/lit/ - Literature

Rollicking fetid horror, the grandiose 40k shrunk like the head of a prized captive, somehow dehydrated even in the swampy airs of Phaedra. A disgusting planet for a disgusting setting, an elegant examination in the every day horrors of the Imperium played for honest horror. The commissars memed for their daily executions for showing the slightest cowardice is turned on its head both ways: the Lethean Penitents (With their dark Revelation; The Emperor Condemns!) are acknowledged by those most capable as being deficient by way of their mad faith. The main character is a haunted man who counts every execution he made, at the start of the novel numbering twenty seven.

Interesting use of antebellum South and steampunk as a flavor for the novel. The Imperium is by definition imperialist, why not have a subsection of recalcitrants who denied the Imperial Creed, full of wonder at steam and steel. Slavery acknowledged a few times makes it clear that they were not pure and benign in their ignorance, rather their zealotry took a different path. Well sketched characters all around, the haunted Poet Templeton, the belligerent Ensor Cutler, the wizened Waites, the zealot Audie Joyce battling the old Guard nobility in Machen. Their conclusion played well, everyone exited the stage with the dark respects granted to them by their actions. Some wandered off the page into legend, some exploded with hatred, but all of them no matter how shortly lived our acquaintance felt appropriately coda-ed.

The ultimate plot behind the novel was interesting, 40k has a love from me for its earnest ebullience, and this was about the wastrels that encourage such a thing. Many regiments of guard are given resplendence in a sentence or two, campaigns hinted at with a sad phrase. All are here to die, all are here to corrupt and molder and fester, abandoned like so many real men were abandoned in foreign lands denied their birthright and their retirement, the tragedy of the Guard is played out here to the hilt and you feel the characters' anger as they realize that this is a post meant to have them destroyed and shattered.

Fehervari understands 40 and also understands horror. On the grand scheme of the genre this is nothing new, no revelations, but it is an exemplar on how you can take an existing franchise and breathe new light into it. One is reminded of "Death Troopers", the Star Wars equivalent that I have not yet read. This will be the first 40k novel I have read in a while and it challenged me to continue reading. An interesting author, an interesting setting, the best the Tau have ever been done (although I loved the Last Chancers meeting with the Tau basically being the palace dinner scene from Temple of Doom, the mocking Kroot laughing at having the protagonists eat human flesh).

I plan on reading more of the Dark Coil and trying to understand its strange pathways as the Warp allows all time to meet.