Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Jack Yeovil does it again!, 1 May 2003
This book is a must for all fans of Warhammer, especially fans of the roleplaying system Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The book contains five short stories, three of which have been published before whilst the remaining two are previously unpublished. They are Red Thirst, Ignorant Armies, No Gold in the Grey Mountains, Warhawk and Ibby the Fish Factor. Whilst I prefer Yeovil's two novels, Drachenfels and Beasts in Velvet, this is a very respectable collection indeed and helps illustrate why Yeovil is the best of the Black Library's writers. This book is well-recommended and I only hope that Yeovil (otherwise known as Kim Newman) will find the time to write some more Warhammer stories.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five short stories of suspense and unreality, 10 Feb 2007
This new collection of essays by Jack Yeovil - alias for horror writer Kim Newman - includes three previously published pieces (from the anthologies Red Thirst, Ignorant Armies and Wolf Riders) and two new pieces written specially for this volume (the new pieces making up over half the total). Only two of the stories feature Yeovil's best-known character, Genevieve the vampire; other characters will also be noticed from his previous works. The book is not integrated either thematically or through characters; each story is basically stand-alone. It has the feel of being put together to exhibit the pre-existing pieces without reissuing the anthologies. Nevertheless, each story is gripping throughout, so the book is a worthwhile read.
Yeovil's creative license with the Warhammer world allows him to create an unusual setting. Picking up on the Gothic fantasy themes of the game, Yeovil adds touches which make this world decidedly more modern, as well as constantly dark and corrupt. In fact the books do more than any other work to flesh out this fantasy world as a serious backdrop. In Yeovil's world, Chaos is not the one-dimensional monstrosity of the game, but involves a constant subterranean corruption pervading life; in this book we get to see Chaos in its own dimension. The other social problems of his world - serial killers, revolutionaries and reactionaries, corrupt bureaucrats, drug addiction - are distinctly modern, despite the feudal and city-state settings. "Good" barely exists in this world; the heroes (such as Vukotich, Genevieve and Harald) are ambiguous beings on the border of corruption, their earthly interests caught up in higher events, usually against their will; sanctimoniously good characters (such as Tio Bland, Glinka and Liesel) appear as zealots or hypocrites (often both). A discerning reader will also find a lot of modern-culture references, usually with a twist - a dwarven Three Stooges, a Snow White parody, "Little Orphan Elsie", "Filthy Harald" and his "Magnin" throwing knife, even a religious leader clearly satirising a certain British Prime Minister - complete with "New and Old Temple", opinion pollsters and permanent grin.
"Red Thirst" features Genevieve and Vukotich in an adventure preceding the various other Genevieve stories. With the Empire overrun with Glinka's puritanical Moral Crusade, cracking down hard on drink, drugs, sex and other "vices", they get swept up in a purge of the underside of the empire. Escaping the Crusade, they discover a plot to kill Glinka, and are pitted against servants of Chaos posing as Crusade zealots. The theme of Chaos is repeated in "Ignorant Armies", with a much older Vukotich accompanying Johann von Mecklenburg to the Chaos Wastes in search of his lost brother Wolf. One of the most powerful depictions of Chaos in the Warhammer world, this short story features nightly battles between mutated warriors, and a house of the mad located in the midst of the daily heap of the dead. Between these stories is "No Gold in the Grey Mountains", a short story in the classic tradition, with many mysteries and a real twist in the tail. It is hard to describe without spoilers; suffice to say a band of brigands stranded in an old castle fall prey to a mysterious assailant which is not all it seems.
"The Warhawk" is a murder mystery, reading like a shorter, less convoluted version of "Beasts in Velvet"; Filthy Harald and Rosanna have to track down a serial killer who uses a hawk to kill his prey, but find that the mystery leads to a dark past of the Empire and that the hunted is pulling the strings of the hunter. The final piece, "The Ibby the Fish Factor", is perhaps the best of all, though clearly modelled after "Red Thirst". A new political leader, Tio Bland, is leading a pogrom against vampires under the pretext of an ambiguously worded law. Genevieve and another vampire have arrived to prevent an assassination attempt against Bland, organised by rival zealots on the vampire side; in the course of the story she has to escape an angry mob, reunite with lost love Detlef von Sierck and infiltrate Bland's Temple. Full of social commentary on modernising politicians, crackdowns and fanaticism, the tale also features puns about guards who act their stereotype, an alternative meaning of the "Hammer of Sigmar", and some clever play on the relationship between Genevieve and the younger-looking but older vampire. Expect another twist in the tale which returns the story to the favourite Yeovil theme of artifice and play-acting. It's a tale in the tradition of Yeovil's best, dealing with the paradoxes of undeath and the relative good of hybridity, impersonation and play-acting compared to the dangers of true belief. In all, the book is a worthwhile addition to Yeovil's oeuvre, certainly worthwhile for fans of his other works - though perhaps not the best starting-place for new readers.
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by Jack Yeovil
by Jack Yeovil
by Dan Abnett
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