Book Review: Atlas Infernal

It has been quite a while since I have finished this book, but I decided that I needed to get on with it and post a review, so here it goes.

This book, along with Outcast Dead were pretty painful for me to read. I didn't really like the majority of either book. With Outcast Dead, there was a really good ending to pull the book up, with Atlas Infernal, it didn't feel that way to me.

Now any book about the inquisition is going to be compared to the Eisenhorn/Ravenor books by Dan Abnett. This is a little harsh, because these books are excellent, and any other inquisition book is going to have a hard time living up to that standard.

In Eisenhorn, we see the story of an Inquisitors change from a fairly purity inquisitor to a much more radical inquisitor by the end of the book. Eisenhorn does some pretty messed up things by the end of the third book, but by that time, you see the man that he is, and I at least could understand why he did what he did.

With Inquisitor Czevak, we don't have that investment. Czevak is way radical. He is doing what he feels must be done to save the Imperium. Now I could get behind that for a cool character, but to me, Czevak isn't. He isn't likable, and I really could care less if he lived or died.

In the beginning of the book, Czevak gets sucked up into the webway in the first part of the book and disappears for quite a few years (sorry, but anything that happens in the first 30-odd pages of a book doesn't count as a spoiler to me). I was all geared up to see what happens with his young acolyte, well he turns into a mini Czevak, pretty much conspiring with traitors and heretics to find his master and save the universe. The problem is, I didn't like him either. There weren't really many of the characters that I did like in the entire book. I think the closest I came to liking was the Daemonhost.

Added to that the non-linear story line, I am not a big fan of this, and everyone seems to do it, but to me, it just seemed like something thrown into the book just to make it not usual (as opposed to unusual) but to me it just feels as if it is thrown in as a gimmick and doesn't really seem to add much to the story.

All-in-all I really didn't like this book. I give it one Harlequin cloak out of five.