Every year Games Workshop puts on what it calls a ‘Black Library Celebration’, which is supposed to be an opportunity for fans to…well…celebrate all things Black Library, but every year it ends up a bit of a damp squib (or should that be a damp squig?). This year, rather than bemoan another missed opportunity and another day of website chaos, I thought I’d do something different and put together my own small celebration of all the things I personally think are cool about Black Library fiction. I’m going to talk about why I read BL stories and what I get out of it, then pick out some highlights from recent years in terms of book reviews, articles and author interviews, all of which I think genuinely celebrate Black Library.
Firstly though…as you’ve probably gathered from my opening comment, I haven’t generally been very impressed by the official Black Library Celebrations. I’m not going to go into detail over the 2023 Celebration, but let’s just say with a disappointing set of WarCom articles (apart from this one, which was quite fun) and something of a disaster when the weekend’s new books went on sale, it certainly wasn’t an improvement. If you’d like to read some of my thoughts on previous years’ Celebrations, here are a few articles I’ve written over the years:
- Some thoughts on the first ever BL Celebration, back in 2018
- Some thoughts on the 2019 BL Celebration
- An article discussing what I was hoping for in the 2022 BL Celebration
- An article discussing the reality of the 2022 BL Celebration
Sadly, given the evidence of the last six years, I don’t foresee BL/GW doing a better job of creating a genuine celebration, which is a real shame. But let’s not get bogged down in that – instead, let’s concentrate on what we as readers actually get out of BL fiction. I can’t speak for others, but I can talk a bit about why I personally read these stories.
Why I read Black Library
I can’t remember exactly what my first Warhammer novel was, but it was probably either David Ferring’s Konrad or Ian Watson’s Inquisitor (both of which are technically pre-Black Library books). Either way, I’ve been reading Warhammer fiction for over 25 years, so these settings – whether the grim dark future of 40k, the classic fantasy setting of the Old World, the vibrant Mortal Realms or the mythological Horus Heresy – always feel incredibly familiar. Whether I’m reading about big-name characters or brand new creations, I know I can pick up a BL story and quickly start enjoying it, without having to worry too much about getting up to speed with the setting or the backstory.
There’s also the real sense of escapism I get from BL fiction, and not just in terms of the action but also the grand sweep of the settings and the larger-than-life nature of most of the characters. I do enjoy a good action scene and a pacy plot, and there’s a lot to be said about explosive, action-heavy stories, of which there are plenty to choose from! I get just as much enjoyment out of exploring the quieter, more introspective tales though, hence why I enjoy authors like Fehervari and French so much. Regardless of the action quotient though, BL stories always offer me the opportunity to lose myself in other worlds full of drama, danger and wild invention.
I think that combination of familiarity and escapism is what makes BL fiction one of my go-to options for comfort reading. Don’t take ‘comfort reading’ to mean guilty pleasure or any kind of throwaway storytelling, though. We all have certain genres, series or authors that we can pick up with confidence and just know we’re going to enjoy (Crime fiction, for example, is a lot of people’s go-to genre), and that’s a great thing. Reading is, after all, supposed to be fun! If I can’t decide what to read, or if I’ve read a few books recently that have taxed my brain a bit, I’ll often look to my BL shelves for something to read next, and that I can sort of relax into. These days I maybe don’t go for BL books as often as I used to, but I definitely do still find them comforting and purely enjoyable.
So I turn to BL books for escapism and comfort reading, but that’s not all. I’m in a very fortunate position where I’ve been able to meet and get to know all manner of authors, editors and other members of BL staff as a result of running Track of Words, and that’s been tremendously rewarding, on a personal level and also in terms of what I’ve been able to learn from building those relationships. What’s more though, I’ve made lifelong friends as a direct result of reading Warhammer fiction, from meeting brilliant mates at BL events (you know who you are) to getting to know loads of amazing people over social media. Even if I never read another BL story, I’ll always be grateful for those friendships.
If BL ever runs in-person events again and you get the chance to go, definitely do it!
So those are some of the reasons I enjoy reading BL fiction and some of the things I get out of it, but I’d love to know your story too. Why do you read Black Library fiction, and what do you get out of it?
Let’s celebrate
With that covered, I thought I’d use the rest of this piece to highlight some of the Black Library books I’ve enjoyed the most recently, some of the best interviews I’ve conducted with BL authors over the last few months, some cool (and hopefully useful) articles, and some of the other folks doing great work celebrating BL content.
To my mind, this is the sort of thing that really makes a Black Library Celebration, rather than just a few new books and some lacklustre website posts. What’s more, the key thing here is that we’re talking about BL not just as a small part of the Warhammer hobby but as something exciting and powerful in its own right! After all, there are plenty of us who don’t play the games but do still enjoy reading the books.
Reviews
To start off with, let’s celebrate some of the best Black Library books from the last couple of years. Each year I put together a ‘Best of Black Library’ retrospective where I pick out my personal favourites from that year’s BL releases, which is often a tricky task! For the sake of brevity I won’t duplicate all of that content here – if you want to read those articles you can just follow the links below:
If I had to choose one book from each of the last two years though, it would be these two: Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! by Nate Crowley, and Outgunned by Denny Flowers. If you’re on the lookout for great books to read, I’d definitely recommend picking both of those up!
I haven’t read that much BL fiction over the last couple of months, but since I wrote the ‘Best of BL 2022’ article I have also read and reviewed Steven B. Fischer’s excellent Imperial Guard novel Witchbringer, and Peter Fehervari’s typically brilliant Angels Resplendent short story Aria Arcana. If you haven’t already, you can check out my reviews of both of those – again, they both come highly recommended!
For more reviews, check out my main Black Library reviews page (listed A-Z by author), or alternatively my separate Age of Sigmar or Horus Heresy reviews pages.
Interviews
Next up, let’s look at some interviews in which I’ve chatted to Black Library authors about their work. The two most recent BL-related interviews where we discussed specific books were with Steven B. Fischer, talking about Witchbringer, and with David Guymer talking about his recent Age of Sigmar book Grombrindal: Chronicles of the Wanderer. Both of those were really fun interviews to put together, and both books are excellent, so they’re well worth reading.
Looking further back, probably my favourite BL interview of 2022 was my two-part conversation with Matthew Farrer about his Urdesh novels (Part One and Part Two). It was so much fun to really go into detail about these books, whether that was discussing their unusual route to publication or digging into Matthew’s approach to writing about Space Marines in action, and I think they stand up as some of the best interviews I’ve ever published. There’s nothing really spoilerific in there, so whether you’ve read the Urdesh books or not, if you’re interested in 40k fiction then I would definitely recommend checking these out.
Going back another year, I really enjoyed chatting to J.S. Collyer, Victoria Hayward, Jude Reid and Danie Ware about the Warhammer Crime short story anthology Sanction & Sin. Not only is this a great anthology but it’s notable for having probably the best female representation in any BL release ever, so I was interested in hearing more about some of the stories it features, and how it felt to be part of what is in fact quite a landmark anthology. It was fascinating to hear the authors’ takes on this, not to mention getting a sense of their incredible enthusiasm for the anthology and the Warhammer Crime setting as a whole.
For more interviews. check out the main Black Library interviews page – there are well over 150 interviews of varying lengths on there, so you’ve got plenty to dig into!
Writing Resources
If you’ve ever been inspired to write your own Warhammer stories then definitely check out some of the interviews and articles I’ve put together over the years which offer ideas, inspiration and advice from all sorts of Black Library authors. In particular, this year I put together a three-part series in which I chatted to nine BL authors about writing short stories, inspired by the latest BL open submissions window. We covered three main topics: putting together short story pitches (Part One), writing about Space Marines (Part Two), and working on short story samples (Part Three), and I was blown away by how generous the authors were with their time and their advice. Even if you don’t fancy writing your own stories, there’s loads of fascinating stuff in here!
If you enjoy those pieces, make sure you check out all of the other writing resources as well.
Articles
Over the years I’ve written all sorts of (often quite opinionated) articles on Black Library-related topics, from speculation on what we’ll see in upcoming series or events to listicles of less well-known stories. You can find all of those here, if you’re interested. My favourite articles to put together though, and generally the most popular ones, are guides to where to start with certain series or factions, and series reading orders. If you’re ever on the lookout for inspiration in terms of what to read next, some of these guides may well be of use.
Without doubt the most popular of them all (in fact the most popular post I’ve ever written, with about 125k page views and counting) is my ‘New 40k’ reading list, in which I try to consolidate all of the ‘Era Indomitus’ books – and those most closely connected – into some kind of chronological reading order. It’s not perfect (the 40k chronology has always been a bit rough), but I had some help from Guy Haley while putting it together so I think it’s as close to perfect as we’re likely to get it, and I do my best to keep it up to date.
Coming in pretty close after that are two more series guides – to Dan Abnett’s Inquisitor Cycle (i.e. Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin and all the accompanying short stories), and to Peter Fehervari’s Dark Coil. They’re both very popular and (I think) pretty useful, and if you haven’t already read those series then I really can’t recommend them enough!
After that, if you’re still looking for more you could try my reading orders for things like Sarah Cawkwell’s Silver Skulls stories, or Danie Ware’s Sister Augusta stories. All of these guides were written with assistance from the authors, so again they’re as accurate as possible.
Check out the Black Library Guides page to find all of the series guides/reading orders.
Recommendations
To finish things off, I thought I’d point out some other folks who do great work discussing, promoting and celebrating Black Library fiction. BL has never really got on board with the community in the way that Games Workshop has with the miniatures and games, so there seems to be very little community support, which is a real shame. That being said, there are great things happening in the community that BL would do well to encourage and support!
If you’re looking for more Black Library reviews then one site I would recommend is Grimdark Magazine. I may be biased as I write the occasional (non-BL) review for the site too, but Adrian is a big 40k fan, and as well as reviews he occasionally puts together cool articles like this one, about ‘What to read when you need a break from 40k’.
You should also check out At Boundary’s Edge, where Alex Hormann publishes reviews and author interviews looking at 40k and the Horus Heresy. If you’re on the lookout for Age of Sigmar content, and you like video reviews, then consider checking out Cinderfall Gaming’s YouTube channel. It covers other settings too, but there’s quite a lot of AoS stuff there, and let’s face it AoS books don’t often seem to get the love they deserve so it’s nice to see someone covering them!
If you’re a Twitter user (I know, I know – it’s not the calmest or stablest of social media platforms at the moment, but it’s the one I’m most familiar with) you can find quite a lot of Black Library authors on there, as well as people like me who just enjoy talking about the books. If there’s one author I’d particularly recommend following, though, it would be Victoria Hayward, whose enthusiasm and obvious love for Warhammer fiction really shines through! Victoria is a great writer both for BL and elsewhere, and if you don’t already follow her and read her work then I’d very much recommend you remedy that!
Finally, one last recommendation that’s not technically Black Library-related, but is still very much focused on Warhammer fiction. For the last few years, the good folks over at Cold Open Stories have been publishing Warhammer 40,000 fan fiction in the form of short stories and audio dramas, and have amassed quite the catalogue of stories. If you enjoy 40k short fiction and have exhausted BL’s own supply, you could do a lot worse than pay COS a visit!
***
There you go then – that was my own personal Black Library Celebration, covering why I read BL fiction and highlighting some of my favourite reviews, interviews, articles and BL-related recommendations. Maybe one day BL will put on a proper celebration of their own, which genuinely does celebrate all the great work of the authors, editors and everyone else involved, but until that happens we can still celebrate in our own ways!
I hope you enjoyed this article – I’d love to hear from you about your own reasons for reading Black Library fiction, and your own personal highlights from the last couple of years. Drop me a line in the comments, or come find me on Twitter or Instagram and let me know!
If you enjoyed this article and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave me a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
