One of the first batch of releases published by Black Library under the Warhammer Horror label, the Wicked and the Damned is a portmanteau story – a collection of three loosely linked novellas, by David Annandale, Phil Kelly and Josh Reynolds. On the mist-shrouded cemetery world of Silence, three strangers – a commissar, an officer and a priest – are brought together seemingly by random, surrounded by the dead with only each other and the sinister mortuary-servitors for company. Confused and unsettled, to try and understand what’s going on and why they’ve been gathered together they each tell the story of what they remember last, and what led them to Silence.
What makes this a portmanteau rather than just a straight-up anthology of novellas is that while each of the three stories is a complete tale in its own right, and could be enjoyed as a standalone story, they’re framed by a single overarching narrative which plays out in short sections at the beginning, in between each novella and at the end. It’s a classic horror technique and it’s used to good effect here, with those intervening scenes reminding the reader that there’s more going on than might appear on the surface. They’re very brief but suitably atmospheric, and act almost like spaces to breathe and relax (a little) in between the main stories; you could just read the novellas on their own, but taken as a whole there’s a satisfying flow to the book and the overall story.
All three novellas are decidedly bleak, sinister and oh-so-40k, taking familiar themes and ideas WAY further than Black Library usually dares, but each one has a real sense of identity. Reynolds’ The Beast in the Trenches gets right into the head of a commissar falling ever-deeper into paranoia, feverishly driven to seek out a darkness within his regiment that only he can see. It’s a bloody, dirty story of a man going mad in the midst of brutal trench warfare, but whose behaviour is almost plausible in the madness of the 41st millennium. In contrast The Woman in the Walls, by Phil Kelly, is a tense and gory ghost story in which an ambitious officer’s greed comes back to haunt her – literally – with stomach-churning results. Caught between vicious Savlar Chem Dogs, her suspicious superiors and a vengeful spirit, as people start to die horribly it seems that all her clever planning might yet come to naught.
The final story, Annandale’s The Faith and the Flesh, tells of a priest burdened by doubts and desperate to take hold of his own future, but whose fears lead him to making poor decisions with soul-shaking (and very violent) consequences. It’s a story of love, faith, fear and how those emotions are challenged when faced with monstrosity and impossible choices. Of the three, Annandale’s is the most bombastic and over the top on the surface, complete with a tangible enemy of classic 40k styling, but there’s subtlety behind the monster horror as well, while Reynolds hides his enemies in plain sight and Kelly reveals his gradually through its exploits as much as its appearance.
All three are told in direct, no-nonsense first person, with a distinct and honest voice coming through for each one which really draws you into these characters and their stories. That individuality, along with each author’s writing style and narrative choice, provides an enjoyable variety across the book to balance out the unrelenting darkness while maintaining a sense that these stories do work together. They’re all familiarly 40k, but go deeper into the visceral, genuinely unpleasant nature of the setting than usual, showing a little more of the gore, the dirt and, yes, the horror of the Imperium than most Black Library books reveal. Overall this is a clever concept, which might not have quite the depth of narrative and character development of a standard novel but which trades that for variety and invention to provide an interesting introduction to what Warhammer Horror can be.
