Accursed or Acclaimed?

Black Library’s Warhammer Horror line continues with The Accursed, another in the range of short story collections which includes Maledictions, Invocations, Anathemas, and The Harrowed Paths, the last of these being a bit of an oddity because so much of its page count was taken with two novellas. I didn’t like Harrowed Paths, but I did like the first three, so let’s see if this is a return to form.

Age of Sigmar

The book leads off with Jake Ozga’s Skull Throne, which had previously been published as a standalone story. It’s quite good – it’s rather odd in its opening sections, but the oddness actually comes together and ends up making sense in a way which increases rather than defusing the power of the story – always a good trick – and I’m a bit more patient about extremely trippy stories when they’re using the Age of Sigmar setting, because the Mortal Realms are basically a death metal variant on a Roger Dean landscape and if a story set in them doesn’t at least somewhat reflect how bizarre they are, it might as well be an Old World story. (Not that Black Library are including any Old World stories in these collections, despite reprinting an entire series of Old World novels in the Warhammer Horror range…)

Harrowed Paths and Warped Routes

Following on from Maledictions, Invocations, and Anathemas, The Harrowed Paths is the latest short story anthology in the Warhammer Horror line. It departs somewhat from the format of the previous entries in the series by sandwiching a cluster of shorter stories in between two novella-length works. Given that The Deacon of Wounds had wide margins, a big font, and a small page count, one wonders whether the original plan was to put out another portmanteau like The Wicked and the Damned consisting of that and the two novellas found here.

Warhammer 40,000

The first of the two novellas is The Colonel’s Monograph by Graham McNeill – this is the one which was previously released in 2019. It depicts a widowed archivist tasked with cataloguing the library of a deceased Colonel; the titular Imperial Guardswoman had been a hero of the sector, but died recently in great debt, and her son declares he’s planning to sell off the books to pay the debts. Supposedly, somewhere in there is an unpublished monograph by the Colonel, a personal account of her last major campaign – if that could be found, it would be very valuable indeed. As our archivist investigates, she discovers – obviously – that all is not as it seems.

This is nothing less than an attempt by McNeill to write an M.R. James-esque story within a Warhammer 40,000 context (there’s even a supporting character named “Montague Rhodes”); there is a bit of perilous lesbian eroticism towards the end of a sort which James never touched, but aside from that it’s a rather nicely-observed take on the style, with the antiquarian mystery, the unexpectedly grubby backstory it’s concealing, and a “ghost” which might not technically be a ghost after all. In this bit of literary cosplay McNeill manages to deliver a better story than any other I’ve read by him.

Anathemas Or Apologies?

Black Library continues their output of Warhammer Horror short story anthologies with Anathemas, the follow-up to Maledictions and Invocations. Whereas Maledictions had 11 stories split between 4 Age of Sigmar tales and 7 Warhammer 40,000 stories, Invocations flipped the proportions somewhat, providing 12 stories with a 5 Warhammer 40,000/7 Age of Sigmar split.

The pendulum swings back in Anathemas, and if anything it swings further: of its 14 stories, 5 are Age of Sigmar pieces and 9 are Warhammer 40,000, which only further cements my view that Warhammer 40,000, since its baseline axioms are darker and less prone to epic heroism than Age of Sigmar, is a bit of a more natural home for horror than Age of Sigmar – at the very least, it seems like the creative juices are flowing a bit more freely on the Warhammer 40,000 side of the equation.

Invocations Or Impertinances?

Invocations is the second in the series of short story collections in the Warhammer Horror series which were kicked off by the preceding Maledictions. As with Maledictions, what you get here is a brace of stories, some in the Age of Sigmar setting, some in the universe of Warhammer 40,000, but this time around there’s a notable attempt to include more Age of Sigmar content: whereas in Maledictions only 4 of the 11 stories were based on that setting, here 7 of the 12 stories are based on it.

Age of Slasher

The Warhammer Horror line continues its second wave with Castle of Blood by C.L. Werner, the first full-length novel in the line to be based in the Age of Sigmar setting. The premise is pretty simple: the ancient Count Wulfsige von Koeterberg has lived for years in isolation in his castle of Mhurghast, overlooking the town of Ravensbach. Decades ago, Count Wulfsige’s errant son died, and since then the Count has been stewing in his own resentment of those he deems responsible, and has been making his plans for revenge.

That revenge is announced at a dinner party he calls at Mhurghast, to which he summons his intended victims – and their children, all of whom are adults of about the age that young von Koeterberg was when he died, give or take. That’s important for the Count’s plan – for, by arranging the dinner in a ritual fashion, he ensures that the children become acceptable vessals for a dire demon of Khorne – a spirit of mass murder and destruction, forcing the parents into a terrible situation where once the demon is unleashed they’ll be forced to kill their own children in self-defence or face destruction at the hands of their offspring.

Maledictions Or Malapropisms?

The undignified, blubbering, grumpy weeping on the part of certain Warhammer fans when it comes to the Warhammer Adventures line of kid’s novels set in the Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000 universe certainly involved a lot of utter bullshit being spouted. The entitled self-appointed gatekeepers of the hobby couldn’t be honest and direct about some of their objections – such as the prominence of girls, PoC, and girls who are PoC in the proposed fiction series – so they had to talk a lot of nonsense which was demonstrably untrue.

An oft-repeated claim, for instance, was that the settings in question weren’t suitable for kids – this despite the fact that the books are pitched at a reading age of 8-12 year olds, an age which happens to match a good many hobbyists’ first encounters with Warhammer in its various flavours more or less exactly. A related complaint, equally unfounded, was that the Warhammer Adventures line would herald the Bowdlerisation of the settings, with disturbing material excised by dint of being not suitable for kids.

The latter complaint was especially ridiculous, since it could only sustain itself if you only paid attention to the Warhammer Adventures announcement and didn’t give any consideration to the other new fiction line Black Library had announced at more or less the same time. This line was Warhammer Horror, an imprint for stories set in any of the Warhammer universes which put a particular emphasis on their horror-oriented aspects – of which there are a great many. This is precisely the material which dullard nerd gatekeepers would have us believe Games Workshop was about to censor forever for the sake of capturing an 8-to-12-year old demographic which, so far as I can tell, they’ve rarely actually lost.

Maledictions is part of the first wave of Warhammer Horror releases – an anthology of short stories (with, concerningly, no editor credit) offering up a range of all-new horror stories in the Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar settings. Although the book doesn’t separate the stories out into a 40K section and an Age of Sigmar section, I will deal with the stories from the two sections separately anyway because my level of exposure to the settings differs greatly.