Monthly Roundup – October 2020

Welcome to October’s Monthly Roundup here on Track of Words – I hope you had a good month, in spite of the continuing craziness! For this month’s article I’m continuing to play around with the format, to try and figure out what works best. I thought it might be interesting to use this article as a way of collecting together all of the content that I’ve recently published here on Track of Words, so you can take a look through and see if you missed anything. With that in mind, I’ll quickly run through the reviews, author interviews and blog posts that I posted since my last roundup, then talk a little about what else I’ve been reading before giving a quick life update to follow on from last month.

I’d love to know what you think, so once you’ve read through the article, do let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more or less of!

Reviews

It’s been a reasonably busy few weeks in terms of reviews, with seven new book reviews and a further four quick short story reviews. I’ve covered IP fiction from Aconyte Books (Descent: Journeys in the Dark and Marvel) and Black Library (40k and Age of Sigmar), dystopian YA fiction, epic fantasy, African urban fantasy, and even a narrative art book. If you missed any of these as I posted them, now’s a great time to check out some of these reviews – click on the links to go to each relevant review.

The Doom of Fallowhearth by Robbie MacNiven – a fun, if surprisingly dark, low fantasy dungeon crawler. Click for review.

Domino: Strays by Tristan Palmgren – a superhero prose novel full of snappy dialogue with an unexpected emotional core. Click for review.

The Head of Mimir by Richard Lee Byers – a pacy fantasy adventure, styled like an oral retelling, featuring a young incarnation of the warrior Heimdall. Click for review.

QUICK REVIEW: Blood of the Flayer by Richard Strachan – a smart, interesting take on Chaos in the Mortal Realms. Click for review.

The Mirrored City by Josh Reynolds – dark, twisting, atmospheric and ambiguous adventures in the cursed city of Shadespire. Click for review.

Tales From The Loop by Simon Stålenhag – stark, melancholic depictions of 1980s/90s Scandinavian life, told through a beautiful blend of artwork and prose. Click for review.

QUICK REVIEW: A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark – beautiful world building and a compelling crime in an alternative Egypt populated by angels and djinns. Click for review.

QUICK REVIEW: The Hounds of Nagash by Guy Haley – the final part of Haley’s serialised AoS story At the Sign of the Brazen Claw, featuring Prince Maesa and Shattercap. Click for review.

QUICK REVIEW: Nightbleed by Peter Fehervari – as dark and twisted a Warhammer Horror story as you’d like, and a return to the true night of Sarastus. Click for review.

The Key To Fear by Kristin Cast – post-pandemic dystopian YA, which is less on-the-nose than you might expect, and gripping from start to finish. Click for review.

Legacy of Ash by Matthew Ward – properly epic fantasy; the first grand, sweeping instalment in Ward’s The Legacy Trilogy. Click for review.

Author interviews

I published almost as many author interviews as book reviews over the last few weeks – three for Black Library novels, four for Aconyte novels, and one for the next instalment in Matthew Ward’s The Legacy Trilogy. I also debuted a new visual style for the header images I use with these author interviews – let me know what you think of those! Click the links below to check out any interviews that you missed.

RAPID FIRE: Richard Strachan Talks Blood of the Everchosen – his debut Black Library novel, exploring the forces of Chaos in the Bloodwind Spoil. Click for interview.

RAPID FIRE: James Swallow and Josh Reynolds Talk Day Zero – their collaboration on a prequel novel to the new Watch Dogs: Legion video game. Click for interview.

RAPID FIRE: Gav Thorpe Talks First of the Fallen – the second novel in the Horus Heresy Character Series, offering deep insights into Luther and the Fallen. Click for interview.

RAPID FIRE: Matthew Ward Talks Legacy of Steel – the second book in Ward’s epic fantasy The Legacy Trilogy, and sequel to the fantastic Legacy of Ash. Click for interview.

RAPID FIRE: Guy Haley Talks Darkness in the Blood and Angel of Mercy – a rare double bill, as Haley gives the lowdown on his next two Blood Angels novels. Click for interview.

RAPID FIRE: S.A. Sidor Talks The Last Ritual – occult horror meets surrealistic art in the latest Arkham Horror novel from Aconyte Books. Click for interview.

RAPID FIRE: Tim Pratt Talks The Fractured Void – explore/get to know the world of Twilight Imperium in this new space opera from Aconyte Books. Click for interview.

RAPID FIRE: Carrie Harris Talks Liberty & Justice For All – the first in a new series from Marvel/Aconyte exploring the lesser-known X-Men characters. Click for interview.

Blog content

Only four new blog articles, but two of these took a LOT of research so I’m pretty happy with ‘just’ four! The last one, in particular, was a bit of a labour of love (and not just for me)…but I’m delighted with how it’s come out.

October’s Releases From Aconyte Books – a quick roundup of all the cool new books released by Aconyte in October (seriously, if you’re not already checking out Aconyte Books then I strongly suggest you do!). Click for article.

November’s Releases From Aconyte Books – the same again, for all the great Aconyte novels coming in November! Click for article.

5 Lesser-Known Warhammer 40k Stories – not all 40k stories get the attention they deserve, so I’ve picked out a few of my personal favourites that I think ought to be better known, considering just how good they are! Click for article.

A Traveller’s Guide to Peter Fehervari’s Dark Coil – with the release of The Reverie, there’s no better time to get stuck into the Dark Coil, whether you’re experiencing a Fehervari story for the first time or digging back in to find all the subtle connections between them. Either way, this article should help (especially the amazing visualisations). Click for article.

Reading roundup

I’m gradually getting back into the swing of largely choosing books that I’m going to review, rather than reading purely for fun. Matthew Ward’s 240k word Legacy of Ash took me a fair while to read so that cut into my October reading time a little, but I’m still pretty happy with a total of 10 books read/listened to for the month. Of those, I’ve already linked out to reviews for five of them, I’m currently working on a review of another, and a couple more were re-reads of books I’ve already read and reviewed. Let’s take a quick look at the rest…

Audiobooks first – I picked up Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile as an Audible daily deal, thinking it would be a fun book to keep me company as I painted miniatures/did the housework/went for walks…and that’s exactly what it was! I must have seen the 1978 movie (the one with Peter Ustinov as Poirot) a fair few times but I’d never got round to reading the book, and listening to this was a wonderful reminder of just how good a story it is. Kenneth Branagh’s narration is camp, dramatic, and exactly right for this – if you need something fun and comforting, I’d definitely recommend it. Just beware, as if you’re anything like me you’ll be incredibly tempted to go out and get more old Poirot stories!

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch continues my trip back through all of the Rivers of London series in audio, and as I expected I actually enjoyed this one more the second time through. The audio format certainly helped (I’ve said it before, but narrator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is utterly wonderful), but I think that was largely down to having read all of the preceding novels quite recently. When I first read this one it had been a while since Foxglove Summer and I think I just couldn’t quite remember everything that had happened beforehand – I enjoyed it, but felt a touch lost at times. This time around, having re-read the whole series fairly recently, I had a better grasp on how it all fitted together, and as a result I absolutely loved it! I reviewed this one back in 2016 so if you’d like you can have a read of that review here.

Of the three other physical books I read, I picked Ahriman: Exile by John French purely as a book to read for fun. It’s still one of my all-time favourite Black Library novels, even after multiple re-reads (this was probably my fourth time through), and it never fails to keep me gripped. If you like your 40k characters tragic, flawed and exceedingly powerful, and your 40k stories dark, complex and cleverly plotted, then I really can’t recommend this enough. You can read my review of Ahriman: Exile from 2015 here, or see all of my reviews for the whole trilogy (plus accompanying short stories) here.

I also picked up Star Wars short story anthology From a Certain Point of View as a just-for-fun read, however I’m tempted to write at least a short review of it at some point. Keep an eye out for that, hopefully. As a big fan of the short story I expected to enjoy this anthology, but I wasn’t prepared for just how good it would be, or for how many of these short stories managed to wring so much emotion out of so few words. If you’re not familiar, the idea is that it’s 40 short stories from different authors, each taking a lesser-known character from the original A New Hope movie and showing a familiar scene or moment from the film through their eyes. We’re talking droids, musicians, Imperial administrators, jawas…and in the hands of wonderful authors these characters are just as compelling as the big names in the film. Wonderful stuff, and there’s a sequel coming very soon!

Lastly, there’s Day Zero by James Swallow and Josh Reynolds, another fantastic novel from Aconyte Books – this time a prequel story to the new Watch Dogs: Legion video game. I’ve never played a Watch Dogs game, nor am I likely to, but I had a lot of fun reading this pacy, action-packed modern thriller. I won’t talk too much about this one, as I’m working on a full review to be published soon, but suffice to say if you like either of these authors’ work, or you just fancy a great standalone high-tech thriller, I can definitely recommend you give this a look.

Life update

I’ve had an amazing response to last month’s life update, where I talked about being made redundant and what the impact of unemployment might be on Track of Words. Thank you so much to everyone who got in touch with kind, thoughtful and supportive comments, and likewise to those who made donations to my Ko-Fi page. You’re all brilliant, and I appreciate it so much! Thank you also to the various Black Library authors who reached out with offers to send me review copies of their books – your generosity means a lot to me! Watch this space for reviews…

As it stands I’ve now finished my ‘notice period’ for redundancy, so I’m officially unemployed for the first time in a fair few years. I’m going to need to ramp up my job hunting a bit more, but at least I’ve got a bit of a buffer from my redundancy payments, and hopefully I’ll find something reasonably soon. If you know anyone who needs a copywriter or editor, send them my way!

Interestingly, over the last few weeks the knowledge that I need to get back on the work wagon has actually pushed me to work harder than ever on Track of Words, and I’m proud of not just the quantity but also the quality of what I’ve published recently. I did wonder if it would slow me down, but it seems to have had quite the opposite effect. In particular, I’m really proud of my A Traveller’s Guide to the Dark Coil article, which took a lot of work from not just me but lots of other people, and which I feel has turned out really well. If you haven’t already checked it out, I’d love it if you did!

As I expected, I’ve ended up covering a bit less of the Black Library content in favour of Aconyte Books and some other great SFF that’s come my way of late, and that’s likely to continue for a while at least. With the aforementioned generosity of some wonderful authors I do have some very cool BL books to review in the near future, so keep an eye on that, and I’m doing my best to put together some more interviews and articles for you 40k and AoS fans. As always, do let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like to see. In the meantime, I hope you’ll also have a read of my reviews, interviews and articles about non-BL books, whether that’s more amazing tie-in fiction from Aconyte (it just keeps on coming!) or some of the fantastic fantasy and SF novels I’ve got on my immediate TBR list.

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I’d love to hear about what you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to recently, what you think about the interviews and article I’ve been publishing of late, whether you’ve read and enjoyed any of the books I tackled this month, and whether there’s anything you’d like to see in these roundup articles…so do drop me a line in the comments below, or get in touch on Twitter.

If you’d like to support Track of Words and help me to keep working on new content, you can leave me a tip over on my Ko-Fi page.