Black Library Weekly – W/C 26/03/18

Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of Black Library Weekly, my regular look at what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. It’s the final week of March, but there have actually been quite a lot of BL-related goings on worth talking about, which is nice. Starting at the beginning as usual…

Monday
For this week’s Digital Monday short story, Black Library have dug into the archives for a 40k tale which was originally published in an event-only anthology way back in 2013 – Flayed by Cavan Scott (£2.49 in ebook). It’s quite a short story, and feels like a natural companion to Scott’s previous story Hidden Treasures, as a grim, personal tale of everyday Imperial citizens trying to survive in appalling circumstances. It’s perhaps not the most exciting of stories, nor one that features big names or forces, but it’s worth checking out nonetheless. You can check out my review by clicking here, or on the image below.

Unusually, that wasn’t it for Monday with the release of two digital-only Primarchs bundles – Primarchs: The eBooks Volume 2 (£24.99) and Primarchs: The Audiobooks Volume 2 (£49.99). As you might expect, these feature the second batch of Primarchs novels, which include Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia by Guy Haley, Lorgar: Bearer of the Word by Gav Thorpe and Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix by Josh Reynolds. If you haven’t yet got hold of these books then either of these bundles could be a good option – the ebook one offers a £5 discount on buying them separately, while the audiobook bundle provides a £15 discount. Not bad.

Midweek
Just the one piece of Black Library-related news during the midweek period, and that was the release of a Humble Bundle entitled Tales from the Worlds of Warhammer. You can read about this on the Warhammer Community website, or check it out on the Humble Bundle website. If you’re not familiar with what a Humble Bundle is, it’s a collection of digital content – in this case ebooks and audio dramas – which is sold using a ‘pay what you want’ model where sales contribute to charitable causes as well as the content creators. Each bundle is available for a limited time period – in this case you can order until the 11th April.

The ‘pay what you want’ model in this instance means that you can literally pay however much you think is appropriate (from a minimum of $1) – the basic package contains four novels, one novella, one audio drama and one short story, plus some Steam discount codes and a BL sampler. As you increase the amount you want to pay – first to $8 and then to $15 you get increasingly more content, with the total value apparently being $263. Translated into Sterling for UK fans that means you get almost £190 worth of content for a little over £10 – although you can choose to pay more if you’d like to give more to charity.

I won’t list all of the included titles here, as it’s easy enough to check them out on the Humble site, but suffice to say there’s an awful lot of great stories available. This is definitely a bundle that’s aimed at getting people into Black Library, with almost every title kicking off a series or introducing a character. It’s great to see BL getting involved in this sort of thing, and whether you’re looking to get started with some new series, fancy getting hold of some great-value ebook versions, or just want to give to a good cause, this seems like a great way to do it. As I’m writing this the Humble website says that over 9.5k bundles have been sold, so it looks like it’s pretty popular as well!

Weekend
It’s been quite a busy weekend on the release front, with the standard edition of the seventh Primarchs novel, a new 40k audio drama and two paperback editions all coming out. Could be quite an expensive one for a few people, I suspect! First up, let’s look at Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa by David Guymer, which came out in limited edition hardback just over two months ago and is now available in standard formats as well – hardback (£12.99), ebook (£9.99) and MP3 (£19.99). If you fancy a bit more information about what this one’s about, you could check out my Rapid Fire interview with David from January, or have a read of my review here.

Next up is Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams by John French, the second in this audio drama series which ties in with John’s wider Horusian Wars series. The first instalment – Blood and Lies – was excellent, and you can read my review of that here. For details of what to expect in this instalment you can check out another Rapid Fire interview where John talks about Truth and Dreams in a bit more detail. If you haven’t already, I would ABSOLUTELY recommend getting on board with this series – start with either Blood and Lies or the short story The Purity of Ignorance.

The last two releases are both paperbacks from David Annandale – the trade paperback (i.e. the big version) of the Horus Heresy novel Ruinstorm (£12.99) and the standard QP edition of Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine (£8.99). Keep an eye out for a review of Warlord coming fairly soon, while if you still need convincing about Ruinstorm you can have a read of both a Rapid Fire interview with David here, and my review here.

Thoughts on the week
The final week of each month is often a bit of a quiet one, so it’s been quite nice this week to see a good range of releases this week, as well as some interesting news. As Digital Monday short stories go, Flayed is probably not one of the standout releases, but it’s always nice to see slightly older stories like this get the standalone ebook treatment. It obviously ties in quite nicely with the new Necron codex that’s come out from GW, and I suspect it will have been quite an appropriate read for anyone buying into that particular army. I also thought it was interesting that the two Primarchs bundles landed on Monday, rather than the weekend – I’d like to see more things like that happening away from the weekend, to keep things fresh!

I’ve been looking forward to both Ferrus Manus and Truth and Dreams for quite some time now, so this was always going to be an interesting weekend for me. A new Primarchs book is always a good thing, and it’s interesting that the gap between LE and standard edition was only just over two months this time, compared to the three months that it tended to be previously. I’m interested to see how this one goes down in general, as I thought it was very good in a lot of respects, but a bit problematic in a few others. If nothing else, it’s worth it to see Ferrus have a bit of his own time in the sun! As for Truth and Dreams, I’m still putting together my thoughts on it in advance of my review, but I think it will go down very well with anyone who enjoyed the previous instalment, or who likes John’s writing.

I don’t think there’s too much more to say about the Humble Bundle, other than to reiterate how good it is to see BL getting involved in something like that which has a charitable element. There was a Horus Heresy-specific bundle a while ago, and although I can’t image this being something we’ll see too often in future (there’s a danger of devaluing things if discounts are always available, and I suspect BL will be very aware of that) I really hope we see more like this.

As usual, here’s a rundown of what else I’ve been posting this week:

Coming up…
It doesn’t look like there are any brand new novels coming out next week, but it should bring with it two new paperback omnibus editions – Champions of Chaos from the Warhammer Chronicles series (Sigvald, Valkia the Bloody, Van Horstmann and a bunch of short stories) and Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Lost by Dan Abnett, which is the third of the Gaunt’s Ghosts omnibuses. Plenty of good reading there! As the first week of April, do keep an eye out on Wednesday for confirmation of July’s new releases as well.

As always, if you’ve got any thoughts or comments on the week’s news and releases please do get in touch via the comments section below or on Facebook or Twitter.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.