Overclocked On Caffeine v.1.1

Dan Abnett - Warhammer 40,000: Xenos

248 Pages

The Warhammer 40k books are a horribly guilty pleasure. There's very little real depth to them: there's lots of explosions and decapitations and people being shredded like cheap tissue paper, but no deep insight into the human soul in the Grim Darkness of the future. They're the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick - read and laugh when someone explodes after being accused of Heresy!, revel in the almost pornographic descriptions of weaponry (oh yeah, work that chainsword and call me the God-Emperor) and smile grimly when the Stirring Music kicks in and someone tells everyone else that the line must be drawn and held here. Great stuff.

Warhammer books typically fall into one of three categories: Space Marine books, which all have the same plot and no characterisation; Eldar books, based on the adventures of Space Elves, a race who haven't been interesting since their rampant fornication and hedonism caused a rip in spacetime and the birth of a god of Chaos (now that's some good fornication right there!); and everything else, which covers the Imperial Guard (regular humans forced to fight cosmic horrors on a daily basis), the commissars (the Ciaphas Cain books have been described as Col. Flashman in space) and the Inquisition. These books are generally regarded as the best of the bunch, not only because they're decently written, but because they look at the Grim Darkness from a slightly more human perspective. The Marine books are filled with superhuman soldiers, single-minded in their purpose. The Eldar are aliens, if insufferably pretty ones, and, as mentioned, dull as fuck. Inquisitors may have training above and beyond anything Batman could hope to achieve, but they see a 15-foot tall Chaos Space Marine (generally regarded as the benchmark for 'Oh shi-' in this universe) and they just about shit themselves, no matter how heavily they're armed. In a universe filled with human-shaped walls of meat and armour, cosmic terrors from the other side of space and filthy xenos of all shapes and sizes, the human aspect, and all that goes with it can be easily lost.

The story focuses on Gregor Eisenhorn, Inquisitor in the employ of the God-Emperor. Inquisitors are sent to root out Heresy! and corruption in the Imperium. And since the Imperium spans several thousand galaxies, they've got a hell of a lot of work to do. Inquisitors are a mix of diplomat, FBI/CIA special task force and Internal Affairs, charged with rooting out corruption and Heresy! wherever it lies. If you see and Inquisitor in the area, you know shit is about to go down. Gregor Eisenhorn is one such man, and as the book opens, he's chasing down a man who has evaded him for the better part of a decade. What starts off as a simple firefight-cum-clusterfuck, resulting in the deaths of several thousand cryogenically frozen nobles eventually escalates into a hunt for an artefact that could tip the balance of power in the galaxy heavily in the favour of Chaos, damning Humanity as a whole

The characters in the book are all broadly written, relying heavily on tropes and ideas you'll probably have seen a thousand times before. That's not as bad as you might think, as it lets you get a handle on the characters swiftly, letting you enjoy the carnage at a more leisurely pace. For instance, Eisnhorn is not a man to cross by any means, but, as you would expect, he still suffers from doubts about his mission as people left and right get shredded, immolated, blown up or have their very literal spirit destroyed by very literal demons. He's still focussed on his goals, but the deaths start to wear on him as the book progresses, and as this is the first part of a trilogy, you know that will have consequences by the end. Kinda helps that they spell that much out for you on the back of the collected edition as well. It's all done as well as you would hope, Dan Abnett having long since cut his teeth working for 2000AD, DC and Marvel, enjoying long stints at each publisher on some fairly popular titles.

If there's any real problem with the book, it's two-fold. First, there's the pacing. The story has at least three or four places where it could end comfortably, but it just keeps going and going. It results in a lumpy narrative that has you ready for the climactic battle... only to remind you that you've still got a hundred or so pages left. And that happens at least twice. Then there's the final confrontation between Eisenhorn and the man he's been seeing in his dreams, which can be summed up thusly:

"Give me the McGuffin or you all die!"

"No."

*crunch*

"Oh. Well... okay then."

*leaps off bridge*

Seriously, that's the entirety of the final confrontation. Leaves you a little underwhelmed to say the least. Though it is balanced out by a very nice bit near the beginning, where one of Eisenhorn's entourage is killed by the man he's spent the last ten years hunting. He swears vengeance and promises to kill him if it's the last thing he does... which he then promptly does less than 30 pages later, slamming his gun in his quarry's mouth and blowing the back of his head off. It's a small thing, but it's nice to see something like this dealt with quickly, rather than extending it artificially for an entire book.

Xenos is a fun read, deep as a Twilight fan, but a whole lot smarter about it. There's a few bumps along the way, but it's perfect for reading on the bus or on the can. It's hopelessly unoriginal, but done so well, it doesn't really matter. Read it and try not to imagine Pete Postlethwate as Eisenhorn and Ben Browder as Midas Betancore. You really can't do it.