Black Library Monthly – April 2019

Welcome to Black Library Monthly for April 2019, in which I’m going to take a look over the key pieces of Black Library-related news which arose over the last month, as well as talk about the month’s new releases and what I’ve been reviewing. In some respects it’s felt like quite a quiet month on the BL front, but looking back there’s actually still been a decent amount to talk about as well as a fair few new releases – including a rare brand-new Digital Monday short story. As usual, I’ll kick off by taking a look at the month’s general BL-related news before moving onto a couple of more specific topics and then the month’s releases.

News

I usually tend to start these articles off with a look at snippets of news that I came across online, and while at first I didn’t think I had a huge amount to talk about on that front this time around, it turns out there’s still plenty. Firstly, a couple of quick snippets that I spotted in the book trade (i.e. not via official BL channels – more on that a little later) about some upcoming releases. Firstly, you might remember that towards the end of 2018 BL released a series of ten novellas with the snappy title of the Black Library Novella Series 1 – it looks like the 40k and Age of Sigmar instalments of that series are being bundled up into their own omnibuses:

If you’re wondering what’s happening with the remaining three novellas in the series, Mike Brooks’ Wanted: Dead is going to be included in the Underhive anthology (which I mentioned in last month’s article) while it’s not yet clear how (or even whether) the two Heresy titles are going to be included in anthology/omnibus form.

Speaking of the Horus Heresy, you might remember that last month a Warhammer Community article confirmed the title of the next Siege of Terra novel – The Lost and the Damned by Guy Haley. Nothing else has been confirmed via official BL/GW channels, but the book trade does now have this title listed (due out in October in standard hardback) with the synopsis available. Here’s what we know so far:

On the thirteenth day of Secundus, the bombardment of Terra began… With the solar defences overcome through the devastating strength of the Traitor armada and the power of the warp, Horus launches his assault on the Throneworld in earnest. After withstanding a ferocious barrage of ordnance, an immense ground war commences outside the Palace with every inch gained paid for in the lives of billions. The front lines are beyond horrific and the very air is reduced to poison and blood. Bodies are thrown into the meatgrinder but the outer redoubts cannot possibly hold for long, even with the loyal primarchs to reinforce them. For Horus has his own generals to call upon… Between the plague weapons of Mortarion and the fury of Angron, the defenders face a losing battle.

Sounds pretty cool, eh? Next, from the Heresy to Warhammer Horror and an interview with the legend that is Kim Newman. Check out this Warhammer Community post for a bit of generic information about the re-release of Drachenfels and then a lovely interview with Kim reminiscing about his early days writing for Warhammer. He seems like a genuinely lovely guy, and exactly how I imagine an English horror writer to be! If you fancy a little bit more from that interview, you could always sign up to the BL email newsletter which, a few weeks ago, contained the transcription of a couple more of Kim’s answers. Once signed up (or if you’re already signed up but missed that email) just open an email from BL, click View in browser and select the Past Issues option, which allows you to go back and check out previous emails.

Speaking of the Warhammer Community site, this article about Warhammer Events was published a few weeks ago and contains a little bit of information about Black Library’s involvement in Warhammer Fest – which is taking place in Coventry on the 11th and 12th May. That article confirmed that John French, Guy Haley, Graeme Lyon, David Guymer, Gav Thorpe and Neil Roberts will be in attendance across the weekend (John, Guy and and Graeme on Saturday and David, Gav and Neil on Sunday), while this later article confirmed the seminar and signing schedules for both days. Here are a couple of bits of information about the Black Library seminars:

  • Saturday 12pm – The Siege of Terra: The Solar War: author John French and Black Library editor Jacob Youngs discuss the opening salvo of this epic megaseries, and hint at horrors yet to come.
  • Saturday 1pm – The Night Haunter: Guy Haley and Jacob Youngs talk about the latest novel in the Primarchs series, focusing on one of the most notorious characters of the Horus Heresy.
  • Sunday 11am – Tales from the Mortal Realms: David Guymer, Gav Thorpe and editor Richard Garton talk about the latest stories set in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar universe.
  • Sunday 1pm – Creating Audio Dramas: David Guymer, Gav Thorpe and Richard Garton discuss what makes serialised stories like Realmslayer and Our Martyred Lady different from novels and even other audio dramas.

Lastly for this section, check out this tweet from Black Library Managing Editor Nick Kyme:

Here’s that link if you’d like to check it out and find out more about who’s been nominated for what, but essentially the Scribe Awards are an annual event “acknowledging excellence in the field of tie-in writing”. Last year John French won the Audio Drama category for his 40k audio Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, while this year BL authors Peter McLean, Rachel Harrison and John French (again) are all nominated in the Short Story category. The winners will be announced in July, so let’s hope that one of the BL team bring home their category!

Coming Soon page
Moving on from the various bits of general news, I can’t talk about what happened in April without at least briefly mentioning the ongoing saga of the Black Library Coming Soon page. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months, the long and short of it is that BL decided to remove the Coming Soon page from their website, a decision which was met with…let’s say ‘a little resistance’. You can read my thoughts on the original decision and what happened around that in this article, but I was pleased to see that during April a brand new version of the page was revealed over on the Warhammer Community site. If you haven’t already, go check that out here.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here regarding the new version of the page, but if you’d like to read my immediate thoughts on it you can check out this article. What I do want to talk about is the updates which have been made since it was first published, as I think the key measure of how useful this page is going to be will end up being the frequency at which it’s updated. For this to be a genuinely useful resource it’s going to need to be regularly updated, not just with new releases being added but with past releases being removed, otherwise what’s the point of having it?

Since it was published (on the 10th April) three of the titles it’s featured have been released (at least on pre-order) – The Red Feast by Gav Thorpe, the Lords and Tyrants anthology, and Steve Parker’s Deathwatch: Shadowbreaker. As I write this (on the 30th April) the page has been updated once since it was first published, with The Red Feast and Lords and Tyrants removed on the 24th April – eleven days after The Red Feast went up for pre-orders and four days after Lords and Tyrants did. Deathwatch: Shadowbreaker is still showing up, three days after pre-orders went live, and nothing has yet been added.

In terms of adding new releases, it’s not surprising that we haven’t seen anything new show up – in the past the Coming Soon page was updated monthly, and I think most people would be happy for that to continue…in which case we should look to see if the next batch of titles show up over the following week or two. As for titles being removed after they’ve gone up for pre-order, it’s felt a little slow so far but at least some of them have indeed been removed. Personally I’d like to see that happen on the Saturday that each title goes up for pre-order, but I guess it isn’t exactly a top priority. I certainly hope the page does continue to be updated regularly – it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months, that’s for sure.

It’s also worth just quickly mentioning that since this page went live we’ve seen four brand new titles released which weren’t listed – five if you include the audiobook version of Dark Imperium: Plague War – as well as two paperback editions. At no point have Black Library said that this page is going to contain every single new release, but it’s just interesting that so far it’s only actually featured three out of the latest ten releases. It’s early days still, but I’d like to see that proportion rise, especially as a lot of the information about other releases is actually available elsewhere online if you can be bothered to go look for it…

New titles (of sorts) in the book trade
Speaking of which, the very helpful Twitter account Black Librarium (check them out here – they’re well worth following) spotted a whole stack of upcoming BL titles over on the German Amazon page, none of which have been officially confirmed by Black Library. I’ll list them here, but be aware that none of them have finalised covers yet so I won’t include the temporary covers, and also remember that these are translations of the German titles and so won’t necessarily be the actual English titles (one in particular definitely isn’t).

  • Rights of Passage by Mike Brooks (Mike confirmed on Twitter that this is the actual title, rather than the translation which worked out as The Eye of the Navigator)
  • The Horusian Wars: Divination by John French (11 short stories, rather than the next novel)
  • The Shield of the Saint by Rachel Harrison
  • Ghoulslayer by Darius Hinks
  • Mephiston: City of Light by Darius Hinks
  • Sabbathiel: Salvation by George Mann
  • Eight Lamentations: The Driving City by Josh Reyonlds (Josh has suggested on Twitter that he hasn’t actually written this yet!)
  • Watchers of the Throne: In the Shadow of the Regent by Chris Wraight

These are all listed as paperbacks (with the exception of Rachel’s book, oddly) on Amazon, with release dates from October 2019 (for Ghoulslayer) onwards, so it’s hard to pin down exactly when we’re likely to see any of them arrive in hardback or ebook form. Now that information about them (of sorts) is out in the wild, perhaps BL will start giving us a few more details over on the Coming Soon page…time will tell.

The Siege of Terra
I briefly mentioned the Siege of Terra earlier in relation to the next novel to be released, but I should also point out that Black Library have been releasing a series of video interviews with the team involved in writing, editing and illustrating this series. The first video was released back in March, and since then four more have landed – they tend to be dropped with little or no fanfare for some reason, beyond a cursory (and brief) social media post, but all of the videos so far have been worth checking out. Here’s what’s turned up so far:

Going by who we know is involved in writing for the series we can expect future interviews with Chris Wraight, Aaron Dembski-Bowden and Dan Abnett, while it’ll be interesting to see if anyone else shows up as well (although having covered the editorial side and the artistic side I’m not sure who else could be involved).

Digital Mondays

Now that I’ve covered all of the news that I spotted, let’s start looking at April’s new releases. Or at least April’s releases, seeing as only one of the Digital Monday short stories was actually a brand new release. Of the four other releases, three were pulled from the Gods & Mortals anthology while the fourth (Shiprats) has previously been published in both an event-only anthology and Sacrosanct & Other Stories.

Here’s the list of releases:

I’ve been quite critical in the past of Black Library plundering anthologies and releasing stories individually, but seeing as Gods & Mortals is a really varied anthology it does make a bit more sense this time to offer some of the stories individually. If you’re particularly interested in Neferata, Hamilcar or Neave Blacktalon to the exclusion of other characters or storylines then you’re onto a winner here (all three stories are pretty good, with Force of Personality easily the best of them), although I’d still suggest that if you have a wider interest in Age of Sigmar as a whole then you’re better off going for the anthology.

Of the other two, Shiprats is thoroughly entertaining and should be of interest to anyone who likes the Kharadron Overlords and/or has read Clint’s Overlords of the Iron Dragon. When Ashes of Grimnir appeared I was really pleased to see not just a brand new story (at last!) but also a first-time Black Library author, however I’ve got to be honest…I wasn’t taken by the story itself. For once I’m actually not going to write a review, as I don’t really feel like I have anything positive to say about it – I’ve no real desire to write bad reviews, so instead I’m just going to skip that one and hope that I enjoy the next story more.

Weekend releases

As usual I’ll quickly take a look through April’s new releases, covering both brand new titles and reissues in new formats. I’ve listed these in the order in which they were published.

Requiem Infernal by Peter Fehervari
Hands down the book I was most looking forward to in 2019, to my absolute lack of surprise this has easily been the best book (of any sort, not just BL) I’ve read so far this year. A complex, powerful and oftentimes disturbing tale of the Adepta Sororitas and Peter’s Dark Coil, this is a total masterpiece. I just wish Black Library would commission and publish more like this. Check out my review here.

The Palace of Memory and Other Stories by David Annandale, David Guymer and Guy Haley
An Age of Sigmar audio drama anthology, this collects together three previously-released short audios: Black Atonement by David Annandale, The Palace of Memory by David Guymer and Hungerfiend by Guy Haley. Click on the titles of each to check out my reviews of each of these, from when they were first released in the 2018 Advent Calendar.

Drachenfels by Kim Newman
A beautiful new paperback edition of the classic Warhammer novel by Jack Yeovil, for the first time this has been published under the name of Kim Newman rather than his pen name. Featuring an author foreword, red page edges and that gorgeous new cover art, this is the first of the series to get the new Warhammer Horror treatment – look out for the rest coming soon.

Ruinstorm by David Annandale
The mass market paperback edition of book 46 in the Horus Heresy series (first published in hardback/ebook back in 2017) – check out my interview with David here, and my review here.

Warlords of Karak Eight-Peaks by David Guymer and Guy Haley
The latest Warhammer Chronicles omnibus, this collects together various stories telling the tale of the epic conflict for Karak Eight-Peaks including the novels Headtaker and Skarsnik, the novella Thorgrim and two short stories.

Black Library Live tickets
Not a novel this time, but tickets for 2019’s Black Library Live event are now on sale for £15. Tickets are available via Eventbrite, so don’t worry that the link on the BL website takes you away from the main page. Still not a lot of information about exactly what’s happening, but hopefully we’ll find out more soon. I’ll see you there…

The Red Feast by Gav Thorpe
Book one in a brand new Age of Sigmar trilogy which is actually set BEFORE the Age of Sigmar itself. As I write this I’m partway through reading this book, and I’m loving it – it’s sort of equal parts fantasy and historical fiction, and feels fresh and exciting. Have a read of my interview with Gav here.

The Imprecations of Daemons by Nick Kyme
An Age of Sigmar audio drama which, if I remember correctly, has previously been described by BL staff as featuring the first exorcism in the Age of Sigmar. I don’t know much about this one, other than what can be gleaned from the cover and the synopsis (it went up for sale with no notice, so I didn’t have time to run an author interview) but it sounds quite interesting.

Lords and Tyrants
An anthology of 40k short stories, this runs the gamut from links with existing series to standalone stories – they’ve all been published before in ebook format, and are almost all (with one exception, in my opinion) great reads. Check out this article for links out to all of my individual reviews.

Dark Imperium: Plague War by Guy Haley
Coming six months or so after the hardback release, the second book in Guy’s Dark Imperium trilogy is now available not just as a paperback edition but also as an audiobook! No idea what caused the delay with that, but it’s a welcome release nonetheless. Check out my interview with Guy here, and my review here.

Blacktalon: First Mark by Andy Clark
The paperback edition of this Age of Sigmar novel, about the Knight-Zephyros of the Hammers of Sigmar. I’ve read both accompanying short stories so far (When Cornered and Hunting Shadows) and enjoyed both, but haven’t yet got round to reading this novel – but it looks fun.

The Imperial Infantryman’s Handbook
This is an interesting one, a re-release of the classic in-universe text The Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer bundled together with the Imperial Munitorum Manual and The Benedictions of the Emperor. I’m not sure if it sold out very quickly or if there was a problem with it, but this is no longer visible on either the BL or GW site…but if you can get your hands on a copy it should be a fun, tongue-in-cheek read in the vein of the Regimental Standard (in fact it was probably a strong influence on the tone of voice chosen by the Community team).

Deathwatch: Shadowbreaker by Steve Parker
The long-awaited sequel to Steve’s excellent 40k novel Deathwatch (boring title – great book), this promises to be a triumphant return for Talon Squad and looks like being a bit of a behemoth – I gather it’s over 450 pages in hardback, or over 16 hours in audio! Check out my interview with Steve here, or my review of the first book in the series here.

Realm Quest: Lair of the Skaven by Tom Huddleston
Book two in the Age of Sigmar series for Warhammer Adventures, picking up where City of Lifestone left off. As with the first book it’s available in paperback, ebook or audiobook, with the audio version narrated by Billie Piper. Check out my review of book one here.

Warped Galaxies: Claws of the Genestealer by Cavan Scott
Similar to the above, this one is book two in the 40k Warhammer Adventures series – the audiobook version of this is read once again by David Tennant. Have a read of my review for book one here.

Reviews, interviews and blog posts

Here’s the list of all of the Black Library-related reviews and blog posts I published in April – well, my review of The Ingenious isn’t actually BL-related, but Darius writes for BL too so I’m including it anyway!

As you’ve probably gathered from what I mentioned earlier, there’s no question what my favourite book of the month was, but I’ve picked out a couple more highlights as well:

  • Requiem Infernal: I can’t speak highly enough of Peter’s writing in general or this book in particular. I understand that this sort of weird, stylised, complex storytelling isn’t going to be for everyone…but I just love it to bits. SO GOOD!
  • The Solar War: unsurprisingly, the first book in the Siege of Terra is pretty special. If it hadn’t been for Requiem Infernal then this would have been my top pick, but even so it’s a magnificent achievement and a wonderful start to this mini-series.
  • Deathwatch: I thought I’d re-read this in anticipation of Shadowbreaker’s release, and boy am I happy I did! I’d forgotten just how good this book is – if you’re thinking it’s just going to be action all the way, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Well worth checking out.

Coming up…

Taking a look at what’s listed on the new Coming Soon page, here’s what we can expect to see in May:

  • Konrad Curze: The Night Hunter by Guy Haley – the LE hardback edition of the 12th Primarchs novel.
  • Rulers of the Dead by David Annandale and Josh Reynolds – an Age of Sigmar omnibus featuring The Undying King and Mortarch of Blood.
  • Myths & Revenants – an Age of Sigmar short story anthology.
  • Knights of Caliban by Gav Thorpe – a 40k Dark Angels omnibus.
  • Agent of the Throne: Ashes and Oaths by John French – the latest in this audio drama series.
  • The Solar War by John French – the standard hardback/ebook edition of the first Siege of Terra novel.
  • Angron: Slave of Nuceria by Ian St. Martin – the standard edition of the 11th Primarchs novel.
  • Inferno! Volume 3
  • Skaven Wars: The Black Plague by CL Werner – the next Warhammer Chronicles omnibus.

Plus, of course, anything which hasn’t been included on the Coming Soon page!

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

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