My husband has been attempting to get me to read a Warhammer 40K novel for the past few years. He finally succeeded over the Christmas break as we had over 12 hours of driving to do and he was able to get the one book on Audible. He doesn't read much as it is, but he, and a few of his friends, really enjoy the Warhammer novels based on the lore and characters from the miniature war table-top game by Games Workshop.
Warhammer 40,000 has been around since 1987 and has an avid and faithful fan-base of not only the game(s), but of the novelizations as well. I know enough about 40K from being with my husband for just about 10 years, that trying out a novel based on it wasn't a huge stretch for me. However, don't get me wrong, I still had to pause it often and ask a lot of questions for things I didn't quite understand or needed a little bit more explanation on unfamiliar things. At one point we had to stop and I spent ten minutes reading about the Emperor's Children on the Warhammer 40K wiki-page because my husband just couldn't explain it in enough detail for me.
The novel we listened to is called Xenos (2001), the first book in a trilogy that follows an Imperial Inquisitor named Gregor Eisenhorn. The novels are written by Dan Abnett, a prolific writer for Warhammer 40K, who has several dozen titles for the franchise under his belt.
First off, I really quite liked and enjoyed this book. I'm looking forward to the other two in the series and finishing the arc of Eisenhorn's story. The novel is written from first-person perspective, but Abnett does a fantastic job of making sure the reader doesn't get lost in the lore or the many complex thoughts of Eisenhorn and him being an Inquisitor. He brings the relationships of the other characters surrounding Eisenhorn into the spectrum of his life and highlights their connected-ness to him in a way that is through Eisenhorn's eyes, but feels almost like third-person narration. The whole thing reads almost like a dictated memoir and I was really pleased with that facet of the novel.
Gregor Eisenhorn as a character was fascinating, terrifying, and powerful . . . but also relate-able, sometimes vulnerable and passionate about his friends, allies and his dedication to his faith and station within the Imperial Inquisition. I think the story arc for Xenos may have suffered if it was in third-person narration following Eisenhorn and his crew, rather than being through his eyes, thoughts and actions. As an Inquisitor, when he "explains" things for the reader, it doesn't seem odd or out of place; rather, it comes off as an almost expected duty of his position and that makes it read more like a memoir and feel more natural to the plot.
The characters surrounding Eisenhorn were unique in themselves, and because of the memoir-like quality of the story, I was able to glean sufficient information about them through the first-person narration without it being forced, or the characters taking odd steps to explain things about themselves in out-of-place conversations. In fact, my favourite character isn't even Eisenhorn, its actually his friend and pilot, Midas Betancore. He's mysterious, ruthless, skillfully dangerous and unflinchingly loyal to Gregor Eisenhorn. I have this specific image of him in my mind and I refuse to look at artistic renditions of him so that I don't ruin what I've conjured up for myself.
The basic plot of Xenos reads much like a detective novel, but set on a much larger scale, in space and involves a lot of science fiction elements. It starts with Eisenhorn chasing down a heretic and mass murder that he has been on the tail of for six years. Predictably, like with many detective-style stories, the whole thing spirals out of control and goes into a series of events that I didn't see coming. Eisenhorn and his crew end up on a system-spanning witch-hunt for the orchestrator of a much larger scale heinous plot. With my somewhat 'knowledge' of Warhammer 40K I was able to stay engaged in the story without being too lost, but also be surprised and intrigued by new things at the same time.
As an audio book, and my first full length one (I have listened to the first part of the dramatized version of Good Omens before), I was very pleased. I typically fall asleep a lot on long car rides, but this kept me awake and engaged the whole time. The narrator, Toby Longworth, was utterly fantastic. He did such a fantastic job of switching between characters, and doing accents, that it was almost like there was more than one person narrating. The only cringe-y parts is when he had to voice Alizebeth Bequin, but as a male narrator, there is only so much you can do. If he does the other two novels, I'm totally set to listen to them both as audiobooks as well.
I would absolutely recommend this book, and probably the rest of the trilogy, to science fiction junkies with some or no knowledge of Warhammer 40K (although a little pre-knowledge does help). The lore to the WH40K universe is extensive, in depth and at points, hard to follow. The wiki does help clear stuff up, but I did find this YouTube video by TotalBiscuit that sums up a vast majority of the lore into a hilariously short minute and a half:
*Much of the detailed information in this post can be found in the wiki for Warhammer 40,000 through the link in the post.
**I also noticed almost every paragraph for this post has seven lines of text. I like the number seven, but this was not at all planned and must be a sign...
***According to my husband, the number seven is the holy number of Nurgle, the Chaos God of Plague, Despair, Disease and Death... so yeah... *cough* hah
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