Fantastic performance in a dark AoS tale

Surprisingly dark portrayal of the skaven and some interesting lore for the stormcast in a brilliantly performed novel. A perfect introduction to the mortal realms leaving me eager for more.

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Outstanding Narration - Story not so much

Let me start by saying that I’m very familiar with the grimdark settings of WH40K, AoS and the Old World and have read & listened to many stories across each of these settings. I know how they often go.

Blood. Pain. Pain, pain, pain and more pain. And some more blood. Every chapter of Skaventide, every character seems to be full of it. So much constant pain that in the end, it ceases to have any real meaning or effect. I started to roll my eyes every time I heard it after halfway through the story. Every character seems to be an emotional mess, never experiencing any level of stability. Crushingly sad one moment, filled with rage the next - Kloster’s cast are like a cluster of manic depressives.

The beginning is excellent, as is the ending. Without spoiling the plot, there are some really good ideas here and the Skaven characters are well portrayed. I like the ominous portents of their coming and how they are shown to be creatures of horror rather than comedy. But there is an awful lot of “filler” here, with vast swathes of the middle part of the story of seemingly no real importance at all. I found myself often drifting while listening, realising I’d missed something, then realising that it largely didn’t matter; most likely just another pain-filled introspective and some more “Hope is a lie” repetition.

The narration by Richard Reed is the best aspect of this audiobook. His Skaven voices are outstanding and make great listening - more so than his other characters - and this alone makes it worth listening to.

There’s a good story underneath all of this, but it takes some “painful” digging to get to.

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Great listen with an awesome build up. leading to an epic ending, or is it.

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enjoyed

Nice lore update for the new stormcast units. as stormcast player I enjoyed it. made me hate skaven more too :)

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The overall story the skaven are terrifying

It was very good the story was well done

However it did show sevora as powerless at times

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great edition starter

this was a fun story with a solid cast. the skaven are definitely the stars of the show as the depiction of them is truely terrifying. the narrator does a great job with all the different characters. the contrast between a scared mortal and a filthy skaven is great. the book does drag a bit in the final act and could definitely prosper from being a few chapters less.

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Standard Black Library fare, no ifs, just buts.

Most Black Library books serve the same purpose: explaining the world in which the Warhammer plastic minis exist. And whenever there are new toys to be had, they need to be shown in this context. Like He-man, or Digimon, only... less successfully.

So we brachiate ourselves through another narrative full of tropes and platitudes with the Stormcast Eternals, the faction in which even the riding beasts are prone to annoying one-word pontifications like "Remember!" or "Six Plus Ward Save!", and mottos such as "Hope where hope is lying" are not only to be repeated, but repeated ad infinitem like the telltale sign of a badly programmed AI chatbot. Or Digimon.

It is known that most authors of the Black Library cabal who pick the short straw and have to write about Age of Sigmar's posterboys have conspired to make the word "cerulean" happen. Not so Mr Kloster, who instead tries to make the word "but" happen. However, we're not reading this stuff hoping for expansive vocabulary; the one remaining GW thesaurus is reserved for authors of monologuing 40k Primarchs after all.

The story hastily throws together some hodgepodge characters of not very much depth, being too busy saving the world from Skaven to develop any credible chemistry or synergy. One of them is called Morgen, which is German for Dawn, and as such she follows an old tradition of cringeworthy Anglo-Teutonic nomenclature going back to the Empire of Man, with its wizards named Zauberer or Kugelschreiber.

The good guys are only granted dimensionality in contrast to their even less-dimensional foils, everybody's favourite ratmen, who have learned a few tricks in this books. Like, mutating from existing animals and humans (Really, GW? I have to retire my Beasts of Chaos to the square-based Old World for THIS?). Or being relatively, ritualistically silent. Or blinding everybody. Honestly, there are more lost eyes in this book than there are cut-off hands in the entire Star Wars franchise, as if written by GRR Martin the sadistic optician. One develops an unhealthy appetite for the occasional slit nostril or burst eardrum just for variety.

The narrator does his best to fulfil the brief. His Skaven sound maniacal, though all their words are preceded by a Hannibal-Lecter-likes-Fava-beans grade flapping of lips. His women sound appropriate, even though our main Memorian Mary-Sue develops an unhealthy habit of exasperating towards the latter half of the book, that's how emotionally involved she is. His action scenes are easily recognizable because he's turning his voice up the exact same notch every time. It's fine. It serves. It's the source material.

And therein lies the rub: Ironically, Games Workshop's Grand Narratives ultimately build such a hostile environment for better... narratives because of their iron corset of parameters to be struck. "Skaven must invade and lose because of infighting, Stormcast are now even more of a bunch of sourpuss edgelords, this character must survive because they come out in plastic soon, and by the way, you have three weeks to clobber this together in your lunchbreaks without second drafts or editing, because hey, that's what works for our rulesets too, right?" - It's hard to hit the Pulitzer Prize within such a framework.

However, the recent novel featuring Gunnar Brand and his merry men of chaos worshippers, set in the same time and conflict and mountain range with nary a metaversal overlap, managed to grip me where this book fails. And in failing, sadly it does meet my expectations.

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Great way to introduce the new edition

A good story overall with engaging characters that help bring more character to the stormcast

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Grimdark AoS

And that’s as it should be but I find I struggle with the melancholic writing of this author, having just read Lazarus the style and tone are very similar, It would be nice to have the occasional brief introduction of humour to alleviate the gloom
Richard Reeds narration is as alway clear, precise with perfect pronunciation

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A good story but the previous ones was better

The story is good but the previous books which was released alongside the second and third edition of the game was better. This one felt mostly as an advertisement for the Skaventide box and how many stories are we going to hear about young people rising from the slums to become a hero? Sure there were times that I couldn’t stop listening but at the same time it could have been so much better.

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