Black Library Weekly – W/C 03/12/18

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. It’s the first full week of December, which means Black Library’s Advent Calendar is fully up and running, so I’m going to slightly change the usual format of this article to cover all of the Advent stories first, before taking a look at what else has been happening during the week. As always there’s lots to discuss, so let’s crack on…

Advent Calendar
This year’s Advent Calendar started last week with a Horus Heresy story from Graham McNeill and an Age of Sigmar story from Gav Thorpe, and this week it’s continued with seven more short stories. There should be six audio dramas coming at some point, but none of them have shown up just yet. What we have had, however, is a mixture of 40k, Age of Sigmar and Horus Heresy stories, with some pretty interesting characters and goings on. I’ll list out each of these, with a very quick description and a link to my review (apart from the last one, which I haven’t published yet).

Fire and Thunder by Rachel Harrison
If you’ve followed Track of Words for a while then you’ll know how much of a fan I am of Rachel’s writing, and this didn’t disappoint. It’s another fascinating story of the 11th Antari Rifles, and another brutal, unrelenting depiction of just how bad life gets for the Imperial Guard. Check out my review here.

Man of Iron by Guy Haley
Of all the awesome miniatures released as part of the Blackstone Fortress box, the one that appeals to me the most is UR-025, the ‘Imperial Robot’. If, like me, you’d like to learn a little more about who/what it is, plus get a little glimpse inside the Fortress itself, then this is definitely the story for you. Check out my review here.

The Deeper Shade by CL Werner
I confess, from the cover of this I automatically assumed it was an Idoneth Deepkin story. It isn’t! Instead, it’s a tale of a Chaos Sorcerer on the hunt for something he probably shouldn’t go looking for, and the sort of story that’s light on the bigger picture or a great deal of character motivation, but heavy on the fun. Check out my review here.

Abyssal by David Annandale
Another story with a somewhat misleading cover, this one looks like it’s going to be a Sisters of Silence story but is in fact about a terrified psyker imprisoned within one of the Black Ships. It’s Annandale, so as you’d imagine this isn’t the happiest of stories, but it’s nicely appropriate in tone and seems to be setting up something interesting for the Siege. Check out my review here.

Acts of Sacrifice by Evan Dicken
This one’s cover isn’t so much misleading as, well…boring. That’s a shame, because this isn’t just another story about Chaos-worshippers having a fight, but rather a tale set during the Age of Chaos with knights of Myrmidia facing apparently inevitable destruction. It’s an interesting story, and well worth reading. Check out my review here.

The Son of Sorrows by John French
The first of several Advent stories to have previously been released elsewhere, this one is a Horusian Wars story which was first published in the 2017/18 Events Anthology. That fact aside, it’s a fascinating exploration of Koleg, one of Covenant’s warband, and another illustration of just how good John’s writing is. Check out my review here.

A Lesson in Iron by David Guymer
The second story to be pulled from the Events Anthology, this one is Great Crusade-era Horus Heresy story featuring Ferrus Manus, and billed as a Primarchs story. At the time of writing this I haven’t yet re-read and reviewed this one, so keep an eye out for a review soon, but it’s always good to see more of Ferrus considering how little time the poor bloke got in the main Heresy series.

Midweek
It’s been a pretty quiet midweek period, Advent Calendar stories notwithstanding. The regular Wednesday Warhammer Community post was something of a disappointment, being a brief recap of the first five Advent stories (all that had been published up to then) which may have been of use to anyone who hadn’t been keeping up with the series, but didn’t offer much in the way of insight or genuine interest. I thought that was a shame, really – considering there’s so much BL content coming out in December it might have been nice for the Community team to give just a little bit more attention to Black Library and go for something a bit more interesting – either instead or as well as this post. Ah well.

One exciting snippet of news I came across on Twitter, however, was confirmation from Chris Wraight that he was finalising the last few edits on the sequel to Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne! This is excellent news – the first book was a brilliant, deeply fascinating story so here’s hoping the second – as yet untitled – book is just as good. No word on when it’s likely to be released yet, but if we’re lucky it could be sometime in the second half of 2019.

Weekend
On top of the seven Advent Calendar short stories released this week, the weekend saw pre-orders go live for two brand new Horus Heresy releases – the 53rd (!) book in the main-range series, and an audio drama which harks back to a time before the devastating events on Calth. Let’s have a look at these one at a time, starting with the novel…

A book which almost wasn’t written (as BL had originally, bafflingly, planned not to cover Beta-Garmon), Guy Haley’s Titandeath comes in as the penultimate book in the series before the Siege of Terra begins. It’s available in hardback (£20) and ebook (£9.99), with no audiobook available at the moment. I picked up my copy at the Weekender back in November, and absolutely loved it – you can have a read of my review right here. If that doesn’t convince you to go out and buy a copy, you can also read one of my usual quick Rapid Fire interviews with Guy by clicking here or on the banner below.

The weekend’s other release was a Horus Heresy audio drama – Hubris of Monarchia by Andy Smillie, which is available to pre-order now in the standard CD (£12) and MP3 (£11.99) formats. In a very classy move, Andy is donating all of his royalties for this release to the Samaritans, so while I’ve no idea how much of the £12 that is, it’s great to know that everyone who buys a copy (I’ve bought mine already) is going to be donating to charity as well as picking up a cool new Heresy story. I haven’t yet listened to this, but I’m looking forward to going back to before the Calth muster and listening to some Ultramarines scrapping with Orks.Thoughts on the week
While I’ve seen plenty of Saturdays with more releases than that, as a whole I’d say that any week which comes with a new novel, a new audio drama, and seven brand (ish) new short stories is a good week! Especially when no fewer than four of those releases were Horus Heresy stories, and not least when the new novel is as good as Titandeath is (in my opinion). There’s certainly been plenty to enjoy for Horus Heresy fans this week!

In terms of the rest of the Advent Calendar stories, I’ve been quite impressed by the standard so far. To be absolutely honest I haven’t yet read one in this year’s series which has really stood out as having the wow factor, but at the same time they’ve all been good – with Rachel Harrison’s Fire and Thunder (not Fire and Fury as I accidentally tweeted…that’s a VERY different story) and Guy Haley’s Man of Iron being my personal pick of the bunch so far. That being said, I haven’t actually re-read The Son of Sorrows, but my memory of that one is that it’s DAMN good, so maybe that’s another one to keep at the top of the list.

I do still feel like it’s a shame the Advent series couldn’t be entirely made up of 100% brand new stories, although to be fair it’s meant that I’ve had a slightly more relaxed weekend as I haven’t had to write a review for The Son of Sorrows – so I guess it’s swings and roundabouts really! I’d be interested to hear from anyone who hadn’t managed to snag a copy of the Black Library Events Anthology 2017/18 and therefore for whom all 24 (well, 23 seeing as one of them is available in Sacrosanct & Other Stories) Advent stories are brand new – do you mind that some of them were previously published elsewhere? Or are you just happy to get to read these at last?

Here’s the usual rundown of everything I’ve posted this week. There have been a couple of double post days, so it’s a longer list than usual!

Coming up…
From what I can see there are two releases coming next weekend, both of which are paperback/ebook omnibuses – The Beast Arises Volume 3 (featuring David Annandale, David Guymer, Rob Sanders and Guy Haley) and The Tyrion and Teclis Omnibus by William King. Plus another seven Advent Calendar stories – presumably including at least one of the six forthcoming audios.

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.

One comment

  1. Hi Michael,

    The Carrion Throne 2 book is definitely coming out in a few months.
    German release is in August already.

    Reply

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