up as much as I can, but I do appreciate having a week where there’s nothing brand new for me to buy and read, so I can crack on with other things!

Just a final note on July’s new releases, to say that while (as someone pointed out to me on Twitter) there’s no main-range Heresy titles in there, I’ve got to say it’s a really, really impressive selection. For me personally it’s nice (albeit a little daunting) to see a month where almost everything is brand new to me, as it’s only Enforcer which I’ve already read. I’m looking forward to everything else to a greater or lesser extent, and time (and money) permitting I’ll hopefully pick up and get stuck into pretty much everything there! The one exception will be the Vulkan book, but I’ll enjoy that when it comes out in standard format. Of the rest, I’m very much looking forward to both Incarnation and Hunger for 40k, while The Silver Shard is getting me excited about Age of Sigmar again. So much to look forward to!

As usual, here’s a quick roundup of what I’ve been posting this week:

• Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams by John French
• Monthly Highlights – March 2018
• QUICK REVIEW: Rise by Ben Counter
• QUICK REVIEW: Where Icathia Once Stood by Graham McNeill (League of Legends)
• Rynn’s World by Steve Parker

Coming up…
The main release for next week looks like being Legacy of Dorn by Mike Lee, which from what I can tell is going to portray the story already told in Rynn’s World from a different perspective. I’m keen to see what that’s like! If you take a look around the BL website you’ll also see that there’s a new Age of Sigmar short story from Guy Haley showing up – The Sands of Grief. Once again the link doesn’t take you anywhere, but it looks like that’s going to be Monday’s new short story.

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.