HUNT FOR VOLDORIUS By Andy Hoare – Reviewed

This is one of the Space Marine’s battle novels, so you pretty much know what you can expect. Plenty of action, and you get that, in bucketloads. What the book fails to deliver is character-development and a decent plot.

Voldorius is a chaos space marine, leader of the infamous traitors the Alpha Legion, and sworn nemesis of Kor’sarro Khan of the White Scars Space marines. Basically, Kor’sarro hunts Voldorius and his legion to the enslaved planet of Quintus and attacks with the help of the mysterious Raven Guard Space Marines.

Ok, so not much story, cardboard characters, but plenty of action, loads of fighting and some nice touches, including the rebels, the hints of Voldorius’ power and the tension between the two space marine outfits.

The problem with the book lies within the limited premise of the series. What we want when picking up a battle novel is a lot of action. But action cannot be maintained throughout an entire novel, the reader would just become numb. The majority of 40K universe books are heavily action-led, but (the Horus Heresy novels at least) have a well-crafted plot behind the action and noticeable character development.

This book isn’t a failure, it’s entertaining enough for me not to write off the entire series, but Hoare needs to look at Dan Abnett, David Gunn and Andy Remic to see how truly brilliant action-heavy novels can contain good characterisation and plotting.

Good, but not quite good enough for a recommendation. Does what it says on the tin, but I was expecting a bit more.

VAMPYRRHIC By Simon Clark – Reviewed

I quite enjoyed this. It’s not normally my kind of thing, it’s a gentle, old-skool horror novel.

The premise is excellent, Thor (from Norse mythology) made a pact with a family a thousand years ago and gave them a vampire army to destroy all of Christendom. Unfortunately the family didn’t stick to the plan, and now, a thousand years later, David Leppington has returned to the family home to find that he is the last of the line, and expected to take control of the vampire army on its unending march to domination of the Christian world.

That would have been a great book. Unfortunately what we get is this great idea as the back-story. The main plot concerns David Leppington returning to his hometown, the town of Leppington, named after his family, and discovering the legend of Thor’s vampire army from his uncle, and then attempting to destroy the army before they begin their attack.

The first two thirds of the book set up the story as we are gradually given more information about the legend and the town. The story slowly and gently unravels, the vampires begin to escape and attack the human population of Leppington, but it isn’t until the uncle blows a hole in the bars imprisoning the creatures that the action kicks up a notch and David and his new-found friends, must fight for their lives.

Clark is a writer of such potential, as shown by the premise. But here he’s missed a massive opportunity. The book we’re given is in no way as exciting, entertaining or as passionate as it could have been. It seems this is a much more traditional, staid, and middle-of-the-road novel, playing safe rather than provoking any kind of emotion.

The writing isn’t Clark at his best either, his characters are all weak, limp-wristed, wet-wipes. Nothing there to incite any feeling.

Still, being the wrong book, a massive missed opportunity, a complete failure in potential, this still isn’t such a bad book. It certainly doesn’t have much going for it; but it’s a good little standard horror novel, similar to what Richard Laymon used to churn out endlessly.

Typical low-impact horror.