Daemon World by Ben Counter

[koilungfish]

9/10/09 - 11/10/09 - Ill

Title - Daemon World
Author - Ben Counter
ISBN - 978-1-84416-703-6

"'Think about it, Word Bearer. What is Chaos? Chaos is a lie.'"

In all canon material which I have read, including the four previously reviewed tie-in novels, the Chaos of Warhammer 40,000 has been described as possessing a quality of innate wrongness, a deviance from the natural order that causes the eyes to bleed and the mind to scream. I feel I should therefore praise Mr Counter for writing a book that captures that essence perfectly, because Daemon World damn near sent me into screaming fits with its broken plot, its wretched characters, its hollow heart, its pamphleteering message - its total wrongness.

The following will contain far more spoilers than I would normally conscience putting in a review simply because, by opening up all Daemon World's hidden places, I hope to discourage anyone from actually reading the book.

The first impression of Daemon World is of lyrical and accomplished prose. Then one gets to the third page and hits this:

Everywhere are wounds of history that bleed stories, and the sky still rains blood from time to time as if in memory of all those who died, or worse, to win mastery of Torvendis.

Is there a word missing? Perhaps half a sentence? The particular copy I read was a reprint from five years after the first publication. In all that time, nobody noticed that broken sentence on the third page? Possibly Mr Counter means "those who died, or worse [than died], to win mastery" but I have read this sentence over ten times today and this is the first time this possible parsing has occurred to me. Either there is an error in the punctuation or Mr Counter meant something like "those who died, or [did] worse, to win mastery" or "those who died, or worse, [tried] to win mastery". In any case, the sentence is a jarring introduction to a book that continues to jar so often one starts to think one is in a jam factory.

The prose disintegrates from thereon. Constantly present are misshapen phrases, such as these:

In a wide ring around the city's very heart stood spiked barricades guarded by the Traitor Space Marines of the Violators Chapter, their armour sky blue with purple-grey ichor weeping from the joints.

Perhaps it is just me but the change from describing armour to describing ichor is jolting and requires a second read for proper sense.

Though it was often scattered, fighting on a score of worlds at once according to the plans of its warlords or the Primarch Lorgar himself, the World Bearers still retained their integrity as a fighting force.

Subject/verb agreement was not part of their battle plan.

They even said there were Space Marines, Traitor Legion warriors a head taller than the mightiest Touched, with massive gore-stained armour and weapons that spat fire.

Are the gore-stains massive? "Massive armour" is an awkward phrase, and one I would sooner see applied to very big tanks than the sort of armour someone might wear, but "massive gore-stained armour" has a mental impression like the sound of unoiled hinges due to leading with the words "massive gore".

It like a burst abscess in the metal.

Sic. I say again, this is a reprint.

Only one fact is never disputed. No one dares predict the future. The wisest sage and the most deluded prophet would dare claim that Torvendis will ever be at peace.

Misplaced punctuation? Absent sentence fragment? Who can tell?

The prose is further bogged down in mistimed description. For example:

Golgoth could see their muscular, black-brown bodies covered with bands of thick, shaggy hair, their pointed, canine faces, the enlarged breastbones that pulsed with the beat of their wings and the yellow, filth-encrusted claws that stabbed from their hands and feet.

This, when the creatures in question are diving at him out of the sky in the middle of a battle, at night. This happens consistently throughout the book: the first time anything appears, it is described, regardless of whether or not the point-of-view character is in a sensible state to take notice of such details. I would also be interested in seeing an example of exactly how a breastbone pulses, preferably using Mr Counter as demonstration material.

In further terms of deformed description, we are offered

Caduceia withdrew the fingers of her right hand into the fleshy orifice that sprouted from her wrist.

"Sprouted" implies that something has grown outwards or upwards from its point or plane of origin - that it has, of course, put forth a sprout. For an orifice to sprout, we must necessarily envision some opening on the end of a stalk. How then does Caduceia "withdraw" her fingers into something that extends outwards from her wrist? Likewise, if she withdraws her fingers into her wrist, where has her hand gone? Does she not actually withdraw her hand into her wrist? Where, then, is the sprouted orifice? The woman is a biological ouroboros.

Later, the reader watches as

Every man grabbed an oar and began paddling ...

Paddling. During a pitched battle on a lake of blood with daemons on the loose and arrows swarming down from the sky, the mighty warriors climb into their mighty longboat and ... paddle. This is the clearest example of bathos I have ever seen. Paddling is what children do in the sea. A swimming dog may paddle; mighty warriors should row.

From there follows disjuncts of logic such as

There was nothing to eat but the scum of algae and the inevitable marsh lizards, no shelter but the rotting boughs of fallen trees that had yet to be swallowed by the swamp.

which leads me to wonder where the fallen trees come from. Did they fall from the sky? Torvendis is a Chaos world and, as is constantly mentioned, a highly mutable one but unless otherwise stipulated the reader is inclined to believe that trees arrive in a place via the natural method. What came down must have, at some point, gone up. Where then are the non-fallen trees? Did every living tree in the marsh die simultaneously? Did the living trees walk off when the saw the plot coming? This single phrase raises questions enough to distract any reader who notices the disjunct.

Nor is this an isolated incident. Earlier in the book, the reader is informed of the Word Bearers' spaceship that

Inside, the interior of the Multus Sanguis was convoluted to the extent that only a tiny fraction of it was habitable, the rest open to hard vacuum or full of twisted metal. Only the bridge, engineering decks and Word Bearers' quarters were safe.

Leaving aside the horror that is "Inside, the interior", if only the Word Bearers' quarters are safe, where do all the slaves who run the ship live? How did the ship become filled with metal? Was it once the property of an obsessive-compulsive junk collector? Are the Techmarines storing spare parts for the Titan in there? Parts of the ship are open to the vacuum - how must they have suffered when the Multus Sanguis entered and exited the atmosphere of Torvendis? Surely the ship's insides aren't made for that? Should the reader not have been treated to a scene or two of the Word Bearers looking faintly embarrassed as unused decks melted and servitors ran around on fire or were blasted out into the upper atmosphere? Why does this supposedly elite team of rogue-hunters set out in a ship that has bloody great holes in and must logically have horrific fuel consumption issues due to being full of junk metal, not to mention a distinct lack of anywhere to store fuel, say, or those vital little things called food, water and breathable air?

Considerably later in the book, two of the ... I hesitate to call them characters ... run into this tidy spectacle:

It was a river of blood, foaming pink where rocks broke the surface. It flowed down the valley from a jagged-mouthed cavern some way upstream, carrying with it wispy strands of flesh that clogged around the rocks. The stench of blood welled up from it, and had Golgoth not been immersed in that same smell for so long beforehand, he would have gagged on it.
'It must have flowed here from the city,' said Tarn, as if to himself. 'There was too much to drain into the earth and it formed underground rivers that spread all over the continent.'

The blood is coming from a lake which formed around a city in the plains. These two are in the mountains. The mountains which are above the plains. By what system do rivers of blood flow uphill? Again, this is a Chaos world and therefore wholly entitled to throw the laws of nature and physics face-down on the bed and have them however it wants, but if a writer is going to have this happen, the reader must be told [unless the writer is really good, in which case the reader will have cottoned on already]. By no measure should the writer, when creating a Chaos world and having violated the various laws as pertaining to the tendency of liquids to flow downhill, then attempt to provide a rational, physics-normal explanation for the physically impossible.

At one point we are treated to the unintentional hilarity of "potent warrior-hormones". Are there such things as "impotent warrior-hormones"? Or does a lack of "potent warrior-hormones" cause impotence? Are "warrior-hormones" hormones produced by warriors, or are the men in question made warriors by the hormones? Was the writer aware that "potent warrior-hormones", evocative of some hyper-manly sex-musk, was probably not the best way to describe the smell of a group of Space Marines, all of whom are asexual neurological eunuchs?

The names of things and places are chronically generic: Arrowhead Peak, Emerald Sword tribe, Snake's Throat pass, Vengeance Pass, Blackwater River, the star/spaceship Slaughtersong, the Bear, Serpent and Lizard tribes. I believe I caught sight of a Bloodstone Pass or Peak in there also. Readers should consider themselves lucky there is no use of that nadir of generic terms, Firestar, and then consider themselves unlucky to be reading this book at all.

But enough of this mithering with the trivia. On to first bone of contention; the poor bloody characters.

Lady Charybdia, Slaaneshi queen and ruling power of Torvendis, is a cardboard cut-out whom Mr Counter moves from one set to another. Her only expressions are of pique that her wholly nonspecific devotions to Slaanesh are being interrupted and a blip of fear at the end. I was a mite perplexed by the scene in which Lady Charybdia claimed that her senses were so hyper-keen that she could no longer tell people apart. I would like someone to explain to me, in small words if possible, how that works. Why does she worship Slaanesh? We never find out. How does she, a conquering queen and once-great warrior, respond to an invasion of her city? Mild pique, leaving it all to her legions, more mild pique, then fearful uselessness. During the entire course of the novel she, one of the characters with the most scenes to her name, instigates nothing, achieves nothing, and in fact does nothing. Her impact on the plot is zero. Had every scene in which Charybdia appeared been excised from the book, nothing would have been lost, nothing would have been changed - she is, in fact, a big damned nothing.

Her "opponent" is Golgoth, a barbarian who took a wrong turn on his way to a third-rate sword-and-sorcery novel. He has some token motivation but spends most of the novel trying to get himself and everyone around him killed in as bloody a fashion as possible. His characterization boils down to "manly hate-filled stabbing-things man". Rather like how one can see in the expression of a particularly stupid person how they are waiting for the next thought to come along, one can see Golgoth waiting for the next plot point to turn up. Golgoth's scenes are filled with description of the barbarian hordes he leads as being "unwashed". They are always "unwashed". Does Golgoth have a particularly sensitive nose? Does he himself bathe regularly and look down on everyone else for not doing so? Inquiring minds want to know, if only to distract themselves from how boring Golgoth is.

Ss'll Sh'Kaar would be a challenge for any writer, being a daemon-prince of Khorne, the W40K god of blood, skulls, warfare, hatred, anger, vengeance, murder and all that good stuff. His motivations are wholly occluded, and all he does is stomp around screaming "Blood for the Blood God!" and killing people. He is less a character, more an FX display.

One of the minor characters who had potential to become something much more is Captain Demetrius, leader of the Violators Chaos Marines. He is a devotee of Slaanesh, a Dreadnought, over ten thousand years old and neither raving mad nor desensitized to the point of being damned near dead, which is good going. That he's also commander of a Chapter is doubly good going on both scores. That he only gets three scenes, during one of which he is ignominiously killed in a fight his side probably should have won, is a shame. The book would have been a damned sight better had all the scenes in which Lady Charybdia wafted around being faintly annoyed been replaced with scenes where Captain Demetrius marshaled the city's defences.

One has to wonder about the Violators. For three-quarters of the plot they stand guard on the innermost defences of Lady Charybdia's city. Then they get massacred off-screen, excepting Captain Demetrius and his company who get massacred on-screen. It is implied that the Violators have been standing guard for a very long time, perhaps hundreds of years. However the Violators are, of course, Space Marines, who become terribly fractious when they're kept out of combat for too long [such as, say, three or four years]. Space Marines are created to fight. It is somewhere between a religious duty and a biological imperative for them to get into combat on a regular basis. Sparring matches and massacring slaves won't do. Like sheepdogs kept as house-pets, Space Marines become neurotic and uncontrollable with nothing to do. Add to this that the Violators are dedicated to Slaanesh, god of pleasure and sensual experience, for whom sitting around doing nothing and being miserable is antithesis, and ... well ... exactly why were they loyal to Charybdia again? Demetrius and the Violators ought to have rebelled against her and taken over the city out of sheer boredom.

Lost somewhere in the back of the plot is a squad of six, or possibly eight, Word Bearers Chaos Marines, who have enough characterization for two and are trying to share it out equally. Their leader, Captain Amakyre, gets the most sympathetic line in the book:

Amakyre looked up at the screen, at the deformed, dying globe of Torvendis, and waited with gritted teeth for the blasphemy to end.

The readers cannot help but share his pain as they have been doing the same thing for the last four hundred pages.

Amakyre has a psydekick named Prakordian who is able to speak to the dead. Given how often Daemon World bangs on about how Torvendis has so many corpses on it that they form geological strata, he should have been a major presence. He isn't. The only other Word Bearer worth remembering is Makelo, whom Mr Counter refers to as either "the smart one" or "the dangerous one". The only reason to remember him is because he gets a scene in which he beats up on Arguleon Veq - a name to be spat - for reasons that only make sense if one has an understanding of Daemon World's plot. So here we go.

Torvendis is an eldar maiden world [read; pure and pretty place] that was invested with a form of consciousness known as the Last. Arguleon Veq defeated the Last and imprisoned it inside itself [don't ask how that works]. Veq, having been off doing other things somewhere, at some point before the book killed the real Karnulon and stole his ship [causing the Word Bearers to chase after him thinking he was Karnulon] so he could go back to Torvendis and find some scion of the Emerald Sword tribe [that'd be Golgoth] so he could make said scion powerful enough to take over the Emerald Sword tribe, unite the clans and lead them in war against Lady Charybdia. Veq then unleashes a bloody great daemon [that'd be Ss'll Sh'Kaar] who assists Golgoth in exterminating Charybdia's forces and then turns on Golgoth and starts in on his lot. This Veq did so that Golgoth would become hateful enough to pass the test Veq set thousands of years ago, allowing him to release the Last. The Last, insane and filled with hatred for Chaos, destroys itself [read; Torvendis] in order to spite Chaos. This kills off everyone who's survived the previous events.

I repeat: the entire cast dies.

Veq does all this to get revenge on Chaos for, err, being Chaos at him.

It is hard to say what I hate more about this book - the character of Arguleon Veq, or the portrayal of Chaos itself.

Arguleon Veq is ... what is he? For most of the book the reader is led to believe that he is a rogue Word Bearer [so a traitor to traitors] and he has the physical fortitude and abilities of a Space Marine. Most notably he is outright stated to be using the half-mind half-sleep that the Word Bearers [and by extension other Space Marines] are [possibly mistakenly] here stated as doing instead of real sleep. However, on the very first page it is noted that he was a champion of Chaos during the time of the Grand Crusade, long before the Horus Heresy and therefore long before before any Space Marines fell to Chaos. There is another mention that I now cannot find of Veq being out in the galaxy doing things before or as the Imperium threw off its "birth-caul", placing Veq coeval with the earliest days of the Imperium itself and long before any human suspected that Chaos was more than a bunch of weird aliens.

Furthermore, Veq's abilities are vastly in excess of those of a Space Marine. He can see bullets as they are fired at them and deflect them with his oh-so-pretty glowing sword [when Veq started mentally impelling fighter-jets across a hangar bay to squash a Word Bearer, I began to hear the Star Wars soundtrack], even when they're being fired at him from an autocannon. His reactions are faster than Space Marines', his senses are sharper, and yet he bitches and whines about how he's so slow now he's old. Obviously at the height of his powers and strength he was vastly better at everything than anyone.

What is the source of these powers? He cannot be a Space Marine and no other human has anything like these abilities. He cannot have gotten these powers as a champion of Chaos. To gain such power from Chaos one must serve it, and Veq has turned his back on Chaos. Doing so would have - must have - robbed him of every gift that Chaos gave him. Furthermore, to be a champion of Chaos is to mutate. This is an observable law rather than a stated one. All champions of Chaos have some level of mutation, be it extra limbs, grotesque deformity, sorcerous powers, unearthly glamour, living armour fused to their body, even to have become partly a daemon and therefore part of the stuff of Chaos itself ... Veq has none of these things.

If Veq was a champion of Chaos, where was his Mark? It is never mentioned. Where are his mutations? He has none. He served Chaos for ten thousand years, claiming to have been one of if not the greatest champions. Why then is he not in the slightest bit daemonic? If he was so great a champion, why has he not become a daemon-prince?

Veq's powers cannot have come from Chaos, or Chaos would have taken them back when he turned against it. Therefore they must be natural. Yet his powers are vastly in excess of those of any human, any Space Marine - on a par with a Primarch, at least. This man, for all I know of the W40K canon, should not exist.

Added to this is the way in which the other characters react to Veq as if he were made of solid awesome. Golgoth rolls over and takes instruction without argument. Prakordian, after his battle-brothers have been slaughtered, begins whimbling about how great Veq's plan was and how he'd have been an awesome Word Bearer [Amakyre continues to win points with the readers by shooting Prakordian in the head seconds after this]. After Veq kills one of their number, the Word Bearers ... what do they do? Do the stage a fighting retreat and summon more of their Legion? Do they make a strategic withdrawal to set an ambush elsewhere? Do they sabotage the ship? No! They run away, panicked and frightened and throwing all the discipline, training and battlefield survival instinct of thousands of years out the window.

There are only two options for what Arguleon Veq is. One is that he is a Grey Sensei working unwittingly in the service of Malal, which is workable with the canon if you don't mention Malal by name but would require, oh, actually being mentioned in the book to be credible.

The other is that he is a Gary Stu.

Hmm ... ridiculous plot centered around Veq's need for revenge against powers that should have squashed him flat long ago, abilities that bend the canon so far it can see the back of its own head, Jedi rip-off with an uber-shiny spaceship and weaponry, beats everyone whilst whimpering about how he's so old and slow, oh dear, someone actually hit me [I was cheering for Makelo when he got that knee into Veq's chest], has a perception of reality [and Chaos] that lines up with the author's but not the canon ...

... uh, yeah. I'm going to have to get back to you on that one. It's such a tough call to make. Meanwhile, I'm going to make a cup of tea by putting the kettle on my head for about five seconds. That's how much I hate Arguleon Veq.

Veq is also the source of the moment when I actually shouted "You are fucking kidding me!" at the book. Thus:

Quite why he had done it, Veq wasn't sure.

If ever there is a sure sign of events happening Because The Author Says So, it is when the characters themselves start wondering why they're doing what they're doing. When the authordained wins-at-everything-guy is thinking that, it feels like the whole story is trying to rip itself apart in shame at its own tenuousness.

Let's go back to that ridiculous plot for a bit, before the ceiling catches fire.

Veq's plan - and the whole book - revolve around getting the Last to commit suicide and destroy the planet of Torvendis so that none of the Ruinous Powers can claim it, nyeh nyeh nyeh. This leads to the obvious question of "Why would the Ruinous Powers care?"

Because Mr Counter is in lurve with Torvendis. Torvendis is the most special thing ever. Torvendis gets a slobbering description about how wonderful and awesome and special and symbolic and made of legends it is at the start of each chapter. The first one, the opening scene of the book, is okay. It's almost impressive in terms of prose, compared to other W40K novels. It reminds one of how Terry Pratchett opens each Discworld novel with a description of the Discworld itself that draws the reader into the universe and provides a new slant on the world itself that pertains to the setting and/or plot of the novel [that Mr Pratchett can do this every book is a sign of both why and how he's a great author]. The second time feels like a wad of exposition [of which, incidentally, there are many, all over the first half of the book]. The third makes the reader go "What, again?". By the fifth reader is getting fed up that what plot there is being bogged down in slavering descriptions. By the eighth, the reader can physically hear Mr Counter masturbating over his pet planet.

It is a great and important maxim that wherever in a book there is something that comes between the reader and the story, the writer should rip it out, root and branch. All but the first of these scenes is just that, incrementally more so as the book goes on. This is not just Mr Counter jerking off over how clever his writing is, and how awesome Torvendis is, it is flat-out bad writing. I may want to beat Mr Counter to death with his own thigh-bone but I wouldn't say no to cracking the head of his copy editor whilst I'm at it.

[Here the review was interrupted by dinner, as I have been ranting for four hours]

Then there is Mr Counter's view of Chaos. Mr Counter does not like Chaos. The opening quote, a piece of Veq's dialogue, is just part of this.

Consider first the death of Yrvo, minor character and priest of Slaanesh:

Yrvo, now just a tattered column of torn flesh tottering from his waist, keeled over onto the rock. His last conscious thought was that death was not the cacophony of sensation that had been promised him - it was cold, and empty, and carried with it pain that he had believed he could never feel again.
Perhaps the revelation would lie in what followed. Yes, that was it. Just a little while longer, and he would feel that ultimate thrill.
Yrvo turned colder, and then thought nothing more.

Last I checked with the canon - and there's a copy of the Liber Chaotica around here with some interesting essays on the subject - after the death of a devoted cultist [as Yrvo clearly is] their soul goes to their god [in this case Slaanesh]. The Chaos gods run on emotion and souls - for Slaanesh to refuse Yrvo's soul is rather like someone refusing to breathe. The Ruinous Powers draw in souls by the very nature of what they are - vortices of fundamental emotion - and for Yrvo's soul not to go to Slaanesh is like, well, blood running uphill.

Then Lady Charybdia dies:

It was the final sensation, the ultimate blessing promised by Slaanesh. Even in death, his followers were to worship him with the experience of their death. But this was no act of piety - this was pain, and sudden cold, and utter futility. Lady Charybdia had failed Slaanesh, and as her punishment her death was no ultimate thrill but a wretched flash of pain followed by emptiness.
Lady Charybdia was still suffering the betrayal of her god when the daemon began to eat her.

Again, emptiness. Again, the same mistake. Those who fail Slaanesh aren't going to be ignored, they're going to be drawn in [as, to become a champion of Slaanesh as Charybdia is, one needs to have pretty much pledged and bound one's soul to him] after which Slaanesh will express his displeasure in many interestingly uncomfortable ways. It is saying much when not only is a Chaos god out of character but the underpinnings of the canon have been forced to run in reverse.

Let's go back to that little fight between Makelo and Veq that I mentioned. Makelo puts up a good fight, coming across as competent and aware of the danger of his foe. In return, Veq proselytizes at him. What does he say?

'It is too late. The gods are laughing at you. They own your body and your soul, and what can you do? You can never have a normal life."

A normal life? Makelo is a Space Marine [read: innately, stubbornly loyal] of the Word Bearers [read: religious fanatic] and wants to be a Dark Apostle [read: hell's archbishop]. What possible appeal could the idea of a "normal life" have to him? What does Veq think Makelo really wants, a wife and children and a desk job? Thankfully, the result of this proselytizing is Makelo getting +3 Fanatic Bonus to all Punching Annoying Idiots attacks he makes in the following round of combat, boots Veq a good one in the chest and makes himself my favourite character in the book just for that.

There remains just one thing to note about Daemon World. After the story comes a little author's note, from which the following two quotes are taken. These are not narrative text. These are Mr Counter's own words about Chaos and its portrayal in Daemon World.

The first principle of Chaos, to my mind, is that everyone who become [sic] involved with it becomes corrupted. Chaos is like spiritual acid that corrodes wherever it comes into contact. No one ever worships Chaos because they want to be corrupted - they do it because Chaos promises power, or mercy, or deliverance, or the granting of the heart's desire. The corruption starts straight away but only becomes apparent later, and by then it is too late. Chaos, then, if it can be said to be any one thing, is a lie.

A lie. Veq's words, Mr Counter's words. Chaos is a lie. This force of fundamental emotions - rage and courage, despair and endurance in the face of despair, ambition, malice and hope, passion and desire - all of these things are lies?

Most of Daemon World isn't about Veq at all but about the corrupted inhabitants of Torvendis who are manipulated towards conflict or destruction. They all illustrated some aspect of the corruption Chaos forces on all its followers - the unfocused anger of the barbarian who has known nothing but harshness and cruelty, the infinite arrogance of the Slaaneshi queen, the pathetic servitude of the city's revellers and the spectacular brutality of Ss'll Sh'Kaar. Some were sympathetic by comparison with one another but they all still deserved to die. The Word Bearers became involved partly to provide a more solid link to the Warhammer 40,000 background but also to show that it was Chaos itself and not just Torvendis that corrupted - the Word Bearers, though they lie to themselves that they are in control, are as degenerate a bunch of thralls as the lowest vermin of the city.

Let's have the pertinent part of that again, shall we?

They all still deserved to die.

Again perhaps, just because I have trouble believing that an author would write this of his cast?

They all still deserved to die.

Mr Counter believes that his entire cast of characters were good for nothing but death.

What kind of writing is this? To ask a reader to invest in the ambitions and feelings of the characters, to share in their lives, when the author himself believes they deserve to die? What reward is there for the reader who reaches the end? None but the death of the entire cast! What manner of feeling does this express from the author to the reader? One of disrespect - that the feelings of the reader do not matter, that whatever character they side with they are wrong. Mr Counter is telling whoever reads this book that they are - for the simple act of reading, for experiencing the lives of these characters that Mr Counter sees as only fit to be ended - wrong.

Mr Counter saw Arguleon Veq as the protagonist of this story; I saw him as the antagonist. Mr Counter saw the Word Bearers as wrong-headed self-decieving zealots; against Veq, and the word of the author, I saw them as heroes. In Mr Counter's eyes I am wrong, because I have liked the wrong characters, championed the wrong cause, sought to see the wrong people triumph. Yet Mr Counter has not written any right characters. All of them are wrong. No matter whom the reader sides with, Mr Counter will tell them they are wrong. If a writer is telling his readers that they are wrong for reading the story he has written, for liking the characters he has created, he is a fucking bad writer.

However, there is a happy little ending. Despite Mr Counter's claims that Chaos is a lie, corrupting everything, and that those who follow it are degenerates, he has not noticed something. Mr Counter, as mentioned, loves Torvendis a very great deal. He describes in long, loving, tiresome passages how it defies mapping, defies the writing of histories, how it changes constantly. Indeed, he says of it that

Chaos on Torvendis manifested itself as change and inscrutability ...

Change and inscrutability, the very face of Tzeentch, whose aspect is avian and whose daemons are most often seen as glitteringly blue. Arguleon Veq sends messages to Golgoth via a shiny blue-green bird whose existence is never explained.

Mr Counter has not noticed that he has fallen to Tzeentch.

This book is:
* - about the author's over-powered canon-breaking mouthpiece hitting the canon over the head and shouting "Bad! Bad! Bad!"
* - dreadful in all its parts
* - only for readers who want to learn from someone else's mistakes

This book is not:
* - contained of any good characters
* - contained of a plot that makes sense
* - worth the paper it is printed on

Comments

[faithinfire.livejournal.com]

Dear gods, Koi, I think I need a conceptual cigarette. Thank you. Everything I wanted to say about this book, only far better and far funnier than I could ever have made any of it. ^____^

*rescues and pets Amakyre and his boys, Demetrius and his whole damn Chapter, and especially poor little Yrvo...*

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

You and the laws of physics ;)

I had considered doing this review using Mark Twain's disembowelment of Fenimore Cooper, but by the time I sat down I'd built up too much of a head of steam do to so.

I am faintly peeved about not noticing that little matter of the Imperium not existing in M25 though ...

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

... all the conjunction of the terms "Imperium" and "M25" give me a mental image of the Emperor and a squad of Custodes standing around at Scotch Corner with a roadmap, looking utterly lost.

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

Did the living trees walk off when the saw the plot coming?

Hahahaha. :D

Mr Counter has not noticed that he has fallen to Tzeentch.

You win!

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't blame them if they did ...

Mr Counter has written some other W40K novels. Rath informs me that in one of them a Tzeentchian daemon does indeed turn up, and is incredibly shiny and overpowered. Hmm, can't think why ...

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Did you somehow come across a very long Chaos-directed Chick tract? Cause that's what it almost sounds like.

That introductory sentence looks like something I do, when I write a sentence when very tired and by the end of it I forget what was at the beginning of the sentence. This is not a good way to do professional work.

Was the writer aware that "potent warrior-hormones", evocative of some hyper-manly sex-musk, was probably not the best way to describe the smell of a group of Space Marines, all of whom are asexual neurological eunuchs?

'Potent warrior-hormones' sounds like something out of bad porn. Using it for asexual Space Marines is just ludicrous.

A lie. Veq's words, Mr Counter's words. Chaos is a lie.

WTF. I suppose he could consider that Chaos does not live up to certain people's expectations, but I'm pretty sure it's still there.

Mr Counter has not noticed that he has fallen to Tzeentch.

...I love it.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

No, just a novel written by someone who ... well, as Rath said in the other post, there are no good guys or bad guys in W40K, just different factions, each with their own definition of right and wrong. Mr Counter's biggest failing here is perhaps forgetting, or not realizing, that the entry-level perspective that Chaos R Teh Ebul becomes more complex, more involved and more ambiguous as you move deeper into the concepts of W40K.

I think it just comes down to that comma in "died, or worse". If it was "died or worse" it would make much more sense.

Utterly. It was going to make me laugh wherever it turned up, but when it turns up describing a dropship full of Space Marines ... oy, heh.

I think it's less that he doesn't believe it's there [since it very definitely is, and won't fuck off no matter what anyone does] but more that he believes it is all-deceiving, never presenting an honest, sincere or benign face ... so ... basically ... he thinks all Chaos is Tzeentch.

But he has! :D

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

I think it's less that he doesn't believe it's there [since it very definitely is, and won't fuck off no matter what anyone does] but more that he believes it is all-deceiving, never presenting an honest, sincere or benign face ... so ... basically ... he thinks all Chaos is Tzeentch.

But he has! :D

So you have found a Chaos Chick Tract. The writer just needs to come out of the amorphous tentacled closet and embrace his chaosness.

Also, I like that you pegged on the character not even knowing why he was doing things. It really bothers me when that happens in fiction, through what amounts to the character having read the script ahead of time and thus knowing exactly what to do. I had the same problem with 9 a few days ago.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

He needs to notice he's in the Chaos closet it at all to start with.

The narrative equivalent is "somehow", a word that might as well be pronounced as "THE WRITER DOES NOT KNOW WHY THE CHARACTER IS DOING THIS!", as in "Somehow, the cop had forgotten to ensure his gun was loaded" or "Marcia had somehow lost all of her clothes", or worst of all "Somehow Frank just knew how to open the fiendishly complicated lock in seconds". Things the author requires to happen but has no idea how to make happen, or can't be bothered to developing, are held together with "somehow", the prose equivalent of chicken-wire and spit.

[(Anonymous)]

Koi, these reviews are amazing. You should find somewhere to post them with more readership, because their beauty needs to be shared.

I don't remotely care about Warhammer and I am still reading them avidly. This one had me laughing for about fifteen minutes straight.

I love the little summaries outside the cut, too. Books scathingly deconstructed in six bullet points!

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Thank you ... err ... who *are* you?

I'm not sure about posting them anywhere else. Where to start? :: shrugs ::

Heh, neat trade for seven hours of ranting ...

I forget why I started the bullet points. Possibly I just felt the need for a summary.

[lupie-stardust.livejournal.com]

This review is made of solid gold. Not gold that is secretly A LIE or deserved unending death, either. Actual solid gold.

Thank you.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Rar :) Possibly I can club Veq to death with it.

[(Anonymous)]

I just finished reading the book and im not sure if this will ever get seen but i mirror your sentiments. It left me utterly confused at the end yowzer!

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

It's a bit of a mess to say the least, yes.