Back when I was young and dumb, I was a big fan of Warhammer 40,000 – not so much the game itself, but the game world, and back in the days before it hit the 2^nd edition. Instead of buying a single book that had the entire game world in it, information about the Warhammer 40,000 universe was spread all over Hell’s half-acre. If you wanted to know about the Orks, then you bought Waaaagh and Freebooterz; if you wanted to know about Chaos, then it was off to The Lost and the Damned and Slaves to Darkness. If you didn’t have the money for those – and I usually didn’t – then you could pick up an issue of White Dwarf, which usually sampled from every game that Games Workshop had to offer, along with the occasional page of knockout art. The fiction pieces were scarce, but they felt much more imaginative; I remember one fiction piece about a blind girl left alone during a battle, and how she discovers that the knight who’s just grabbed her is actually a rotting, animated skeleton. (Her mind snaps; this is back in the day when the wargame and the role-playing game were closer together.)

Thanks to the way that the information was spread out, reading an issue of White Dwarf was kind of like doing a crossword puzzle – a casual reference to Terminator armor, or to the Emperor, or to Nurgle was later explained in in another issue. It was a fascinating experience to investigate a universe solely through second-hand sources, and the fact that the GW’s universe was heavily British made it feel that much more exotic – 2000AD and Dr. Who instead of He-Man and Thundercats. The universe that they were creating was pessimistic, heavy-metal-flavored, dim, grim, frequently absurd, and fascinating.

Anyways, to come to the point, I always wanted to work on the GW universe – make changes to this, explore the possibility of that. It was typical teenage hubris, but it was also the result of realizing that the Warhammer universes weren’t entirely glued together all that well. Some parts of the universe were fleshed out, like the description of the Eldar, while other parts – like what a day in the life of an Imperial citizen was like – were left completely to the imagination. Even worse is when they would describe some fascinating bit about something that had nothing to do with the wargame, like how the Eldar felt emotions, or the social structure of Orkish clans.

So, about ten years later, enter Dan Abnett, who’s proven himself a master of the little details that make up a fascinating world – in short, providing exactly what I was looking for Abnett has done superlative work on just about everything that he’s written so far, with the possible exception of Double Eagle and maybe His Last Command - and only then because GW seems intent on getting him to crank out too much stuff in way too short a period. Necropolis, which I’m reviewing, is probably the best work that he’s ever done.

It’s part of the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, featuring Colonel-Commissar Gaunt and the Imperial Guard regiment under his command, the last survivors of chaos-destroyed Tanith. Thanks to their nearly supernatural ability to sneak around – which occasionally stretches credulity – the Ghosts mostly take on commando missions, rather than the usual “Pick up that lasgun and go charge that Carnifex” duty that most Imperial Guardsmen get. The series focuses on a few named characters – Gaunt, Corbec, Rawne, Larkin, Dorden, Try-Again Bragg, Milo Brin and so forth – with the rest of the Ghosts as anonymous cannon fodder. I keep thinking that the books are patterned after British youth novels – stuff like Biggles, although I’ve never read those books – but you can see similar examples in any World War II film, novel or pornographic scrawling.

The particular genius of Necropolis is that Abnett broadens the scope of the novel beyond Gaunt and his troops. Instead of starting with the Ghosts, we begin with a cross-section of Vervunhive’s populace – a couple of nobles, a mother with two kids, a female gang member, a miner, and the grotesque leader of the industrial hive who runs the whole show. They don’t maintain their roles for long, though, as a rival hive – Zoica – suddenly launches a devastating assault, with appropriately horrific results. By the time that the Ghosts arrive, the outer parts of the city are in ruins, with only an energy shield and a sturdy wall preventing the interior city from being shelled flat. The parallel with the battle of Stalingrad is immediate and obvious - there’s even a river running through Vervunhive, with ferries carrying refugees to whatever safety they can find.

Abnett’s books tend to be very difficult to summarize because he’s very good at jumping from character to character, creating a short vignette before moving to somebody else; Necropolis is an ensemble piece, like the movie Crash. The female gang member finds herself with an unexpected responsibility; the miner becomes the leader of a scratch resistance force; one of the nobles rises to the challenge, while another is too concerned with profit to care about human life. Gaunt finds himself involved with both local and military politics, including a rivalry with the callous Commissar Kowle and a general whose hurt feelings led him to “accidentally” drop an artillery barrage on Gaunt’s troops in an earlier campaign. Zoica, meanwhile, has been utterly corrupted by Chaos, and is busy cranking out bizarre siege weapons to throw at the walls of Vervunhive.

I’m making it sound a little drier than it actually is. Abnett’s tends to draw his characters with tight strokes – Larkin is mad, Rawne is vindictive and bitter, Corbec is jovial and hale (and kinda dull), Gaunt is dutiful and cunning. They aren’t deep characters, but they are interesting ones, and that’s all that a book like this really needs. The new characters are drawn just as well. Particularly interesting is the lord of the hive, Salvador Sondar, who spends his time linked to the hive’s systems in an iron tank full of liquid; he communicates entirely using vatgrown servitors. To quote Abnett’s description of his thoughts:

Salvador Sondar floated upwards, his dreams now machine-language landscapes of autoledgers, contoured ziggurats of mounted interest values, rivers of exchange rates, terraces of production value outputs.

The mathematical vistas of mercantile triumph he adored more than any other place in the universe.

He twitched again in the warm soup, iridescent bubbles coating his shrunken limbs and fluttering to the roof of the Iron Tank. He was pleased now that he’d killed the old man. Heironymo had ruled too long! A hundred and twenty years old, beloved by the stupid, vapid public, still unwilling to make way for his twenty-year old nephew and obvious successor! It had been a merciful act, Salvador dreamed to himself, though the guilt of it had plagued him for the last fifty years. His sleeping features winced.

And it’s stuff like that which makes Abnett’s writing so good – his ability to invent technology that’s just as baroque as the rest of the WH40K universe without making it seem out of place. Computers aren’t computers; they’re autoledgers, or cogitators. House Chass has a cybernetic garden, complete with oil-sap fruit, mechanical butterflies and fractally-generated hedges. We find out that servitors aren’t modified humans, but lobotomized, cybernetically augmented clones. The forces of Chaos don’t use Defilers or Rhinos; they use stalk-tanks and flat-crabs. Because he’s focusing on the Imperial Guard, Abnett never really uses the more toyetic aspects of the Warhammer 40K universe – Space Marines, Dreadnaughts, Titans – so that he can focus on the human experience.

I realize that this whole description of his work comes off as flat, and that’s a shame, because Abnett’s style is compulsively likeable; he’s just damn good at writing. It’s pure popcorn; the kind of stuff that you can just dive into without hestitation. Necropolis also works as a sort of pseudo-history of the entire conflict, like a pastiche of a history book. Abnett returned to the style more strongly in The Sabbat Worlds Crusade, but he’ll include stuff that you’ll probably never see in any other Warhammer book; the fate of the refugees pouring into the city, or the way that Kowle’s propaganda efforts are spread throughout the city. We also get to finally see Gaunt act like a commissar, rather than as a colonel; which is to say that he shoots some people in the head for cowardice. (He was a pretty benevolent commissar in previous books, mostly because he was commanding elite troops.)

That’s not to say that Abnett’s writing is completely without flaw. Abnett has a nasty habit of introducing eight or nine characters all at once, without really distinguishing them. Since they’re usually fighting for their lives, there’s not a whole lot of time for character development in any meaningful fashion. Even the core members of the Ghosts don’t pick up a personality until the second or third book in the series, after Abnett’s had a chance to show them in a down moment. Reading about the exploits of a bunch of people that you don’t really know can be a less than pleasant experience. Abnett also tends to make his characters a little talky when they should be terse; there’s an exchange between Kolea and Dorden over his mercy killing of a trooper that comes off as forced and artificial. Just the same, these are minor complaints, and Necropolis suffers less from this than other books.

Should you buy it? Of course you should buy it. It doesn’t really matter if you’re into Warhammer; Necropolis is a excellent book on its own merits, regardless of whether or not you’ve got the kidney to sell to get into the wargame. It’s not the best piece of game fiction I’ve ever read – that would be A Hunger Like Fire – but it’s really damn close, and one of my favorite game-releated novels.

-Darren MacLennan