Short and Sweet – November 2023

Hello and welcome to my Short and Sweet review roundup for November 2023, where as usual I’ve picked out a trio of books that I’ve recently read to talk a little about, in lieu of my usual longer reviews. For this month’s roundup I’ve gone for books with quite a range of page counts, from a novella all the way up to a 750+ page doorstopper! Across these three books you’ve got magic, demons, demigods, transhuman soldiers, immortal hunters, wizarding bureaucracy, mystical prophecies and loads more. There’s plenty to enjoy in all of them, although if I’m honest none of them entirely worked for me, personally.

If Found, Return To Hell by Em X. Liu

An interesting novella from Rebellion with a really cool premise, this is a story about wizards, demons, magical bureaucracy, and characters in search of family. Set in a world in which magic is administered by corporations, and the protagonist of the story – Journeyman Wen – works as a magical intern for One Wizard – providers of “wizarding care”. Ground down by the tedium of a job in what is essentially a wizarding call centre, Wen’s quiet, dull life is irrevocably disrupted by a call from a young man with an unusual magical problem, which turns out to be more dangerous…and more interesting…than Wen could possibly have expected.

I loved the premise of this, and in some respects I thought it was pretty cool, but I had a couple of key issues with it that just got in the way of my enjoyment. Firstly, it’s written in second person…which is really tricky to pull off, and I don’t think Liu quite managed it. I just don’t really see the point of it here, or why they chose an approach that – for me – puts a barrier between the reader and the text. On top of that, I didn’t quite follow all the world building. It was interesting, but presented in a way that felt like I sort of breezed past it in rapid order, leaving me a little confused and continuously wanting more context. Ultimately the story was still entertaining up to a point, but I came away with no real frame of reference for Wen – I still don’t really know who they are or why they made the decisions they did. Definitely one for those looking for something different, rather than the easy option.

The End And The Death Volume 2 by Dan Abnett

The second volume of the final Siege of Terra novel (i.e. book 8.2), this continues the increasingly lengthy journey of bringing the Horus Heresy to a close after 60+ books, picking up directly after TEATD Volume 1 and continuing the story of…well, everyone. Horus, Dorn, Sanguinius, Loken, Sindermann, Keeler, Fo, Abaddon, Amit, Fafnir Rann, Sigismund, Oll Persson…the list goes on, and the Dramatis Personae is the longest I’ve ever known! I don’t want to say too much about what actually happens here, for risk of spoilers if anyone hasn’t read Volume 1, but let’s just say there’s progression in ways both big and small, told over the course of a truly huge tome that’s over 750 pages in hardback.

That’s right, this is considerably longer even than the first volume, and there’s still one more to go! I still think it’s hard to make a properly informed judgement about the conclusion of the Siege as a whole, never mind TEATD as a novel in its own right, because there’s still so much to come. As a single volume though…I have mixed feelings about this. With its many, many very short chapters (we’re talking over 160 chapters!) and constant rotation of viewpoints, I honestly found it a bit of a grind – there are some really cool moments, and I wasn’t exactly bored reading it, but I had a hard time properly getting into the story, if you know what I mean. Suffice it to say this hasn’t left me desperate for the final volume, but I’m sure I’ll read it pretty quickly once it finally arrives…I just wish this had been less of a slog, to be honest.

Blacktalon by Liane Merciel

Liane Merciel’s debut novel for BL, this tells the tale of a group of (mostly) Stormcast Eternals assassins called the Blacktalons, named after their leader Neave Blacktalon, who are tasked by Sigmar with hunting down a series of dangerous enemies. Each enemy they track down is a powerful Chaos warlord in their own right, all of them searching for prophecies regarding a legitimate danger to Sigmar himself. As Neave and the Blacktalons battle through the forces of these warlords, they also wrestle with challenges to their identities and the perils of an immortality which sees their memories slowly eroded.

This is an interesting book in context of Black Library’s Age of Sigmar range, as while it’s technically the second novel to feature Neave Blacktalon, after Andy Clark’s Blacktalon: First Mark, I don’t think you can really call it a sequel. It’s more of a companion piece to the Blacktalons Warhammer+ TV show, from what I understand, although there are some preceding short stories too. I really wanted to like this, but while it’s entertaining enough it didn’t exactly grip me. The central concept is actually quite cool (I can’t say much without spoiling things), there are some interesting moments now and then. The problem was, I just couldn’t connect with the story itself and I came away not really caring about the characters.

Stormcast stories are tricky anyway, as it’s hard to instil genuine danger and excitement with characters who’ll be reforged every time they die. On top of that, it feels like this had quite a lot of editorially-imposed plot constraints – it boils down to a series of five main battles interspersed with travelling scenes, and reads like the sort of book that was plotted in broad strokes by Games Workshop, with the author asked to fill in the blanks. I might be way off the mark, but that’s how it felt to me, and under the circumstances I think Merciel did about as good a job as could be expected…but I could have just done with considerably less fighting and a much less linear plot. What I do like about this, however, is that it continues a recent trend of encouraging authors to have fun with the Mortal Realms themselves, populating them with imaginative beasts, locations, characters and factions. So pick it up for the exploration of the settings, rather than for a genuinely compelling plot.

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We’ve reached the end of this instalment of Short and Sweet – if you’re still reading, thanks for sticking with me! I’ll hopefully be back with another one review roundup in a few weeks, once I’ve got some more books to talk about. If you have any comments about these roundups, or if there’s anything else you’d like to see me cover, do let me know! You can drop me a line in the comments below, or find me on social media.

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