Bloody Books Review: The Deacon Of Wounds

When Warhammer Horror opened it’s doors, it came out swinging with the anthology Wicked and the Damned (review incoming) and Dark Harvest. Slowly, but surely, WHH cemented itself as being a real contender for horror aficionados, never by screaming from the rooftops as if a tabletop banshee, but industrially building the catalogue from which to pick a nightmare.

Deacon of Wounds is grim. It is horror, and whilst it holds out its hands to show you the desiccated remains it carries close to it’s heart, it apepars to have been overlooked as the label continues on.

We are introduced to Arch-deacon Ambrose through his rise to spiritual leader to the drought-stricken workld of Theotokos. He is adored where his predecessor was feared. He is praised whilst the past Arch-deacon was cursed. He has become to them a beacon of light and of hope. As this rise continues, something, somewhere begins to fail, a cog becomes loose and the triumphant rise becomes a fear-ridden free-fall into despair and unrecognisable decisions.

It is near impossible to tell when the turn happens, as Ambrose moves from approachable and personable towards a breaking point from which he, and those around him, cannot ever truly return from. There is a character arc here handled deftly and with a lot of care to never pull back the curtain back too far too early, hiding it in the trappings and trims of the religious sect against Ambrose’s story plays out against the Grey Tears pandemic and the drought of his world.

The side characters of the tale unfortunately do not hold the same level of characterisation, Berthia for example, a parishioner and temptation for Ambrose needed more fleshing out and feels highly stilted and under developed, which condsidering how important she becomes, feels like a misstep.

The pacing of the tale is a slow burn, more so than the vast majority of 40k based offerings, but this allows for some serious exercises in tension building, winding up the payoff more and more until you can hear the veins begin to creak. Unlike that majority of 40k novels, there is no grand battle here, only talk of a wider war, with this desiccated world being only a small part of the larger machine, and it is a masterclass in world-building. Theotokos is a world where you can smell the air and feel your feet upon the parched ground, and even more so when the Ecclesiarchy’s ways and machinations are brought into sharp focus

We must now however, discuss the remains of the elephant in the chamber. Deacon of Wounds feels somehow, unfinished, not fully formed or realised in terms of plot. It is a rhythmically captivating and depraved read, with rich and captivating scenes of true disgust and despair, and a return again and again of three subtle words that hinted to the misery yet to come, yet a depth feels missing, an area unexplored. The plot itself is an enjoyable experience that does not overly surprise but had truly effective moments, yet it feels bent around the character rather than Ambrose reacting to it, and without his inner monologue it may have been utterly lost.