Nick Kyme makes his novel-length introduction to the Warhammer Horror imprint with Sepulturum, a (short) 40k novel pitting a lone inquisitor against shadowy, hidden enemies and the terror of an endless horde of zombies. Morgravia Sanctus is in the hive city of Blackgeist hunting for…something, but she can’t remember what. All she knows for sure is that she’s in pain, afflicted by terrible waking dreams, and no longer the hunter. Battered and bloody, she seeks out a way to reclaim her memories and complete her mission, only to be swept up in a tide of blood as Blackgeist’s population succumbs to some kind of zombie plague.
The plot revolves around two separate strands which happen largely concurrently, moving through various seedy locations within the hive in a progression of increasingly desperate set pieces. While Morgravia and her remaining acolyte attempt to find a mysterious figure known only as ‘the Broker’, manufactorum worker Cristo’s objective is just to protect his daughter and try to find a way to survive the chaos engulfing their home. Morgravia – of the Ordo Sepulturum no less, whose remit is the risen dead – is as driven as you’d expect, but her gruff and sarcastic exterior hides considerable pain; Kyme keeps the source of this largely obscured, but her ‘red dreams strongly hint at its nature. Cristo has much less agency but is no less determined; he doesn’t really consider himself to be a good man, but he’s desperate to find some way of rebuilding his relationship with his daughter, even in the face of almost certain death.
Domestic 40k and zombies go together perfectly, especially under the Warhammer Horror label, and the combination here proves to be as dark and bloody as you might imagine. There’s gore aplenty, flashes of body horror, and although 40k is always dark, and zombies have appeared plenty of times before, this feels like horror first and Warhammer second. Bearing that in mind, despite the presence of the Inquisition this actually feels much more like a super-dark Necromunda story than main-range 40k (there’s virtually no actual military presence in it), not least because it’s much more relaxed in tone than usual. Morgravia drops a number of F-bombs, for example, and one particular character’s noticeably rigid delivery only serves to illustrate how everyone else in the book uses much less formal dialogue than you might typically see in, say, a Space Marine-focused novel.
As with other Warhammer Horror novels like Castle of Blood and The Oubliette this is a fairly short book, but Kyme jumps straight into the plot and keeps up a brisk pace with short chapters rotating between Morgravia and Cristo helping to maintain momentum. It never really delves too deeply into the whys and wherefores of exactly what Morgravia is involved in, but while that leaves things feeling ever so slightly shallow, for the most part it works well. A little mystery can, of course, go a long way, and there’s lots to enjoy as it is. A slightly longer word count might have allowed a couple of minor characters to be fleshed out a little further, and their interactions land a bit better, but that’s nitpicking really. As a self-contained story which takes domestic 40k and ramps the gore and brutality up a few notches, it’s an engrossing and darkly entertaining read.
Check out my Rapid Fire interview with Nick Kyme talking about Sepulturum.
Click this link to buy Sepulturum, or this one for the audiobook.