I Have an Author-Man-Crush

So I think Black Library has a new king and his name is Aaron Dembski-Bowden. I thought he did a excellent job in his first book Cadian Blood which I have already reviewed. I have just finished reading two of his most recent books Helsreach and Soul Hunter.

I fell both books are do a very good job of bringing me what i want in a BL book. A good friggin story and nothing else.

Now I consider myself a big Dan Abnett fanboy, but he seems to be getting into the Tom Clancy habit of having a mission sub-plots in each story. So many that some of them don't seem to have anything to do with the main plot, and so many characters its hard to keep track of everything. This was certainly the case in Abnett's book Titanicus.

Dembski-Bowden's first book had nothing like that. It had just a few characters that you followed and got involved with and made things simple to follow for a simple dude like me.


Soul Hunter is the best example of this. I am very surprised I actually liked this book. It is the story of 1st Claw, 10th Company of the Night Hunters. I usually don't go in for "bad guy" books, but Talos, the main character in the book does a good job of making me give a crap. He's not evil, and in fact he abhors how some of his legion embarased the ruinous powers.


In this book, we see the Night Hunters as a struggling legion. Individual space marines will fight to the death over a piece of wargear from a slain enemy, or ally.


Helsreach is another of the in the Space Marines Battles Novel. I was a little wary reading this one after Rynn's World because I was thinking, "Oh look! Another SM book, and they are fighting... orks... again." But this book is very different from Rynn's World. That book is about Pedro Kantor's struggle to get to New Rynn City to link up with the remnants of his Chapter. Helsreach is the story of Grimaldus, the newly promoted Relcusiarch of the Black Templars. The story of his struggle to feel worthy of his new position.


Helsreach does get a bit Abnett-esque in the amount of characters introduced, but he does a keep it together, and it is no where near Titanicus.


All in all both are excellent book certainly worth reading. I give both books 4 Ibram Gaunt's out of 5.

Review: Rynn's World

So I finished Rynn's World last night. Wow, what a book. Steve Parker did a really good job with this book. From reading a lot of the fluff from the 40k book and other sources, I knew that the Crimson Fists were gunna get jacked up in this book, but Parker did an excellent job of fleshing it out.

I have really been impressed lately with the action "scenes" in a lot of BL books (40k and Fantasy), and this book is just as good. The battles were pretty epic, even when it was just a skirmish. The only thing I was disappointed with was the fact that the space battle was glossed over, but this was a pretty beefy book, so a chapter or two of space battle missing isn't too bad.


My major pet peeve of having too many plots and characters going on at one time was thankfully absent in this book. There were quite a few characters, but they mostly revolved around different parts of two major plots. For me this was good because I got a bit of the "oh my god this is good, I can't wait to get back to it in the next chapter," but I didn't get the, "OK, now I have to remember what this character was doing 200 pages, and 15 sub-plots ago."


Another thing that was thankfully missing was the "uber-evil imperial guy" that is just there to make the lives of the major characters more of a PITA. There was one dude in the story that I thought was going to shape up into one of those characters, but it didn't turn out that way. Thank you Mr. Parker!

With prior knowledge of that fact that the Crimson Fists were going to get mauled in this book, it made me hesitant to cheer for characters, but I knew that many of them were gunna be blowed up, and this was the case. I actually think this was a good thing in the book because every time a new and interesting character was introduce, I was like, "Oh no! I hope he doesn't die!" Another thing I liked was that Mr. Parker did in fact kill off some of those likeable characters you were just getting to know. It made it feel real. It made it feel as if the Crimson Fists were well and truly boned.

A couple of the things I didn't like about the book were the distain that many of the Space Marines felt towards the humans that they were fighting for. There are some circumstances that do come up in the book that explain it, but it was the differences between that different Astartes that really made me stop and blink before continuing.

The last thing that sorta stuck in my craw was the fact that we saw Space Marines in this book had a stat line that was roughly, in my opinion, BS 7 WS 7 S8 T8 W10 I6 A8 Ld 11 Sv 1+. Regular tactical marines were ambushed by Orks and killed every ork without taking a casualty, there were fights were you would think SOMEONE is gunna bite it, but no one does. Now I understand why this is written this way. It's a Space Marines novel, so we want them to be heroic. We want them to stand against the Green Tide and never give up, but there were a couple of occasions where it was a bit unbelievable, even for Space Marines.

Overall this was an excellent book. I would encourage anyone to read it. I give it 4 out of 5 stars!