Hello and welcome to another instalment of Black Library Weekly, a weekly look through the week’s Black Library news and releases. It’s been something of a busier week, with a few cool new releases as well as a little bit of interesting news. As usual, let’s start at the beginning and work our way through the week…
Slaughter at Giant’s Coffin is LJ Goulding’s first full Black Library novel, and it’s also the first ever novel focusing on the Scythes of the Emperor. As the title suggests, and its nature as a Space Marine Battles book, this focuses on a single action…the Scythes’ defence of the Giant’s Coffin bastion, on Miral Prime. Having lost their homeworld of Sotha to Hive Fleet Kraken, the battered remnants of the Scythes regroup in the Miral system, where the returning Chapter Master Thorcyra plans to rebuild the chapter. The shadow of the Kraken looms large however, and things look very bleak.
Gav Thorpe’s 70-minute audio drama Asurmen: The Darker Road comes nearly two years after its predecessor in the fledgling Phoenix Lords series, the short novel Asurmen: Hand of Asuryan. This time we see the first of the Phoenix Lords arriving at Craftworld Ulthwé in time to join Eldrad Ulthran on an expedition to the Crone Worlds, to claim an artefact that could guarantee the safety of Ulthwé and its people. Accompanied by the head of Ulthwé’s Seer Council, Asurmen guides his fellows through their perilous journey, but his presence doesn’t necessarily denote success for the mission.
“Just my type of scum!”
The story that introduced us to the 13th Penal Legion, Gav Thorpe’s Last Chance was first published in 1998, two years before Kage, Colonel Schaeffer and the rest of the Last Chancers were fleshed out in the novel 13th Legion. We first meet Kage sprinting through sniper-threatened no man’s land and stumbling across a platoon of Mordian Iron Guard, clearly keen to be anywhere other than where he is. After arousing the suspicion of the platoon’s Commissar, he regales the soldiers detailed to guard him with the story of how he ended up under Schaeffer’s dangerous command.
I recently posted a Forgotten Texts review for Chris Pramas’ classic (and excellent) Dark Angels short story The Black Pearl. I also got in touch with Chris for a quick interview, talking about how he ended up writing for Black Library and giving his thoughts on the wider hobby. Let’s get straight into the interview…
Available as an e-short for the first time, 11 years after its publication in the Let The Galaxy Burn anthology, Dan Abnett’s The Fall of Malvolion is a standalone ‘Astra Militarum’ (that’s Imperial Guard, to you and me) story featuring the Mordian Iron Guard. When troopers of the Mordian 15th uncover a nest of genestealers on the agri-world of Malvolion, it becomes a race against time to evacuate the population before the inevitable waves of tyranid monstrosities descend upon the planet to feed. Malvolion is well defended, but against the tyranid hordes even the staunchest Imperial defenders are hard pressed.
Happy Sunday (or whenever you read this), and welcome back to another instalment of Black Library Weekly, a weekly look through the week’s Black Library news and releases. We’ve had a couple of fairly quiet but still enjoyable weeks, and that trend has continued this week; there has been some exciting news, but not a huge amount of brand new content (read: essentially none). As usual, let’s start at the beginning and work our way through the week…
If you’ve been following Black Library for a couple of years or more, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that there have been some ups and downs in terms of the volume and style of releases. You might remember 2015 as a year where only a single main-series Horus Heresy novel was released, or look at a fair few of the relatively recent books and see unusually close links to what’s been coming out of Games Workshop – the Warhammer End Times books for example, or the early Age of Sigmar stories and the War Zone Fenris releases.
Keep reading…
In his debut novel Kingsblade, Andy Clark gives us the first full Black Library novel focused on the mighty Imperial Knights. When the world of Donatos falls prey to the machinations of the Word Bearers, led by Dark Apostle Varakh’Lorr, the Knightly Houses of Adrastapol are in the forefront of the Imperial response. Young and untested, two newly-raised Knights join their Houses in battle, keen to step out from under the lengthy shadows of their highborn fathers. When disaster strikes though, they have to shoulder unexpected burdens if they are to survive and find victory.
“Yer one of us now, lad.”
An early Warhammer story from back in 1997, Andy Jones’ Grunsonn’s Marauders introduced readers to the titular band of roguish adventurers – the dwarf Grimcrag Grunsonn, Jiriki the elf, young Imperial Envoy Johann Anstein, and the wonderfully named barbarian Keanu the Reaver. You can probably work out the tone of the story just from the names! It sees the four marauders taking on a quest to find a powerful magical relic, on behalf of a friendly old wizard. As you might expect, things don’t turn out quite as simple as they hope, and much adventure ensues.