Still reading a Warhammer book here and there, still feeling the need to share my reviews of these masterpieces with the world. Sadly, there was no gem unearthed this time as I read Cawkwell's "Valkia the Bloody". It's rather poor.
First off, let me say that unless one likes Chaos and Khorne in particular... it's best to just skip it altogether. I am not a "Khorne Man" myself, but I have enjoyed a great many other Chaos-themed books from GW, so I fell in. That said, this book is heavily geared towards fans of the BATTLE aspect of Warhammer, rather than those (of us) who may prefer a more RPG-oriented take on the universe.
Avoiding spoilers here, so it's somewhat limited what I can reveal, but I'll reveal a little nevertheless as there is really absolutely no mystery to this book, except perhaps "What happened to the baby then?" which I will just throw out there so that those of you who read it can wonder with me. Unless a chapter was torn out of my copy, there is no answer to that, and I suspect there probably was an answer to that question in some draft of this book, and that it was edited out to cut down on the page number. Anyway. Part of the problem is that Valkia's life is in fact somewhat boring, Eventful, yes, but lacking in surprises for the seasoned reader of Warhammer lit. Or any lit. Or books of any kind. Any kind. Even very short ones. The intrigues are not very sophisticated and Valkia herself is somewhat boring, charmless, and not even really a chip off the old Red Sonja/Xena block, but kinda hard to love or hate. So basically the whole thing is a bit like a Manowar-song only with a female main character at the center, and I really don't mean that in a good way.
There's a sense in which Warhammer Fantasy always seemed different from 40K in which the gods are much closer to the regular (meta-)humans. As in... you can go visit them. Their plots are small, like giving one person a hard time or something. In 40K it's all on a much grander scale, and lesser demons get to corrupt entire worlds, and wars between species or populations are fought when gods yank strings. In this book this difference is notable. Khorne apparently notices a random barbarian girl, Valkia, and takes a shine to her. Eventually she becomes his bride, consort, girlfriend (ooooh!) or something like that. He gives her horns and wings. She gives him skulls for his den and throne. Meanwhile, in 40K, Imperial Guardsmen fight other Guardsmen turned traitor who can't quite manage more than scribbling forbidden symbols and praising "dark gods" that they have little concept of with some atrocities.
I have spoken in other reviews about the joy of getting some juicy background info, even when the book is otherwise crappy. Sadly... No dice. The setting is so generic that no one could pin it on a map. That seems to be on purpose as well. "North" is all one can say about it really, as the names of the characters are a random mix at best. There is Valkia, her father Merroc (who seems to speak some pseudo Scandinavian to her), her brother Edan, her daughters Eris (!) and Bellona and a Kormak (there's another Kormak in another book, also Chaos-loving) and her "barbarian" tribe are the Schwarzvolf... So yeah, you figure out where how the names fit together with a place, because I sure as hell can't.
The author can't quite make up her mind about the tribe's religious practice. Do they honour The Four or not? When? How? Even if the tribe is originally small in number, it seems to also be small in terms of history or culture, apart from a few basic gender norms and a political system. Even Khorne worship, something stupendously simple, ie "kill something and shout 'THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, BIG GUY'!" is not really very clear. Sure, I get that Khorne doesn't care whose skull he gets, but Valkia apparently thinks that it is a "great honour" if she puts your skull by her boyfriend's char, BUT at the same time it's also where you throw the skull of a chubby traitor. So yeah, the background is poor at best and one might describe it as generic.
Is there nothing good about it? I can't think of anything, really. Maybe if you're very visual and get off on imagining shapely devil-girls based on the author's somewhat unimaginative descriptions? Or if you feel it empowers women that Valkia kills a great deal of men (and some other women) in this book? Look, it's poorly written. It reads like the voice over to a real crime show on the Discovery channel, and Cawkwell has an annoying tendency to throw these "one liner" sentences in at the end of a paragraph, like "The slaughter would soon begin" and even "and hell followed with her" if memory serves. Cringeworthy stuff, really.
I am giving it one skull out of five, because I enjoyed imagining a shapely devil-girl, and because Khorne will want the other four for his throne.
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