Dead Men Walking (Warhammer 40K: Necrons) 3.5Stars

 

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Title: Dead Men Walking
Series: Warhammer 40K: Necrons
Author: Steve Lyons
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 267
Words: 96K

Every Warhammer 40,000 book starts with the following quote:

“It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”

This book, Dead Men Walking, captures the essence of the bolded part of that quote. A lot of the Warhammer 40K that I’ve read has been about the “good” parts of the society; Ciaphas Cain the rich and famous Commisar, Ibram Gaunt the disciplined yet moral Colonel-Commisar and then you have my forays into the non-human side of things with the Tau and now the Necrons. All of those are the exception to the rule of the Empire of Man. DMW sets the record straight about what it is like to be a normal citizen of the Empire and how your life is weighed, sometimes literally, against a box of ammunition. Is it cost-effective to rescue World X? If not, then so long Citizen. But heaven forbid if those same citizens turn on the Imperium before it abandons them, then’s it chop, chop, off with their heads.

This book is about a Necron Tomb resurrection on a mining world and how the Imperium screws things up. Technically the “main characters” are the Kreig Death Korps, but I’m lumping it in with my Necrons read because they are the main bad guys and we get to see just how bad ass they are. Unlike The Infinite and the Divine, where the Necrons almost come across as chummy, bonhomie babies, here they are shown for the absolute monstrous dealers of death that they are. Unkillable killing machines that grind the troops of the mining world to dust. Whether it is the elite Death Korps, or regular Astrum Militarum or even citizens drafted into a world army, it doesn’t matter. They all die. One of the main characters we follow who was a regular citizen, realizes that is going to be his final fate and instead of fighting and raging against it, stoically does his best to kill as many Necrons as he can before he dies.

And that is why this book is titled as such. Every man and woman who is fighting is a dead man from the get go and there is nothing they can do about that.

I call that soul destroying. It is also why I don’t read a lot of the Space Marines stories in WH40K (plus, those guys are just jerks and they DESERVE to die, horribly). I try to cherry pick my stories so that there is at least an iota of hope within the pages.

The cover is hard to parse at this size, but it is supposed to be part of some sort of gun that the soldiers carry.

Overall, I enjoyed the action and the Necrons being described, but I absolutely hated the stark reality of this universe.

★★★✬☆

From the Black Library

When the necrons rise, a mining planet descends into a cauldron of war and the remorseless foes decimate the human defenders. Salvation comes in an unlikely form - the Death Korps of Krieg, a force as unfeeling as the Necrons themselves. When the two powers go to war, casualties are high and the magnitude of the destruction is unimaginable.