Adrian Collins's Blog, page 205

REVIEW: The Talon of Horus by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The Talon of Horus is the tale of how the Black Legion came about in the aftermath of the galaxy-spanning Horus Heresy. It is recollected by Iskander Khayon, a former Thousand Sons sorcerer who languishes in Inquisition custody and is compelled to tell the tale of his sins.

As you may have guessed from that opening paragraph, this is not a story for newcomers to the Warhammer 40k setting. If you don’t understand those references, then you’ll be hopelessly lost in this story. Go back and read the Horus Heresy series from the start (that’s Horus Rising by Dan Abnett) and come back to this one later.

For fans of 40k and especially fans of Chaos, this is a triumph.

Rather than the usual 40k dynamic of some representatives of the Imperium of Man facing off against a heretical or alien threat, The Talon of Horus features a cast almost entirely drawn from the Traitor Legions, the notional villains of the Horus Heresy and setting as a whole.

Dembski-Bowen doesn’t shy away from this fact either. Our protagonist, Khayon casually talks about slaves being expendable, yet we come to identify with his goals and principles. We develop affection for both him and for his coterie of daemonic familiars and strays from other legions. In the end, we feel his admiration for Abaddon, who is pretty much the biggest bad guy in the setting.

Making such morally dubious protagonists compelling while not shying away from, or offering excuses for their questionable views and decisions is not easy, but Dembski-Bowden pulls it off admirably here.

One of the elements which most enthralled me about this book was the way the author takes the established 40k lore about the Traitor Legions, the Eye of Terror, the nature of daemons and runs with it. The way characters from different Legions interact and display their distinct aims and perspectives is engaging. The portrayal of daemons in ways that are far more personal and visceral than the limited range we see on the tabletop version of 40k is simply delicious and I want so much more of that.

Dembski-Bowden has long been considered one of the best Black Library authors for his ability to turn the lore of 40k (especially as regards Chaos) into genuinely innovative, almost weird fiction and this novel is an excellent example of that ability.

My only real criticism of this novel is that it is perhaps a little dry and reliant on exposition over action although it hardly lacks for action and this may be a necessary evil given we are dealing with a time-period and part of the 40k galaxy which has been little explored. Khayon’s rambling narrative, staggering between personal feelings, contextual recollections and more immediate conflicts can be a little wearing and the occasional moments where he breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to his captors, rather than just telling the story are a little distracting.

Overall, this is an excellent deep dive into a fascinating and long-neglected part of the 40k mythos and I highly recommend it to any fans of the setting.

Buy The Talon of Horus by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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Grimdark Magazine Issue #23 is out now!

This week, the last four months, and hell, this year has just been absolutely full on, across so many parts of the SFF community. So, I’ll be honest, it feels a bit odd to be shouting out that Grimdark Magazine Issue #23 has hit the stands. It’s ready for our Patreon subscribers to download and for the rest of our followers to grab from Amazon in ebook or from our webstore in PDF.

Issue #23 cover

Carlos Diaz has once again put out an excellent cover image based upon Ben Galley’s The Road to Hella and is a brilliant intro to what is a jam packed issue of grimdark fantasy.

Contributor lineup for Grimdark Magazine Issue #23

In this issue we have an awesome range of authors, interviewees, and article writers to immerse you in the grimdark genre and the publishing industry.

The Thrallcatcher’s Apprentice  by Deborah A. Wolf
The Pachinko Gambit by Chris Edwards
The Road to Hella by Ben Galley
The Indie Author’s Guide to Hiring a Cover Artist by Dean Samed
An interview with M.L Spencer
An interview with Rob J. Hayes
Review: The Seventh Perfection
Review: The Book of Dragons

Buy Grimdark Magazine Issue #23

Grab yourself a copy of this issue using the below links.

If this is the first time you’ve checked out GdM make sure you head on over to our catalogue, type in the name of your favourite author, and see what we have from them in our catalogue.

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REVIEW: Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI by Jonathan Raab

Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI is something I’ve rarely encountered in my years of reviewing books: a horror comedy that works. Better still, it’s a horror comedy that focuses on slasher movies and specifically a transparent send-up of the Friday the 13th movies.

As a longstanding fan of slasher movies, I have devoted years of my life to movies that are almost universally stupid. Indeed, the most fascinating parts of slasher movies tend to be the behind-the-scenes stories about them. This book combines both with a well-written slasher movie plot combined with an entirely fiction history behind its production.

Jonathan Raab fictionalizes himself as the author hired to do the official novelization of Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI. In-universe, Camp Ghoul Mountain is a controversial entry into a long-running brainless horror franchise that was derivative of already derivative movies. The director, a psychadelic-addicted conspiracy theory, turns it into a movie about Hollywood Satanism as well as a screed against the Vietnam War.

The movie studio, having financial troubles, must release the movie as is to critical failure. However, the movie gradually starts picking up a fandom due to the moral guardians cracking down it as well as the heroic efforts of the Camp Ghoul Mountain franchise creator. The director and he conflict over whether they’re making art or mindless entertainment but combine efforts to save the film.

This story is interspersed with the novelization of the fictional movie itself. Surprisingly, Jonathan Raab resists the urge to make the actual slasher portion of the novel perfunctory. Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI is an exceptionally well-written B-movie with the characters both believable as well as likable. Yes, it’s just another story of horny teens going up to an isolated location to be killed but they are dealing with much more sinister forces than the animal mask-wearing Henry the Horror.

Grimdark fans will love the dark and twisted take on the slasher genre that applies its weird principles to political satire. It’s a decent enough horror movie that I would have enjoyed watching it in the real world. Part of what makes slasher movies entertaining is that they really are the nadir of writing with rare exceptions.

It’s not the writing that people come to see, anyway, but the special effects and fanservice. Jonathan Raab understands that and inserts numerous sly comments like his fictional avatar commenting on scenes where the “movie” objectifies its female stars. The fact the in-universe author often tries to justify it all in the name of high art makes it even funnier.

Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI is a solid piece of entertainment and actually has a few interesting things to say. I think horror fans, especially slasher movie fans, will get more out of it than others. It’s definitely a recommendation for those who love the genre and probably those who have only a cursory examination of it too.

Buy Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI

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REVIEW: Exuma by Mark Brendan

It’s always a rare privilege to be offered the ARC (advance review copy) of a novel – or, in this case, a novella – before it heads to print and the big bad world. In recent years I’ve become something of a Hispanophile and an early modern era aficionado, so that I pounced on Grimdark Magazine’s offer to read Mark Brendan’s debut novella Exuma, when I learned that it was partly set in early modern Spain and also strays into fantasy. It’s also a story which contains an unfair galley rower sentence, a shipwreck as well as constant setback and desperate survival against all odds, so that it was hard to resist.

In Exuma, we follow the misfortunes of textile merchant Juan Phillip Diaz de Castro, during a period when the Office of the Holy Inquisition in Spain is still going strong. De Castro runs afoul of this Office, when a helpful informer tells the Inquisition that De Castro and his younger brother Pablo are in possession of a family heirloom, a Lutheran Bible printed in the vernacular.

A merciless Inquisitor swoops on De Castro and Pablo, making them suffer the rack and worse in his torture chambers, in a effort to make them confess and recant their heresy. During this scene the reader also learns that the brothers are of Low Countries origin who emigrated to Spain. The younger brother Pablo is defiant until the last not to renounce his faith, so that he is tied to the stake and burned to a crisp. Yet to his great shame De Castro is broken, before being sentenced to serve as a galley slave on the Bella Maria, where he befriends a fellow Spaniard in Sanchez and Raoul (a Haitian) between blows of the overseer’s whip.

The Bella Maria eventually sails close to Cancun in the Caribbean when it is blown to bits after being attacked by a fleet of English privateers. De Castro, Sanchez and Raoul find themselves clinging to a bit of driftwood in the middle of the ocean, until they come in view of an island where they make out a band of castaways consisting of Spanish soldiers, sailors and galley slaves. The galley slaves are systematically slaughtered by the soldiers, so that De Castro and his two buddies decide to wait until nightfall before swimming towards the island. Upon reaching it they encounter yet more calamity when the narrative takes a fantastical turn. For hardly does the night set in that Mayan death bats the size of humans called Camzotzas emerge from the rainforest and attack the soldiers along the beach.

Following this attack an unlikely alliance is formed between the three slaves and the soldiers upon the beach, who resolve to join forces to repel the beasts. Eventually De Castro and his friends realise that the monsters can be slain by fire or by severing their heads from their shoulders (a bit like Christopher Lambert and Adrian Paul’s enemies in the Highlander movies and TV series of yore). They manage to resist one of the beasts’ attacks although Sanchez is carried off by the monsters. De Castro is still racked by guilt after having recanted to the Inquisition while his brother was killed, so that he is left feeling torn over whether to attempt escape from the island with the soldiers or to track down and liberate his friend Sanchez.

This story is possessed of simple, flowing writing and based on some solid historical research. It is an honest meat-and-potatoes yarn which is a bit of fun to leaf through on a Sunday afternoon. While being short enough to never become overly tedious, the story’s creepy mythical monsters inject enough tension and mystery into the narrative to make it interesting. The early modern Spanish setting is also a breath of fresh air and keeps the narrative from wholly descending into B-grade literary splatter.

So overall for Exuma it’s a three out of five for this upcoming novella from Mark Brendan, a straightforward monster-killing romp with high odds stacked against the protagonist who faces a real struggle both to survive and to redeem himself.

Buy Exuma by Mark Brendan

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Neon Leviathan now on Audible

T.R. Napper’s barnstorming collection Neon Leviathan–described by reviewers as “at once gritty and vertiginous and close-focus human in the way only the best SF can manage” by Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon) and “a deft and masterful hand” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time)–is now available on Audible. Greg Patmore has done yet another masterful job of narrating the book (after his brilliant work on Evil is a Matter of Perspective), capturing the myriad voices Napper has used to tell his cyberpunk masterpiece.

You can check out a sample over on Audible, below.

 

 

 

 

 

Check out an excerpt

Earlier this year we published an excerpt from Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang, the story that won the Writers of the Future contest back in 2014. Check it out here.

Napper, who has a doctorate in cyberpunk, also wrote up an excellent cyberpunk primer that is well worth checking out over on the GdM blog.

Listen to Neon Leviathan by T.R. Napper on Audible

Amazon.com
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Are you a reviewer?

If you’re an audio book reviewer, please reach out to Adrian at adrian@grimdarkmagazine.com for a reviewer code. Please include the site or channel you review for as there are limited codes for release.

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REVIEW: Along the Razor’s Edge by Rob J. Hayes

“Handshakes are a dangerous business in some parts of the world.” This quote from Along the Razor’s Edge stuck with me, though Hayes meant it in a different light than how it pertains to most of us in this Covidic world right now. Still, it was no less deadly, as it turns out.

Our protagonist in this novel, Eskara Helsene, is quite the anti-heroine. She’s one of the world’s most powerful battle sorcerers, yet as our story gets underway, she’s as helpless as a baby mouse, and not much bigger.

See, Eskara was on the losing side in a great war and through her defeat by treachery, she has lost access to her power Sources and has been cast into the Pit, where thousands of “scabs” toil alongside her in their unending task of digging. Digging deeper and farther, and to what end no one knows.

Of course, it’s not that simple. There are politics and power plays amongst the prisoners. The strong rise to the top of the weak and the downtrodden. Simple things such as food and snuff and favors are bartered and stolen between the prisoners. There is no hope of release or redemption, just the day to day hell underground of digging and surviving.

Until Eska meets a “crazy” old man that has strange ideas and an ear for whistling wind. A plot is hatched, and through the first-person account from Eska herself we see how that all progresses. And more often than not, ends in shit.

Hayes uses a brilliant method of telling Eska’s tale. While we’re set in her first-person narrative at her age of 15 to 16, we are getting constant snippets of her story from other times. Flashbacks to her childhood and training at the Academy, along with her friendship with friend and companion Josef, and their actions during the war give us lots of backstory intrigue to build on.

“It’s just as important to tailor a truth to the audience, as it is a lie.”

We also get a good bit of foreshadowing, where the “old” Eska is throwing little intrigues and hints of what’s to come many years from our main story. It’s clear that Eska is telling this story from a perspective of an older woman looking back at her youth, both her mistakes and her triumphs. She gives us great insight on her own regrets and understanding of how she became what she is in later life. These little hints entice the reader by showing that Eska won’t be in this Pit hell forever, and she has quite the climb to power ahead of her, and perhaps some setbacks along the way. This isn’t a spoiler in the context of her story – it’s obvious she survives the Pit as she’s telling us about it. But these little tidbits give us a real teaser for the next two books in the trilogy.

Along the Razor’s Edge isn’t the first book I’ve read by Rob J. Hayes, and it certainly won’t be the last. Without giving anything away, I will say that this book is satisfying in the fact that it completes a story arc in Eska’s life, but the way Hayes brings it all about makes me want to rush out and get the next one.

Buy Along the Razor’s Edge by Rob J. Hayes

Read an excerpt of Along the Razor’s Edge on the GdM blog.

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REVIEW: Dark Imperium by Guy Haley

To me, Guy Haley’s Dark Imperium, the highly anticipated advancement of decades of Warhammer 40K storyline by the Black Library, is the story of what should have been. This should have been a book that reinvigorated those of us hundreds of books deep into the 30K and 40K universe. This should have been a carefully constructed mix of the brilliant story style of the opening books of the Horus Heresy mixed with the colossal re-introduction of Roboute Guilliman and the introduction of the Primaris space marine upgrades that would align with Games Workshop’s model range releases for these models. It should have been a jump-in point for new fans. It should have been the start of a massive wave of new books and short stories and lore and… It should have been many things, but for this Black Library buff and two-decade Warhammer 40k fiction fan, Dark Imperium fell flat.

To recap the story, Roboute Guilliman is a century clear of the stasis field that kept him alive for ten thousand years. He has teamed up with a rogue machanicus priest who designed the bigger and better primaris space marines ten thousand years ago and has kept them safe and secret ever since the Imperium tore itself apart. He’s now chasing his brother Mortarion and his Death Guard plague marines across the sector while at the same time learning of his home system of Ultramar coming under siege. This book is the story of Roboute’s fight to face his brother, rescue his homeworld, break the Imperium out of its frozen-gear state to start working as it needs to in order to restore its former glory, and to reverse people’s thinking that the Emperor is a god, all the while keeping his own mental state—dormant in stasis for ten thousand years—in line.

The story has a bunch of PoVs: Guilliman, a wounded soldier on a hospital world, a Primaris space marine, Mortarion shows up for a short bit, and a priest recently elevated to be Guilliman’s key member in the Imperial church. Guilliman’s PoV was fine (though it lacked the sheer magnificence of thought Abnett and McNeill created in the Horus heresy books), as was the wounded soldier’s and the space marine’s (probably the pick of the bunch). However, Mortarion’s PoV felt pointless, and the priest just read like a fan-boy stroking himself over Guilliman the entire time. Upon finishing the book, I can only assume Mortarion has been placed in there as a PoV for use in a sequel book, because I’m buggered if I know why he was there otherwise. Such a colossal foe deserved more, or should have been referred to but left out as a PoV. And on the topic of PoVs, the author flagrantly wandered between PoVs throughout the book, making the reading experience frustrating, at best.

When it comes to the storyline, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed in a book ending in my life. It was just an absolute let down of an ending to follow up a confusing and meandering middle. I really can’t say more without spoiling the ending, suffice to say I was sitting on the bus when the reveal—for lack of a better way to say it—dropped and if it weren’t for being surrounded by people I would have thrown the book at a window.

It would also be remiss of me to not mention the info dumps. Crikey. There are long stretches of it and they can be pretty dense. And then, sometimes, just in case you didn’t get it the first time, the information is re-dumped on you.

We don’t do this very often on the GdM blog, but I can’t in good conscience recommend this book to our readers. Knowing a fair few authors and hearing their stories about how Black Library run the publication process (some good; some not so good), this book feels like the author wrote something pretty good, then some lore-master jumped in and went BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DETAILS, and then a publishing exec went BUT THIS COULD BE A TRILOGY, and then a project manager shouted at Haley YOU HAVE 48HRS TO IMPLEMENT ALL OF THAT AND COME OUT THE OTHER END WITH SOME SORT OF SERVICEABLE STORY. And Haley just sat down and went, “Fuck.”

Buy Dark Imperium by Guy Haley

I reiterate that I’m not giving this book the thumbs up, but if you’re a 40K tragic like I am, you’ll probably do it anyway, because hell … it’s the first time the storyline has moved forward in donkeys. Use the below links.

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Another Ten Indie Grimdark Novel Recommendations

The indie fantasy market is something that has been very good to grimdark authors. It provides a global audience for those who want to tell stories that might not be right for traditional publishers. I’ve been very lucky to not only find a bunch of great novels but meet some great authors as well. These are great works, though, that I think grimdark fans would be lucky to check out.

Paternus: Rise of Gods by Dyrk Ashton

Mini-Review: Paternus is not a book that I normally think of as grimdark as it is a grandiose tale of gods versus monsters that has been occurring behind the scenes for much of human history. However, the protagonists turn out to be more of the brutal and dark side of mythology. Heroes and villains mix in a story that I feel is just plain awesome to read.

GdM Review: Click here

A Wizard’s Forge by A.M. Justice

Mini-Review: Not every fantasy story needs a lot of swearing, ultra-violence, and sex to be grimdark. A Wizard’s Forge is a work that deals with an interesting and underused plot device in Stockholm Syndrome. The protagonist is kidnapped, sold into slavery, and then gaslit until she’s genuinely in love with her captor. Thankfully, she’s also in hate and manages to escape to a country without slavery. However, the scars from her condition remain with her and cannot be easily excised.

Chains of Blood by M.L. Spencer

Mini-Review: Chains of Blood is the first book of the sequel series to the awesome Rhenwars Saga. I very much enjoyed the Rhenwars Saga and recommend it but you don’t need to have read it to enjoy this work. A young farmer has his family murdered by a mysterious cult in the middle of the night, only to force him to swear an unbreakable oath of allegiance to his tormentors. He then finds out he is the heir of a powerful magical bloodline just as the region is invaded by a sinister hive-mind of warriors that enslave all wizards. The moral ambiguity of the protagonist is the most interesting work here and how the various sides are all thoroughly repugnant but there’s no way to go it alone.

GdM Review: Click here

Mercury’s Son by Luke Hindmarsh

Mini-Review: Mercury’s Son is a dystopian science fiction novel that I absolutely love. The Earth’s environment has been destroyed by a war that has left it under the control of a Luddite cult. The cult is incredibly hypocritical, though, and employs a cyborg assassin who has no memory of his past. This is a solid grimdark story of a more Blade Runner-esque influence than most. I really liked the protagonist and think it works as both a mystery as well as science fiction epic.

Gideon’s Curse by David Niall Wilson

Mini-Review: Gideon’s Curse deals with a subject that America still struggles with the legacy of: slavery. An antebellum plantation’s ruins is home to a horrifying curse that relate to its dark past. This is more a horror novel than a grimdark one, but I really enjoyed it and its author submitted to it as grimdark. Also, the story of how a decent (even saintly) person gets torn down from his idealism by the inherent crappiness of man makes it a story that has a lot of grimdark resonance.

GdM Review: Click here

Child of the Night Guild by Andy Peloquin

Mini-Review: Child of the Night Guild is a rare combination: Young Adult with grimdark. This works surprisingly well as Viola is a woman who goes through a traumatizing series of experiences that slowly shapes her into someone looking out for her own interests over empathy. The Night Guild is not a lovable band of thieves but an abusive, controlling environment that eagerly buys children to turn them into tools. Books like The Hunger Games prove that just because books can be meant for younger readers, doesn’t mean that they’re not dark and edgy.

GdM review: Click here

Heart of Stone by Ben Galley

Mini-Review: I am fully of the mind Ben Galley is going to be one of the important voices in grimdark fiction from 2020 onward. He’s already created some future classics like Chasing Graves and, well, this. The Heart of Stone stars an unusual protagonist in Task the Golem. A creature built to kill and who has killed thousands, following his unusual journey was one that managed to combine an existential crisis with a surprising search for humanity.

Faithless by Graham Austin King

Mini-Review: Religion is always a good topic for grimdark as it is a trusted institution by many while also being a place many terrible things have been done in the name of (or hidden behind). Graham Austin King tells a surprisingly small-scale story in a fantasy setting that is, nevertheless, incredibly evocative. After a man is sold by his father to a mining god’s church, he is condemned to a life of slavery in the mines below before doing anything to get out of them into the hallowed temple above. Political intrigue, hypocrisy, black magic, slavery, betrayal, and greed are just some of the things you’ll find in this wonderful but dark story.

GdM review: Click here

The Elder Ice by David Hambling

Mini-Review: The works of H.P. Lovecraft are well-loved among many grimdark authors as his nihilistic cosmic horror tales are perfectly suited for existentialist fantasy stories. After all, if you can’t look to the gods or humanity for comfort then what do you do? The Elder Ice is a short horror adventure set post-WW2 and deals with an unusual situation in Lovecraftian fiction: the monsters never appear onscreen. Instead, it is the suggestion of them and their existence that causes greed as well as despair to overcome a small group of human beings fighting over an inheritance. Non-traditional grimdark fantasy but one that I deeply enjoyed, It is also the beginning of the enjoyable Harry Stubbs series.

GdM review: Click here 

Lords of Asylum by Kevin Wright

Mini-Review: One of the most solid examples of grimdark on this list, I really enjoyed this book. Sir Luther Slythe Krait is a former justicar who has fallen to drink, murder for hire, and other crimes. Recruited against his will, Sir Krait is sent to investigate the murder of a noblewoman’s family by an apparent monster in a plague-ridden city. The twists and turns in this book are enough for three novels and it’s a hefty 500 pages. While Sir Krait has his redeeming qualities, they are deeply buried, and he reminded me a great deal of George R.R. Martin’s Hound.

GdM review: Click here

The post Another Ten Indie Grimdark Novel Recommendations appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Toreador by Stewart Wieck

The Vampire: The Masquerade Clan Novel series is something that I enjoyed a great deal when I was eighteen years old and it was 1999. My taste in fiction was not quite as refined as it would be decades later and my favorite pastime was buying game fiction from Waldenbooks (remember those?). I read probably over a hundred Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft novels published by TSR before they were bought by Wizards of the Coast. Well before the settings were bought by Hasbro.

The Clan Novel series was an attempt by White Wolf to cash in on the relative success of the Dungeons and Dragons fiction line. Set in the World of Darkness, every form of supernatural monster lurks in the shadows while regular humans go about their nights in blissful ignorance. Vampires are the most prominent of supernaturals and regularly wage war against one another for control of feeding grounds as well as ideology. The more civilized of the two major factions is the Camarilla while the more wild and ferocios is the Sabbat. Standing between them is the Anarchs, who tend to side with the Camarilla more often than the Sabbat.

The Clan Novels were out of print for almost twenty years but were recently re-released under Crossroad Press on ebook and in paperback form. Deciding to experience the books again, I picked up all thirteen volumes of it and have been gradually working my way through them. My adult tastes have left the experience a mixed bag. They’re still very fun for what I remember of the setting but the flaws stand out more.

If you aren’t familiar with the World of Darkness setting in general and the Vampire: The Masquerade setting in particular then Clan Novel: Toreador is probably not for you. It requires a more than passing familiarity with the setting to make sense of who the Clans, sects, and factions are. This is somewhat irritating as if they’d taken the time to be a bit more new reader friendly, then the series might have been quite a bit more enjoyable. It’s doubly frustrating because the next book in the series, Gangrel, is an excellent introduction.

The book is primarily about a new vampire named Leopold. It opens reasonably well by establishing he’s a sculptor that preys on the local prostitutes and runaways in his neighborhood but doesn’t kill them. Leopold wants to be a friendly neighborhood vampire but is self-aware enough that he knows how much of a scumbag he really is. Leopold had his memory erased of the vampire who turned him and hopes to find out the truth of his Embrace from the local Clan Toreador elder, Victoria Ash.

Meanwhile, Victoria Ash is throwing an elaborate party as part of a plan to manoeuvre herself to becoming ruler of Atlanta’s vampires. Unfortunately, for her, the plan is doomed from the start. Her party is meant to be the first target of the Sabbat’s siege of Atlanta. There is also a plan to sell a priceless magical artifact during the party that could change the course of Kindred history. Bad timing doesn’t begin to describe it.

Toreador is not the best of the Clan Novels and is actually pretty close to my bottom of the thirteen. Leopold is not a particularly interesting character. Victoria Ash eventually develops into one but comes off as a somewhat flighty, even dumb, character here despite being over four hundred years old. No vampire who lives that long is not a cunning and feral creature underneath whatever facade they’ve adopted.

Overall, I think this is a book better endured than enjoyed. There’s a lot of really solid fiction and excellent characters in the Clan Novel saga. However, Toreador isn’t the best place to find them I’m sorry to say. The horror of being a vampire and the cold, calculating politics of the Camarilla just aren’t on display here. Still, you have to read this in order to understand the rest of the series.

Buy Toreador by Stewart Wieck

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5 Plague-Related Video Games To Play

Most of the world remains locked down due to the coronavirus, even if some of our nations have started to open up our shops and restaurants again. Plague is something that a lot of us have never given any thought to before Covid-19 and it has been a frightening wake-up call about how vulnerable we are to disease. Indeed, some of us have lost friends and family to the disease.

Facing our fears is something that fantasy helps us deal with, though. Sometimes that’s in the form of electronic media like video games as well. As such, I am going to recommend five video games that deal with plague that you might feel like playing during this time of crisis. It isn’t for everyone and some would much prefer to play Animal Crossing or other games utterly removed from the subject. Those video games are not for me, though.

Tom Clancy’s The Division (Xbox One, Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows)

The Dollar Flu has ravaged the country and New York City in particular. As a member of a covert emergency response agency, you are given a pistol and a mission to execute whatever groups stand against the rebuilding of America. It’s a somewhat authoritarian narrative but the game is more aware of this than many people give it credit for as the Division turns out to not necessarily be the nicest bunch of people in the world. The best part of this game is the design of New York and the hundreds of short stories found on its collectables. Unfortunately, it’s designed for multiplayer and its fanbase has mostly moved on. As such, the game starts to get punishingly difficult by the end.

A Plague Tale: Innocence (Xbox One, Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows)

It’s the 13th century in Aquitaine France with the Hundred Years War in full swing. The Black Death descends upon the region like, well, a plague and you are left defending your poor brother from the Catholic Inquisition. The depiction of thousands of rats threatening to eat you and being a scared young woman hunted by armored soldiers is very well done. Amicia is a very likable character and while I wasn’t a big fan of her brother Hugo, I felt motivated to complete her quest. The game is an excellent mixture of stealth and puzzle-solving that gives you a sense of real power as you slowly learn how to ninja your way through the Inquisition’s ranks. Amicia will never battle armored men face-to-face but she’ll learn how to kill them like a Faceless Man trained Arya.

Vampyr (Xbox One, Playstation 4, Switch, Microsoft Windows)

Vampyr takes place in 1918 during the Spanish Flu. Jonathan Reid is a physician turned into a vampire when the outbreak is made worse by a horde of feral vampires. Most of the gameplay consists of a sort of easier Dark Souls-esque combat system where you fight hordes of the undead alongside vigilante vampire hunters. It is also added by a conversation system where Doctor Reid must determine which of the 60+ voiced NPCs will feed his immortal hunger. Doctor Reid is a bit of a wet blanket as protagonists go but the game’s atmosphere is top notch. I heartily recommend it for just the chance to whip up some potions to help the public if you can’t do it in real life.

Dishonored (Xbox One, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows)

One of the best works of grimdark fantasy in gaming, Dishonored is the story of former Lord Protector Corvo Attano and his quest for revenge. Once the bodyguard and lover of Empress Emily, he fails Her Highness when she needs him most. Making a pact with the setting’s equivalent of Satan, he gains supernatural powers and goes on a killing spree through a plague-ridden steampunk kingdom. It is an amazing atmosphere, darkly evocative world, and Cthulhu-esque magic system. The game is also extremely good with its stealth mechanics and variety of oddball weapons. The only regret I have is that you’re not allowed to go on a monstrous killing spree unless you want the “Bad” ending.

The Last of Us (Playstation 4, Playstation 3)

Despite recent controversies over leaks, The Last of Us is often considered for the best storytelling by any game ever written. The story of the world being overrun by a fungal infection creates one of the most unique visions of a ‘zombie apocalypse’ you’re going to find. The characters of Joel and Ellie are the real reason to play this game, though, and are among the most beloved in a video game for a reason. The game itself is primarily a stealth one but includes enough action as well as set pieces to be really enjoyable. It’s a shame it’s only on one system.

 

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