Hello and welcome to this guest review here on Track of Words, where I’m opening up the floor to author Victoria Hayward to talk about Nate Crowley’s novel The Twice-dead King: Ruin, which is out now from Black Library. 40k fans may well already be familiar with Victoria as the author of short stories The Carbis Incident and The Siege of Ismyr (featured in the Warhammer Crime anthology Sanction & Sin), both of which are excellent! I knew Victoria had read and loved The Twice-dead King: Ruin, and I was delighted when she agreed to write this review – I think it’s a fantastic review, which brilliantly illustrates what this book means to Victoria while painting a vivid (but spoiler-free) picture of the story as a whole. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
First of all here’s the publisher’s synopsis for The Twice-dead King: Ruin:
Exile to the miserable world of Sedh, the disgraced Necron Lord Oltyx is consumed with bitterness. Once heir to the throne of a dynasty, he now commands nothing but a dwindling garrison of warriors, in a never-ending struggle against Ork invaders. Oltyx can think of nothing but the prospect of vengeance against his betrayers, and the reclamation of his birthright. But the Orks are merely the harbingers of a truly unstoppable force. Unless Oltyx acts to save his dynasty, revenge will win him only ashes. And so he must return to the crownworld, and to the heart of the very court which cast him out. But what awaits there is a horror more profound than any invader, whose roots are tangled with the dark origins of the Necrons themselves.
And now, over to Victoria…
***
Memory is a funny thing, and so are the things that spark it. For me, books hold the power to transport me to a time or place in visceral – and sometimes unexpected – ways. For example, I cannot think of Nicobobinous (a Terry Jones kids’ book) without immediately finding myself where I conducted my yearly read of it – sitting under our family Christmas tree, covertly snarfling chocolates out of their foil wrappers.
The Twice-dead King: Ruin is a book that accompanied me through a difficult time, in waiting rooms and hospital car parks, across long, anxious stretches of time. When I think of it, I am transported back to those moments, and to those places. And I recall in those apprehensive hours of waiting, opening the book and urgently leafing my way back to where I’d left Oltyx, because I wanted to be lost in his story. Because somehow, Nate has managed to write a story about a metal skeleton cast adrift on dead, tideless seas of time that has such pathos, humour and warmth that you will immediately feel a deep and sincere connection to the immortal, inhuman protagonist.
It would be crude to say that Nate has ‘humanised’ Necrons – he hasn’t. He’s done something much harder and requiring considerably more skill, which is to open the mind of the reader to the reality of being Necron. He deftly hooks us into the pride, the fear, the horror of existing throughout the cold expanse of aeons and what remains of who you are when your physical self has gone.
Nabokov said in his Lectures on Literature that writers are storytellers, teachers and enchanters – but that major writers are primarily enchanters, with the magic of their art present in “the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought.” Nate is such a craftsman, spinning bright, ephemeral threads of self and future, illuminating for us the reality of an alien mind entombed in a metal, eternal body. He works so artfully that we feel viscerally the terrible pain of Oltyx’s existence, gasp at the phantom horror of lungs unable to breathe, burn with shame at the fall of the once vaunted and glow with pride for the deconstructed minds that we (and he) come to love and respect.
In The Twice-dead King, Nate tells a story on an epic scale with humour, reality and respect for the Necron protagonists – they are all believable and engaging individuals. It may seem strange talking about the importance of ‘reality’ as a science fiction writer – but it is imperative. As a reader, we need to connect with characters, and for their desires and struggles to feel authentic. The more outré the setting, the more important this is. In a dystopian universe filled with daemons, world-devouring xenos, the grinding horror of the Imperium and general overblown gothic flamboyance, it is imperative to anchor a story with the authentic experience of what it actually feels like to exist here.
Nate has crafted a reality and lived experience that is uniquely Necron. This is in the way the characters perceive the world, their plight, their past, their future, how they communicate and how they process and experience their remaining memories and emotions. I was taken with the way that the Necrons are not depicted as static – this is a civilisation whose long, slow skid into oblivion has started but will likely take painful aeons to complete. Oltyx remembers how things were back before his people made their terrible pact, and then the horror of biotransference, which Nate gently unfolds through sharp, recurring moments of self-realisation as the memories of Oltyx’s organic body ebb away forever.
There are a number of gut-wrenching moments (save in the presence of our Necron friends of course) where Oltyx is confronted by the existential horror of reality as an everyday Necron, stripped of one’s self and senses, that are so raw and agonising for him that as a reader it feels almost intrusive to witness them. When the people he knew begin to horrifically degrade, we feel Oltyx’s revulsion, and his own shame for feeling this. We experience the reality of relationships existing over aeons – the grind of grievances maintained over the lifetimes of countless brief mortals, and the nova-like brightness of hope when past loyalties are rekindled.
To finish back where we started, for me, The Twice-dead King is about memory. I found it to be a fascinating vignette of a stately and decaying people, wading through the swarming chaos of organic life, who still remember what it was to be alive, and to be powerful, and who exist suspended in a narrative about how they should continue to perform that. It is also a bright and humane reflection on how we rebuild ourselves when we have been broken. Perhaps we do not have all of the parts we started out with, but if we remember who we want to be, then we can choose to grasp the pieces we want to reforge ourselves as we choose in the harsh crucible of existence.
This is where I admit that this review is a little indulgent, because I have focused on the aspects of this book that I connected with most as an individuaI reader. For completeness, you should know that this is an epic story of conflict and retribution in which you will also get to see the politicking of a Necron court, and how this trammels a dynasty faced by threats from outside – the brutish Orks and the multitudinous Imperium. You will get a well-paced adventure with meaningful highs and lows and satisfying emotional payoffs, and stakes with world-spanning consequences.
So how do you demonstrate in a single story that you can have heart without having a heart, and write a 40K epic on the themes of love, solitude and hope with nuance, humour and action? Simply, reader, you do it like this.
I can’t wait for part two – Nate, you had me at Fl*sh.
***
Surely every author photo should feature a working tank!
Victoria Hayward is a trained historitor who spent her youth serving as an acolyte in a Games Workshop store. She writes about black holes and the palaces of despots in her day job as a science communicator and her favourite corners of the 40k universe are those occupied by the Inquisition – which is all of it. She resides in Nottingham where she keeps birds and practises printmaking.
You can find Victoria on Twitter.
***
Thanks so much to Victoria for agreeing to contribute to Track of Words, and for writing such a thoughtful, insightful review! I haven’t read The Twice-dead King: Ruin yet, but having read this review I know I definitely want to read it!
See also: my review of The Carbis Incident and my interview with Victoria (and 3 other authors) talking about Warhammer Crime and women in Warhammer.
Check out the links below to order* a copy of The Twice-dead King: Ruin and make up your own mind about it!
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
If you enjoyed this interview and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
