.

Great listen with an awesome build up. leading to an epic ending, or is it.

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Fantastic performance in a dark AoS tale

Surprisingly dark portrayal of the skaven and some interesting lore for the stormcast in a brilliantly performed novel. A perfect introduction to the mortal realms leaving me eager for more.

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I hope you like the word hope.

It’s a solid book, the world building is fab learning a bit more about hallowheart and the Adamantine chain.

if you really want to learn more about the ruination chamber it’s great! And the skaven are just nightmare fuel.

Tho if you was playing a drinking game every time you heard “hope”you would be in hospital.

And a pet peeve, you follow the hallowed knights in this book. Not once do they use their signature catchphrase “only the faithful”

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great edition starter

this was a fun story with a solid cast. the skaven are definitely the stars of the show as the depiction of them is truely terrifying. the narrator does a great job with all the different characters. the contrast between a scared mortal and a filthy skaven is great. the book does drag a bit in the final act and could definitely prosper from being a few chapters less.

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Standard Black Library fare, no ifs, just buts.

Most Black Library books serve the same purpose: explaining the world in which the Warhammer plastic minis exist. And whenever there are new toys to be had, they need to be shown in this context. Like He-man, or Digimon, only... less successfully.

So we brachiate ourselves through another narrative full of tropes and platitudes with the Stormcast Eternals, the faction in which even the riding beasts are prone to annoying one-word pontifications like "Remember!" or "Six Plus Ward Save!", and mottos such as "Hope where hope is lying" are not only to be repeated, but repeated ad infinitem like the telltale sign of a badly programmed AI chatbot. Or Digimon.

It is known that most authors of the Black Library cabal who pick the short straw and have to write about Age of Sigmar's posterboys have conspired to make the word "cerulean" happen. Not so Mr Kloster, who instead tries to make the word "but" happen. However, we're not reading this stuff hoping for expansive vocabulary; the one remaining GW thesaurus is reserved for authors of monologuing 40k Primarchs after all.

The story hastily throws together some hodgepodge characters of not very much depth, being too busy saving the world from Skaven to develop any credible chemistry or synergy. One of them is called Morgen, which is German for Dawn, and as such she follows an old tradition of cringeworthy Anglo-Teutonic nomenclature going back to the Empire of Man, with its wizards named Zauberer or Kugelschreiber.

The good guys are only granted dimensionality in contrast to their even less-dimensional foils, everybody's favourite ratmen, who have learned a few tricks in this books. Like, mutating from existing animals and humans (Really, GW? I have to retire my Beasts of Chaos to the square-based Old World for THIS?). Or being relatively, ritualistically silent. Or blinding everybody. Honestly, there are more lost eyes in this book than there are cut-off hands in the entire Star Wars franchise, as if written by GRR Martin the sadistic optician. One develops an unhealthy appetite for the occasional slit nostril or burst eardrum just for variety.

The narrator does his best to fulfil the brief. His Skaven sound maniacal, though all their words are preceded by a Hannibal-Lecter-likes-Fava-beans grade flapping of lips. His women sound appropriate, even though our main Memorian Mary-Sue develops an unhealthy habit of exasperating towards the latter half of the book, that's how emotionally involved she is. His action scenes are easily recognizable because he's turning his voice up the exact same notch every time. It's fine. It serves. It's the source material.

And therein lies the rub: Ironically, Games Workshop's Grand Narratives ultimately build such a hostile environment for better... narratives because of their iron corset of parameters to be struck. "Skaven must invade and lose because of infighting, Stormcast are now even more of a bunch of sourpuss edgelords, this character must survive because they come out in plastic soon, and by the way, you have three weeks to clobber this together in your lunchbreaks without second drafts or editing, because hey, that's what works for our rulesets too, right?" - It's hard to hit the Pulitzer Prize within such a framework.

However, the recent novel featuring Gunnar Brand and his merry men of chaos worshippers, set in the same time and conflict and mountain range with nary a metaversal overlap, managed to grip me where this book fails. And in failing, sadly it does meet my expectations.

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An okay introduction

I think there's a lot of cool things in this novel but it's offset by a lot of the characters and dialogue unfortunately. Here's my likes and dislikes!:

Likes:
- The environment of the halt is really cool and has a nice mystery to it that's very AoS
- The scenes where the skaven appear are fantastic, very eery and I was hooked at this part
- the side characters are all really cool especially the Lord Veritant and Peace the Gryph-Crow with his mimicry of human speech
- Some absolutely rad and horrific descriptions of skaven monsters and magic
- Was really cool to get more insight into the Memorians and what their relationships with the Stormcast they are partnered with are like
- Richard Reed is always a joy to listen to!

Dislikes:
- The main POV character was insufferable to me for a lot of the book, you kind of come to understand it if you know AoS lore pretty well but it doesn't really help in this case
- The hallowed knights don't feel like hallowed knights, there's no chants of 'Only the Faithful!' or anything that really makes them representative of my favourite Stormhost, they just feel like generic stormcasts
- Dialogue felt like a bit of a broken record at times, expect to hear 'hope is a lie' and 'hope when hope is dying' a lot.
- Skaven are a bit too much on the serious side, especially for a race that is so comically evil
- Some parts of the story feel like drawn out misery for the sake of drawn out misery
- Lack of proper Skaven PoVs

Overall the plot line does keep you engaged and I managed to get through it but some of my dislikes came close to stopping me, it does do a good job of setting up the bleak picture for the new Edition of Age of sigmar though!

Whilst this book might not have been my cup of tea at times I'm always on the look out for more AoS stuff to listen to and look forward to diving into Gary Kloster's other novels!

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Nothing special

I’ve listened to a fair few AOS books and some of them are great, most are pretty average and for me this falls into the latter.
Most of the characters are uninspired, and the pays offs are pretty underwhelming. The Skaven are far more horrific than they are funny which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but the story didn’t carry for me.

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Great way to introduce the new edition

A good story overall with engaging characters that help bring more character to the stormcast

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Grimdark AoS

And that’s as it should be but I find I struggle with the melancholic writing of this author, having just read Lazarus the style and tone are very similar, It would be nice to have the occasional brief introduction of humour to alleviate the gloom
Richard Reeds narration is as alway clear, precise with perfect pronunciation

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A good story but the previous ones was better

The story is good but the previous books which was released alongside the second and third edition of the game was better. This one felt mostly as an advertisement for the Skaventide box and how many stories are we going to hear about young people rising from the slums to become a hero? Sure there were times that I couldn’t stop listening but at the same time it could have been so much better.

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