The Twice Dead King: Reign (Warhammer 40K: Necrons) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Twice Dead King: Reign
Series: Warhammer 40K: Necrons
Author: Nate Crowley
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 317
Words: 113K
Publish: 2022

This wasn’t as enjoyable as the previous book, Ruin. Most of that was due to Oltyx and his remaining Necrons doing nothing but running for 75% of the book. It was boring. A book about nigh-immortal killing machines should not be boring. The thing is, Crowley (the author) did a great job of showing how kickass the Necrons were in Ruin, so I don’t understand why he went the boring route here. It had to have been a deliberate choice on his part, but it made no sense to me. Now that I’ve this Twice Dead King duology, I’m just as likely to avoid Crowley as seek him out. That’s not good “branding”.

The ending was just plain weird. It wasn’t bad, but it left me going “huh?” Basically, Necrons can go crazy and try to eat flesh and pretend they are the biological Necrontyrs again. But it turns out the Flayers (the name given to Necrons who go crazy and try to eat flesh) have access to a special dimension in space and go almost anywhere in no time. Oltyx fully embraces this by book’s end, but it just ignores the fact that they are still crazy. They are insane. Insane beings usually don’t think they are insane, but that doesn’t change that they are. By the end you realize Oltyx is insane as any Flayer and that the Ithacan Empire is really no more.

The cover once again is pretty cool, with a gold plated Oltyx (the way the Necrons show someone is royalty) holding some sort of glow’y green spear/ax/staff thing. Whatever it is, it looks cool. Halberd, that’s what its Earth equivalent would be! A space-halberd powered by raw fusion. Yeah baby, that is just awesomesauce!

★★★☆☆

From WH40k.lexicanum.com/

After centuries of exile, the necron lord Oltyx has at last been granted the thing he has always craved: the throne of the Ithakas Dynasty. Kingship, however, is not quite what he had hoped for – Oltyx's reign currently exists aboard the dying battleship Akrops, as it lumbers away from the ruins of his crownworld. Behind it is a hostile armada of unfathomable size, launched by the barbaric alien war-cult known as the Imperium of Man. And within the Akrops' sepulchral hold, an even greater threat festers – the creeping horror of the flayer curse. Faced with such overwhelming odds, Oltyx leads a desperate voyage into a darkness so profound that salvation and doom look much the same. If he and his dynasty are to make it through that long night, Oltyx will have to become a very different sort of king

The Twice Dead King: Ruin (Warhammer 40K: Necrons) 3.5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Twice Dead King: Ruin
Series: Warhammer 40K: Necrons
Author: Nate Crowley
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 306
Words: 108K

I am wicked glad I read The Infinite and the Divine before diving into this The Twice Dead King duology. While Crowley (the author) does a great job of using flashbacks to explain how the Necrontyr (the people) became the Necrons (immortal metal beings), already knowing the basics helped me process other parts of the story better. Also, being familiar with the Shards and how they affect Necrons explained a lot that wasn’t explained here.

What we get here is the first part of a duology that shows why the Necrons haven’t taken over the entire universe, even being as powerful as they are. It shows their degradation over the millions of years that they slept in their tombs, to awaken, or to awaken insane or to not awaken at all. Factor in that there can never be any more little baby Necrons, well, you have a race of beings that don’t want to die but were tricked into committing long term race suicide and are now going insane over the issue.

Literally insane. Like, eating humans to try to get flesh into their metal bodies, even though they have no mouths or digestive organs. The main character also has an episode, which I guess is common to Necrons, where his brain “remembers” being flesh and has what amounts to a killer panic attack because he can’t “breathe” even though he’s a robot.

How messed up is all of that? Very messed up, that’s how much. And it fits perfectly within the Warhammer 40K grimdark universe. You think you are getting immortality and the chance to rule the universe and BAM, you’re totally boned by some nasty other race. And even if you kill them all, they still bone you for millions of years because they were that nasty.

The Empire of Man makes an appearance and boy howdy, do they do a number on the Necrons. They are on a Crusade and are wiping out the Necrons one world at a time and Oltyx (the main Necron character) is trying to save his House (Necrons are divided up into factions based upon Family and it is as messy as anything humans ever experienced). Which is when he discovers his King has gone insane and is eating people and “stuff”. He manages to make it off his home planet with a small contingent of survivors by the book’s end, but I am not sure what the next book will entail. Without the ability to increase his forces, he is ultimately doomed, even if it takes another million years.

I was impressed with how well Crowley wrote this story. It was a good story (within the framework of the WH:40K universe I mean) and didn’t read like a game codex turned into a book in 3 days.

To close, I’d like to talk about that cover. Terminator looking machines with glow’y axes. How cool is that? It’s WICKED cool, that’s how cool it is! Definitely going to be a strong contender for cover love at the end of the month.

★★★✬☆

From the Publisher

Pride is everything for the dynastic kings of the Necron race, who have awakened after millennia to see their empires occupied by foul beasts and simple minds. For the Necron Lord Oltyx, the Ithakas dynasty was his by right, but the machinations of the court see him stripped of his position and exiled to a forgotten world.

Exiled to the miserable world of Sedh, the disgraced Necron Lord Oltyx is consumed with bitterness. Once heir to the throne of a dynasty, he now commands nothing but a dwindling garrison of warriors, in a never-ending struggle against Ork invaders. Oltyx can think of nothing but the prospect of vengeance against his betrayers, and the reclamation of his birthright. But the Orks are merely the harbingers of a truly unstoppable force. Unless Oltyx acts to save his dynasty, revenge will win him only ashes. And so he must return to the crownworld, and to the heart of the very court which cast him out. But what awaits there is a horror more profound than any invader, whose roots are tangled with the dark origins of the Necrons themselves.

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

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

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

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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 it’s 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.

★★★✬☆

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From The Black Library

Synopsis- Click to Open

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.

The Infinite and the Divine (Warhammer 40K: Necrons) 3.5Stars

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: The Infinite and the Divine
Series: Warhammer 40K: Necrons
Author: Robert Rath
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 339
Words: 112K

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This book came across my radar back in January, when Mark Reviewed It. It deals with two Necrons, Trazyn the Infinite and Orikan the Divine, hence the title of the book.

Oh yes, I plan to interject various Magic the Gathering cards from the Warhammer Commander set from 2022. Prepare yourselves accordingly!

They have always been enemies, even when they were still flesh and the Bio-Transference Ceremony that turned the entire Necrontyr race into Immortal Metal Necrons hasn’t stopped that rivalry.

They have found a Magical Boojum that one wants to hoard and the other wants to investigate. So for the next 10,000 years they fight and backstab and occasionally work together to figure out just what this Magical Boojum is. Well, bad news guys. It was a trap all along! The Necrons were tricked by a race called the C’Tan, godlike beings, who ate their souls when they turned the Necrontyr into the Necrons. Pretty sneaky. Well, the Necrons weren’t too happy about that and did their best to wipe out the C’Tan. They did a pretty good job, except they didn’t quite destroy them all. Those they couldn’t destroy they put into Shards, basically permanent prison. One Shard didn’t take this sitting down and decided to do something and eventually break free. Which is what this Magical Boojum does. The C’Tan breaks free, Orikan and Trazyn are forced to work together to destroy it and the book ends with both Necrons having a piece of a sub-shard which they are convinced they can handle, secretly and on their own. Sigh.

While not as bad as Farsight, this book still does rely on the reader having some knowledge of the Warhammer 40K universe. Too much in my opinion. You have to know that the space elves destroyed their society by creating one of the Chaos Gods. You have to know that the C’Tan forced the Necrontyr into becoming the Necrons. You have to have heard of the Horus Heresy and understand that it was a civil war in the human empire. There is an instance of the Empire of Mankind performing an Exterminatus on the planet that the Magical Boojum is hidden on, but the author does a pretty good job of explaining that so you aren’t left flailing, trying to figure out what it is.

Rath also does an excellent job of showing how time is so different for a race that is functionally immortal. The middle section of the book encompasses just over 8,000 years and Rath has both characters look up and realize 2,000 years have passed while they’ve been doing whatever. The “time” aspect was handled very well.

The end of the book is one massive battle that starts as a betrayal between Orikan and Trazyn and then spirals out of control as they realize that a C’Tan has tricked them both. They throw everything they have against him and barely make it out. Rath throws in tons of Necron military types to the mix and eventually my eyes just glazed over and I read it all as “then another Necron did something something something”.

Overall, I enjoyed this and found out a lot about the Necrons, but that wouldn’t have happened without input from Mark. I was doing a buddy-read with Dave and he had just as many questions as I did. The blind leading the blind as it were.

One the plus side, I got to showcase a bunch of Magic Cards, so that’s a big plus, hahahahaa.

★★★✬☆

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From TVTropes.com

Synopsis – click to open

the novel follows two Necron lords, Trazyn the Infinite, a collector of ancient artifacts, and Orikan the Diviner, a powerful chronomancer. Trazyn and Orikan have been enemies for millennia, but when Orikan steals the Astrarium Mysterios from Trazyn’s collection, believing it to be the key to unlocking an ancient power, the two are dragged into direct conflict. Over the course of ten thousand years, they go from competing over ownership of the Mysterios, to working together to unlock its secrets, to stabbing each other in the back over it. Their feud reshapes timelines, dooms planets, and threatens to either destroy or restore the entire Necron race.