The third short story in Black Library’s Digital Horror Week 2019, Nick Kyme’s Stitches deals with the inevitable aftermath of battle for the Astra Militarum and their overworked medical staff. For Medicae Bucher the grinding war of attrition taking place around him is taking a toll, with an endless stream of war-torn bodies requiring his attention, and few of them surviving his tender ministrations. Fearing for his position, he desperately needs something to go right, so when his patients start surviving when they probably shouldn’t, he doesn’t question his fortune and attributes it to the Emperor’s blessing instead.
At face value this deals with familiar 40k themes and visuals like grisly post-battlefield surgery, a man driven to paranoia by the burdens he carries (both physically and psychologically), and miraculous goings-on with darker undertones. Narratively it’s well-constructed and engaging, gradually digging deeper into Bucher’s flaws and building towards an inevitable but darkly satisfying conclusion, but what sets this apart is how it lingers on details which other stories would tend to gloss over. Even for 40k it’s visceral, bloody and sometimes hard to read, so your enjoyment of it may be determined, in places, by your tolerance for gore. While the psychological horror elements are there, the straight-up nastiness does tend to dominate – don’t read this while eating, for example.
