Bloody Books Review: Skaven Pestilens

Stormcast Eternals and Seraphon take on the Skaven in a city inside a massive slug.

This is a sentence I just had to write.

When the Old World of Warhammer Fantasy Battle came to an end and Age of Sigmar came to the fore, a lot of lore was remade from the ground-up, with refocusing and change coming into the play for the more well-known parts of the older setting. The Skaven had a lot to loose from this shift, being a both comedic and horrifying faction at once, hugely popular and the oldest GW-original race*. They were a wonderful race of rat-men and they could have been done very dirty by the design team.

With the luck of the Horned Rat, the background of the Skaven has gone from strength to strength in AoS, going from a reintroduction to a true force of entropy**. They are not a typical fantasy race in any way, with a desire for survival as well as a tendency for self-destruction, and more paranoia than your average cold war. Combine that with layers ontop of that somewhat simple description and you have an impish, tinkering race, and with AoS, the Horned Rat took to the pantheon of Chaos making them more of a true power.

This novel may not put them front and centre but it does a wonderful job of reintroducing them in a tradition not too unlike their WHFB counterparts. the story centres around the Battle for the Crawling City, an old stronghold of Sigmar’s forces which is on the back and inside a gigantic worm-creature. Because this is the Dawn of the Age of Sigmar and sheer unadulterated madness is the name of the game. The Skaven battle against the Stormcast and a contingent of Seraphon and does a fine job of introducing all the different forces as they enter the tale.

This novel is a pulpy joy to read, there is a real delight that Josh Reynolds brings to the proceedings. It’s not high-brow, nor is is a pinnacle of the genre, but it’s a lot of fun. The main Skaven, Vretch, Kruk, Squeelch and Skuralanx have such an in-built natural paranoia that they ruin each other’s plans and schemes almost with thinking about it. Josh captures it perfectly, and it often reminds me of Bill King’s Skavenslayer for how they all work against each other. Without these characters, the book would fall very quickly.

On the other side we have Lord-Celestant Zephacleas of the Beastbane warrior chamber of the Astral Templars Stormhost., who had already appeared in the Realmgate Wars series, who is a rough and ready character, much at odds with how we had seen the Stormcast so far in the series. He’s not the silent stoic type, but rougher, more ready to laugh and swear and it’s a welcome addition. Then come the Seraphon, who were, lets face, a bit of a mess at the start of AoS. This take on the starlight lizard men however is a great way to read the concept, half formed memories of lives and deaths long past and a confusion by the Seraphon over just where and when they are. Until the Belakor background book, this was my preferred way to see the Seraphon in the Mortal Realms.

Ultimately though, the pacing and the story told can trip a lot as it goes along. The characterisation is the strength, but the narrative is cluttered and often important parts vanish as you try to keep up. It;s the sign of a author improving in leaps and bounds however, as it’s a far cry from Knights of the Blazing Sun, his first Black Library novel. It’s a great introduction book, introducing these races brilliantly, in case of the Stormcast, more so than Realm Gates wars ever did. For long term readers, it’s a fine ride indeed.

*As the Fimir, Chaos Dwarves and many others had fallen to the wayside

**They literally gnaw through reality and cause cave-ins.