Book review: Death's Messenger

I threw myself into "Death's Messenger" in damn near complete ignorance it seems. I foolishly thought that it was perhaps written by a woman (Sandy?), but I was wrong. It's a pseudonym. It says so in the back of the book. Not sure I understand what the purpose was then, but hey. Secondly, I had not grasped that this was in fact part one of a series, and so I sat there throughout the book, admittedly LIKE A MORON and kept wondering HOW miss Sandy would manage to offer a satisfactory ending to the tale as the pages vanished.

As usual, I will not spoil the plot much. It's a coming of age tale, a grim one at that, as young Rudi is forced to flee his village in the rural regions of the Empire. Antagonists are many and of every stripe, both village bullies, beastmen, skaven, zealots, cultists... You name it. In retrospect, it all calls for elaboration to make much sense, but it is such an easy read that I was perhaps misled into thinking that it just wouldn't be explained or fleshed out much. Young Rudi goes from a somewhat stunted upbringing in the woods - and yes we get it several times: he grew up in the forrest with his stepfather, he thus has little sophistication and few social skills - through a brief career as mail man in his local community and straight to fugitive in a Mark Twain-ish story.

What's good? The writing is fairly crisp and vivid, not too meandering and pretentious, not too simple and repetive. The characters ... well, a lot are RPG-stock, including the main protagonists. Painfully so, some might find, but some of us may accept it as part and parcel with Warhammer books. I wasn't too bothered. It was like drinking Guinness. You've had it before, but it's still good. It IS a very easy and somewhat predictable read where it's fair to say that many veterans will understand more of what's going on than the characters. It's a classic problem in these books, and so is the "it does drag a bit"-sequences when characters are "between" major plot elements, and you can figure out where stuff is going.

The plot does seem genuinely complicated and "large" enough to keep young Rudi occupied for two more books without too much (literally) wandering in the wilderness to finally manage to bore me.

There is not much - if any - new info in this book. Nada. No nuggets if arcane knowledge, no explorer's joy as we visit new and exciting regions. We do not really visit any regions at all actually, as it's all very generic "fantasy landscape" where monsters lurk in woods, villagers struggle in ignorance and adventurers do cool stuff. Everyone has German sounding names, but they could have had any names, anywhere, and it wouldn't matter much. There's a little flavour involved when it comes to Chaos (a specific god that it won't take big brains to detect for the seasoned Warhammer reader), but that's it really when it comes to slightly less generic stuff.

It ends in a cliffhanger. If you hate this sort of thing, or don't fancy reading a whole trilogy then skip it altogether. I think you can miss it and not kick yourself, unless you're reading it so that you can join a roleplaying game and roll your eyes when your gamemaster steals from it, or something that he genuinely thought up accidentally resembles parts of this tale.

Rating: 3 out of 5. Spaghetti bolognese.