September is upon us, and it’s officially – technically – Autumn, so it’s time for me to take a look back at the stories I’ve read and reviewed in August and pick out a few highlights. Whether Autumn is really upon us or not, last month brought with it Black Library’s annual Summer of Reading campaign, and I’ve picked out two of the short stories from that campaign as my honourable mentions for August. It wasn’t hard to pick an overall highlight, however, even if I did cheat a little bit and consolidate three stories into one for that choice.
In case you haven’t guessed already, those three stories are the three Prophets of Waaagh! short audio dramas by Guy Haley – The End of Daze, Bozgat’s Big Adventure and The Waaagh! Faker (click those titles to read my reviews). It’s not often that you see Black Library stories written from the perspective of greenskins, but when Guy Haley’s writing them you can usually trust that they’re going to be good fun, and that’s exactly what these three are. I listened to the first two on a fairly long train journey, and had to work hard not to regularly laugh out loud and annoy the other passengers, they were that good! I’m starting to sound a bit like a broken record I know, but the quality of recent audio dramas from BL is just staggering, and in terms of production values and choice of actors these are as good as anything else you’ll hear.
I decided that rather than jump straight in and listen to these right away I’d probably be better off reading and listening to the previous stories that Guy had written about these characters – the Red Sunz. In narrative order there’s an e-short (Engine of Mork), which is labelled as an Apocalypse short story (shows how long ago that was released), followed by a novella (Evil Sun Rising) and a short audio (Klaw of Mork), both in the Sanctus Reach series. I wouldn’t necessarily say that they were absolutely essential to read/listen to before you pick up the Prophets of Waaagh! audios, but personally I was glad to have a little familiarity with the main characters before I tackled these new stories.
Whether you decide to check those earlier stories out or not, what you get from these three short audios is a single overarching narrative broken down into three chunks, each of which focuses on one of the main three Red Sunz orks – Big Mek Uggrim, Bozgat, and Snikgob. They’re set on something of a backwater world, where the orks have crashed after the Cicatrix Maledictum tore reality apart – an event the orks, in typical greenskin fashion, interpret as Gork’s grin splitting the sky. They’re three individual stories, so you could absolutely just listen to one of them if that’s all you want, but I defy anyone to listen to the first one and not want to hear more! While Klaw of Mork was an entertaining audio drama with a good story and some decent voice acting, these new audios have stepped everything up, not least the sheer quality of the acting and the overall soundscape.
Right from the outset they really go all in on the orkishness, as the usual narration of the cast list is subverted and morphs into the ominous sound of guttural orkish, translated with relish by the always listenable Jonathan Keeble. That’s representative of the way Guy Haley gets under the (green) skin of orkish stories, and manages to pretty much perfectly balance the brutality and casual violence inherent in the greenskins in 40k, with a sense of slapdash humour that somehow doesn’t detract from that darkness. These are orks who will brutally slaughter any grots that displease them, simply because they’re weak and vulnerable, and then grumpily accuse the dead greenskins of slacking – it’s grim, but darkly funny.
To be honest I don’t think I’d want there to be too many 40k stories like these. I mean, I absolutely love the occasional splash of humour in 40k – these ork stories, Josh’s Lukas the Trickster stuff, the Ciaphas Cain novels – but I think they need to be the exception rather than the rule. 40k should, after all, be dark and gritty and really damn unpleasant for the people who live and fight and die in it. That doesn’t mean it can’t have humour, however, so the occasional story like these ones offers up the chance to see a different side to what we normally read and listen about, and orks are obvious candidates for this sort of story. When you’ve got Guy Haley writing them, and a voice cast as good as this one, they can be something a little bit special – which is exactly what these are. If you can be patient and wait for the Prophets of Waaagh! collection to come out then it’s probably worth doing that, as it’s a bit better value, but there’s not that much difference, and one way or another I’d urge you to check them out!
As I mentioned at the top, for my honourable mentions in August I want to take a quick look at a couple of short stories from the Summer of Reading campaign. They’re from two authors who are pretty new to Black Library, but who on the strength of their first few stories have VERY quickly become ones to watch, in my opinion. The two stories are A Company of Shadows by Rachel Harrison and Lightning Run by Peter McLean, and both are stories very much about relatable, human characters forced into pretty horrifying situations who somehow manage to keep going and fighting through grit, determination and faith. Perfect 40k stories, in other words.
Starting with A Company of Shadows, this follows on from last year’s Execution, which was one of my absolute highlights of the whole year and saw Rachel introducing the characters of Commissar Severina Raine and the 11th Antari Rifles. This time around it’s a more ambitious story, which broadens out the scope a little and manages to further develop both Raine’s character and that of Sergeant Wyck, who’s turning into something a little bit like the early depiction of Major Rawne in the Gaunt’s Ghosts stories. In fact the comparison with Abnett’s Ghosts stories is apt, as even though Raine and the Antari have only had two short stories in which to grow on me, I’m already getting the sense that there’s a wider story here with an awful lot of potential. Will this turn into an epic Imperial Guard series? I’ve no idea. I can’t wait to find out, though.
Last but by no means least we’ve got Lightning Run by Peter McLean. This is McLean’s second Black Library story after the grim, at times horrifying Baphomet By Night, and while it features different characters and perhaps isn’t quite as dark, it does share many of that story’s characteristics. I’m really keen to read some of his non-BL work to see how his writing translates to settings other than 40k, but in his first two BL stories McLean is demonstrating a grasp of 40k’s inherent tone and feel that really is second to none – as long as you want to go full-on into the darkness and plumb the depths of what relatable, human characters have to do in order to survive. There are a couple of moments in Lightning Run which genuinely made me shudder as I imagined what the character would be experiencing. I guess it might not be for everyone, but for me this was the best story in the Summer of Reading campaign, and has me waiting with bated breath for whatever McLean writes next for BL.
So there you have it, my top three (ish) picks for August’s Monthly Highlights – the three Prophets of Waaagh! short audio dramas by Guy Haley, A Company of Shadows by Rachel Harrison, and Lightning Run by Peter McLean. I’d love to know what you thought of these stories if you’ve read any of them, so let me know in the comments below or on Facebook or Twitter. I’ll hopefully write another one of these posts at the start of October, looking back at what I’ve read and reviewed in September!
Man, i wish i could buy all these😔