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elfsThe second Grey Knights novel is Dark Adeptus, which I managed to find at Half-Price, lucky me, and read in about three days. Pretty good considering it's 400 pages long.
Brother Alaric is joined by Inquisitor Nyxos to the Borosis star system, which has mysteriously gone silent. There, they discover a whole planet that has mysteriously emerged from the Chaos and seems to be overwhelmed by biomechanical life-forms of hideous and corrupt intent. Their mission is to get down to the surface, find the source of the corruption, and kill it.
Counter does as good a job here as he did with the previous book. He makes a strong case that Alaric is clever and creative, not features normally found in a Grey Knight, and is as skilled at using his mind as he is at his magic or his halberd. The ending is particularly satisfying as Alaric, confronted with a situation he cannot win, figures out how to change the rules in mid-game to his favor. He's a more sympathetic person in this book, worrying much more about civilians he's worked with, and perhaps we could argue needs.
On the one hand, it's not as satisfying as the first book. The villain at its core doesn't seem as all-consuming. The conspiracy isn't as big, the threat not as convincing. Counter doesn't do as good a job convincing us the threat posed by Ukrathos is real, mostly because Ukrathos is away from center-stage most of the time, doesn't corrupt those around himself effectively, and only makes boastful claims rather than showing us the effects he might have. It weakens the real threat of the plot.
There's a description in chapter six that made me grin:
All in all, a fine middle book. I'll see how the third book pans out next week.
Brother Alaric is joined by Inquisitor Nyxos to the Borosis star system, which has mysteriously gone silent. There, they discover a whole planet that has mysteriously emerged from the Chaos and seems to be overwhelmed by biomechanical life-forms of hideous and corrupt intent. Their mission is to get down to the surface, find the source of the corruption, and kill it.
Counter does as good a job here as he did with the previous book. He makes a strong case that Alaric is clever and creative, not features normally found in a Grey Knight, and is as skilled at using his mind as he is at his magic or his halberd. The ending is particularly satisfying as Alaric, confronted with a situation he cannot win, figures out how to change the rules in mid-game to his favor. He's a more sympathetic person in this book, worrying much more about civilians he's worked with, and perhaps we could argue needs.
On the one hand, it's not as satisfying as the first book. The villain at its core doesn't seem as all-consuming. The conspiracy isn't as big, the threat not as convincing. Counter doesn't do as good a job convincing us the threat posed by Ukrathos is real, mostly because Ukrathos is away from center-stage most of the time, doesn't corrupt those around himself effectively, and only makes boastful claims rather than showing us the effects he might have. It weakens the real threat of the plot.
There's a description in chapter six that made me grin:
The city's towers soared out of the chasms below, masses of flesh like tentacles wrapped around them as if holding them upright. The towers were in the half-Gothic, half-industrial style of the Adeptus Mechanicus but all similarity to an Imperial city ended there. The black steel spires were fused with the city's biological mass, so that some were like massive teeth sticking out from rancid gums or huge steel leg bones, skinned and wrapped in greyish muscle. Bulbous growths fused obscenely with sheer-sided skyscrapers.My first thought upon reading this was, "Yeah, I saw Bubblegum Crisis, too." A lot of Counter's writing is like that: he does a very good job with his cinematic descriptions, as if you can see into his head and watch him replaying the best grotesqueries of anime or cinema he's ever absorbed. That's okay, I do it too.
All in all, a fine middle book. I'll see how the third book pans out next week.
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Date: 2008-06-04 02:34 am (UTC)-Malthus