1. I read all the Warhammer books I can find that feature Nurgle-stuff.
2. It is the second tale of Orfeo, and I read the first one and liked it.
3. I have liked Brian Craig's other books.
4. I like the earlier, older Warhammer books better than the new ones.
5. It is set in yet another not so familiar region of the Old World.
All these reasons, however, took on the guise of daemons themselves, and they became the very source of my disappointment.
I did not like this book. While there is some development of the metaplot that features Orfeo and his captor from the first book (and this I liked, overall), the tale itself is damn near daft and fairly uninteresting at best. It's the tale of a man-at-arms (and so we are told repeatedly) with the personality of a pack of lunch meats and his struggle to save a small kingdom in The Border Princes from the clutches of the plague god, Nurgle. Again, without revealing much, I think one can say that this features treachery, wizardry and douchebaggery.
I struggled to find one interesting character in the entire book. For the life of me, I could not care less what happened to these people. If Craig (ambitiously) wanted his characters to be more ordinary, "cometh the hour, cometh the man"-type of heroes then... Well, it was a fine thought, but I don't think it succeeded in its execution. It's a difficult task to let your characters mature and blossom into heroes, and they often start out too lame, or go through too much of a transformation. In this case it's more of the former, and it is somewhat predictable as well.
How good is the writing, how rich and powerful the imagery? Not very. While I would be a hypocrite if I asked for the very blood, gore and action that later Warhammer novels offer in spades, I struggled to find excitement in even the most climactic scenes. The plot just sort of drudged along, and the whole thing did feel very much like a tale. A boring one at that, and this book, weaker in terms of plot than the first one, really needed some extra colour... You know, people diving in slow motion as stuff explodes. Nothing ever did.
Is this - like some of the other books I have read and reviewed - a treasure of knowledge? Will wisdom be yours if you read it? Alas, no. The Border Princes, much like Norsca, Chaos Wastes etc. is one of the less charted regions of the Warhammer world, and thus it offers the chance to have any sort of kingdom located there that you may want or need. While it's hardly feasible to go on and on describing details about a place and its culture, this all came across as very generic. It could almost literally be anywhere. As for Nurgle-stuff... Nothing new, no deep insights.
This felt very much like a part two of a trilogy. I yawned, I soldiered on, but I was not terribly amused or impressed. I have definitely seen better from this author, so I was somewhat frustrated by this book.
Rating: 2 out of 5. Boring, a missed boat.
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