Review: Gaunt's Ghosts 2 Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett
Gaunt’s Ghosts 2 Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett
Whereas the first book in this series was all Gaunt all the time, this novel focuses almost completely on the Ghosts who make up Gaunt’s regiment. It does this through a series of flashback stories, starting with the “founding” of the regiment and then highlighting specific ghosts so that the reader can get to know each of them better. The least successful of these stories for me was the first one, Ghostmaker, which tells how Gaunt pulled the Tanith First off their home world in the face of an unexpected attack by a Chaos fleet. This is the critical moment in explaining the complex relationship between Gaunt and his men. All through the first book they blamed Gaunt for not letting them fight for Tanith. Unfortunately, this story doesn’t satisfy. The fleet sneaks into the system, lands some chaos troops who are killing people, and Gaunt runs. Supposedly the whole world is lost (i.e. destroyed) and Gaunt decided that his regiment wasn’t enough to protect it. I had expected the planet to be destroyed by some sort of nuclear bombardment from orbit, but the enemy soldiers are on the planet and it just doesn’t make any sense that the wholly militarized Empire couldn’t get some relief forces to help save the day before an entire planet was destroyed by troops on the ground. I won’t say this often about Abnett, but I wish he had simply not written this story because to my mind, it makes the founding myth of the regiment ridiculous.
The other stories are much stronger. I won’t mention them all, but I would like to highlight a few. Mad Larkin the sniper gets his day in the sun in “The Angel of Bucephalon” where we find him high in a church spire after having apparently abandoned his fellow soldiers. The whole story is a conversation he has with a stone statue. In it we learn that he needs pills to keep from hallucinating, but even with the pills, the only time he sees the world as it really is, is when he looks at it through his sniper scope. He comes off as a strangely timid soldier who is a simply brilliant marksman. And as the angel, playing the role of commissar, demands he defend himself against her charge of desertion and the punishment of death, he slowly gathers himself together, waits his opportunity, and assassinates the head of the chaos resistance force which the Ghosts had been sent to kill. It’s a very effective tale which will leave you loving Mad Larkin.
“That Hideous Strength” tells the story of dull-whitted “Try Again” Bragg, the strongest and mentally weakest of the Ghosts whom Gaunt puts in charge of a supply convoy that no one thinks can make it to its destination. Bragg is simply awesome—not only as a soldier who won’t quit and remains steadfast in his loyalty to Gaunt—but because we learn that “slow” is very different than “stupid”. It’s just a great story all around.
And finally in “Blood Oath”, Ghost Physician Dorden, oldest man in the regiment, and the only one who is unwilling to carry a gun, finds his values pushed to the limit when he’s told to abandon scores of injured men from a rival regiment because the whole army is retreating. War is an especially terrible place for doctors and we learn a lot about the physician that the whole regiment depends so heavily on. It’s a moving tale.
As a way to quickly introduce the Ghosts who will be the mainstay of this series, this novel is effective. But as a story on its own, it’s weak, probably because it’s not truly a novel, just a collection of loosely braided together short stories.
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