The Dark City review thread

[aa.logan]

Best Inquisition novel series since Ian Watson’s Jaq Draco, and I’m wholly serious.

[DukeLeto69]

19 hours ago, aa.logan said:

Best Inquisition novel series since Ian Watson’s Jaq Draco, and I’m wholly serious.

That’s an interesting gauntlet to throw down!

Not read VoT3 yet (did manage to get me a HB in the end but not via GW!) but the first two were awesome.

However, personally (so far) the VoT series doesn’t top Eisenhorn->Ravenor>Bequin (for me) but is defo 2nd place.

The Ian Watson Draco trilogy was...interesting! The first book was great, really good. I read it when first published and it shaped much of my W40k “world view”. The next two books were increasingly baffling and quite frankly mad! Watson was plain weird! IMHO!

[DarkChaplain]

No, his arrival on Luna and the Terran Crusade. It's being lampshaded here, and has been slightly referenced in Dawn of Fire and The Emperor's Legion, but not much. The meeting with Dad has been as well described as I'd like it to, no more is needed.

But Guilliman's arrival in-system, through the Webway, the whole stint with Magnus? The chaos it produces in the moment? The journey from stasis to Terra, seeing how bad it's become by his arrival in The Emperor's Legion? That's juicy stuff.

I love that Vaults of Terra, and Watchers of the Throne, only tangentially outline those events. They don't tackle it directly, they're almost avoiding to even speak his name in the relevant sections. But I'd totally be down to having the Guilliman-Side of the narrative gap explored, the reaction of the Custodes (including Navradaran) to a thought-dead Primarch suddenly coming through a Mechanicum-held Webway Portal of all things. Hear from the now seemingly forgotten Ynnari whether they were expecting this route to be open to them at all. We get glimpses of the shock and awe of his arrival in The Dark City and The Emperor's Legion, but it's indirect, and deliberately so. It benefits these stories, but also leaves another open to be told down the road.

[Ubiquitous1984]

Just finished listening to it.  It started off quite slowly but really picked up after the halfway mark.  Pretty much from arriving on Luna onwards was some of the best BL of the year so far.  

Another strong performance by John Banks on the audio.  

The ending left me quite dejected … but also made me think that a door has been left open for a fourth book?  It was interesting how people weren’t being explicitly shown to have died ‘on screen’ with most deaths being implied.  Perhaps this is just wishful thinking.  Certainly the fate of the Fabricator General is something that will have to be addressed in a future release, whether that be a codex or the DoF series.  

Edited August 4, 2022 by Ubiquitous1984

[Lord Nord in Gravis Armour]

55 minutes ago, Ubiquitous1984 said:

[spoilers]...  [/spoilers]

The "Spoiler" tag is singular. Unless you don't want it to work.

[Ubiquitous1984]

8 hours ago, Lord Nord said:

The "Spoiler" tag is singular. Unless you don't want it to work.

Cheers, fixed it. 

[Lord Nord in Gravis Armour]

21 hours ago, Ubiquitous1984 said:

 

  Hide contents

 The ending let me quite dejected … but also made me think that a door has been left open for a fourth book?  It was interesting how people weren’t being explicitly shown to have died ‘on screen’ with most deaths being implied.  Perhaps this is just wishful thinking.  Certainly the fate of the Fabricator General is something that will have to be addressed in a future release, whether that be a codex or the DoF series.  

 

 

Yeah, the non-conclusive nature of several of the "deaths" is something I specifically anticipated a lot of people having an issue with. There really are no less than seven characters of some note who get that trick pulled with them. However, it would only really bother me if a few of these apparent deaths got reversed. Specifically:

Crowl: He really needs to be dead. This was his trilogy.  He was redeemed regarding his obsession with tracking down the last conspirator from Book 1. Plus he had one foot in the grave already. Having him survive would also mean finding him some convenient "miracle cure." As-is, there was no need to see him explicitly die - assuming he did, he went out in about as painless a manner as he could have hoped for. And that was after being successful at his main objective.

The Drukhari Haemonculus: Supposedly wasn't going to die, but would find himself in a very uncomfortable spot. He doesn't need to be seen again, no matter how the "Drukhari Throne" storyline progresses.

Revus and Khazad: Both of these characters reached the end of their thread. Khazad got her revenge and Revus made good on his obligation to Crowl after abandoning him at the end of Book 2. They had about the best 40K deaths they could have asked for. And with future stories being centered around Spinoza, Hegain works much better as the captain of her guard anyway (undoubtedly the reason he was chosen for the red herring mission that kept him safe during this book's climax).

So those are the four who really should be dead or at least gone if the story continues. Otherwise:

Raskian: I knew he'd probably be taken off the table since the only other spot in the fiction where he's mentioned by name after these events is in Chapter 1 of The Regent's Shadow where Jek specifically says she can't get in touch with him. And he's the only sitting High Lord (following Guilliman's purges) not to be heard from during the Hexarchy crisis. And even later during the Dark Imperium trilogy, both before and after the retconning of its place in the timeline, Raskian is not mentioned by name during the discussion about Cawl being proposed as the new Fabricator General. He COULD be back in place by then, he could also not be.

I don't have any real strong feelings about whether or not he's gone for good, though. If Navradaran was able to at least save the "avatar" and thereby a significant chunk of Raskian's "base" persona, I wouldn't mind.

Navradaran: Picture or it didn't happen.

Spinoza: We aren't even expected to seriously consider that she's dead, I don't think. All we know is that she was trying to make it to the portal and then we just find out that she didn't make it back to Earth right away and Gorgias is alive and presumably well somewhere else. It won't be any kind of cheat if she comes back and I can't imagine anyone thinks for a second that she's dead.

As for "book four," I think that's part of the problem. I don't think Black Library has decided WHAT they want to do as far as a followup to this trilogy and would rather not greenlight either a fourth book or a new trilogy right away, especially given the long lag time between books two and three here. Plus I suspect Wraight isn't in a hurry to write a direct followup. So keeping things vague on Spinoza, Navradaran and even Raskian has the effect of taking them out of the mix until such time as Wraight or Black Library want to move forward with the "failing throne" storyline. But it allows them all to be available at some point in the future if and when Wraight is willing to write another story (or in the case of Raskian, if BL just simply wants to move in another direction with the Fabricator-General storyline).

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by Lord Nord

[Ubiquitous1984]

58 minutes ago, Lord Nord said:

  Hide contents

Yeah, the non-conclusive nature of several of the "deaths" is something I specifically anticipated a lot of people having an issue with. There really are no less than seven characters of some note who get that trick pulled with them. However, it would only really bother me if a few of these apparent deaths got reversed. Specifically:

Crowl: He really needs to be dead. This was his trilogy.  He was redeemed regarding his obsession with tracking down the last conspirator from Book 1. Plus he had one foot in the grave already. Having him survive would also mean finding him some convenient "miracle cure." As-is, there was no need to see him explicitly die - assuming he did, he went out in about as painless a manner as he could have hoped for. And that was after being successful at his main objective.

The Drukhari Haemonculus: Supposedly wasn't going to die, but would find himself in a very uncomfortable spot. He doesn't need to be seen again, no matter how the "Drukhari Throne" storyline progresses.

Revus and Khazad: Both of these characters reached the end of their thread. Khazad got her revenge and Revus made good on his obligation to Crowl after abandoning him at the end of Book 2. They had about the best 40K deaths they could have asked for. And with future stories being centered around Spinoza, Hegain works much better as the captain of her guard anyway (undoubtedly the reason he was chosen for the red herring mission that kept him safe during this book's climax).

So those are the four who really should be dead or at least gone if the story continues. Otherwise:

Raskian: I knew he'd probably be taken off the table since the only other spot in the fiction where he's mentioned by name after these events is in Chapter 1 of The Regent's Shadow where Jek specifically says she can't get in touch with him. And he's the only sitting High Lord (following Guilliman's purges) not to be heard from during the Hexarchy crisis. And even later during the Dark Imperium trilogy, both before and after the retconning of its place in the timeline, Raskian is not mentioned by name during the discussion about Cawl being proposed as the new Fabricator General. He COULD be back in place by then, he could also not be.

I don't have any real strong feelings about whether or not he's gone for good, though. If Navradaran was able to at least save the "avatar" and thereby a significant chunk of Raskian's "base" persona, I wouldn't mind.

Navradaran: Picture or it didn't happen.

Spinoza: We aren't even expected to seriously consider that she's dead, I don't think. All we know is that she was trying to make it to the portal and then we just find out that she didn't make it back to Earth right away and Gorgias is alive and presumably well somewhere else. It won't be any kind of cheat if she comes back and I can't imagine anyone thinks for a second that she's dead.

As for "book four," I think that's part of the problem. I don't think Black Library has decided WHAT they want to do as far as a followup to this trilogy and would rather not greenlight either a fourth book or a new trilogy right away, especially given the long lag time between books two and three here. Plus I suspect Wraight isn't in a hurry to write a direct followup. So keeping things vague on Spinoza, Navradaran and even Raskian has the effect of taking them out of the mix until such time as Wraight or Black Library want to move forward with the "failing throne" storyline. But it allows them all to be available at some point in the future if and when Wraight is willing to write another story (or in the case of Raskian, if BL just simply wants to move in another direction with the Fabricator-General storyline).

 

Great summery.  I enjoyed reading it.  

[aa.logan]

On 8/3/2022 at 10:01 AM, DukeLeto69 said:

That’s an interesting gauntlet to throw down!

Not read VoT3 yet (did manage to get me a HB in the end but not via GW!) but the first two were awesome.

However, personally (so far) the VoT series doesn’t top Eisenhorn->Ravenor>Bequin (for me) but is defo 2nd place.

The Ian Watson Draco trilogy was...interesting! The first book was great, really good. I read it when first published and it shaped much of my W40k “world view”. The next two books were increasingly baffling and quite frankly mad! Watson was plain weird! IMHO!

The baffling and quite frankly mad aspects of the Inquisition War trilogy are what draw me most to it, and if I’m honest it’s the fact that the Vaults of Terra books plough a not dissimilar furrow that I’m such a fan of. 
 

I’m a massive fan of the Abnett series, but it’s they just don’t have the scale of these books- and if every book did, they’d be diminished, but the workings of the big Terran bodies, and the Throneworld itself, will always fascinate me. 
 

Other people have been far more articulate in their reviews of what makes this book, and the trilogy generally, so great, but

the hint that Bach is the apogee of Human civilisation, the big dramatic revelations about stealing just one drop of the Emperor’s blood to clone him

and all the rest have that sense of camp that to me is as integral to 40K as grimdark is.

[Roomsky]

Another prestigious entry into the Hall of "Books Everyone Seems Enamored with that Roomsky Didn't Like Very Much (TM)"

I'm serious. I think this is the most disappointing thing I've read in a while.

The first half of this book is inexcusably boring. And that has nothing to do with the lack of action, it's just that it's almost totally barren of character or stakes. Spinoza needs someone more eccentric to bounce off of, and without it she's incredibly bland. Revus isn't much better. Gorgias could have spiced it up far more than it did, but the funny little skull is woefully underused. The plot is that they need to find Crowl, except we know the book isn't going to be about that by the end. It's not a given that Crowl is alive, sure, but when you know priorities are going to shift by the end this portion is just going through the motions. What esoteric clues shall we make use of to locate our good inquisitor? Who cares, it's padding! The first 100 pages of this 275 book could have been about 20, and it would have been better for it. It doesn't even have the palpable atmosphere of the first book - it's just "things are bad! Spinoza couldn't believe the rich and powerful refused to help! Things are bad! Spinoza couldn't believe the rich and powerful refused to help!" 

Honestly, if this book didn't have the buzz it does I would not have bothered finishing it. Admittedly, this will read much better when an omnibus releases - the first half of this book will be a breather after the cataclysms of The Hollow Mountain. Less effective when I've been having a breather from those events for 2 real world years.

Things pick up in the second half, and there's lots of good stuff here. Once Navradaran shows up the pacing improves immensely, stakes are actually established, and the character dynamics really start to click. Wraight uses a less-is-more approach with the Dark Eldar, and it works extremely well. The most illuminating view we get of them, Crowl's conversation with the Pain-Bringer, had me glued to the page. And had it all stuck the landing, I would have given everything a pass because again, this'll read better in the omnibus.

So Crowl makes a last-minute discovery, the Imperial forces turn on the Dark Eldar, everyone dies but at least Comorragh is worse for it. Wow, Daring today, aren't we? It's just so... trite. All the while I was coming up to the ending, knowing something had to give. And I was begging, begging the book to have Crowl either be flat-out wrong, or betrayed by his retinue/the Custodes. That would have been soul-crushing grimdark. That would have been worth the meticulous set-up, and given some genuine emotional resonance to the whole affair. That would have been something I'd expect from Wraight, talented fellow that he is. But this is the same ending I've read in piles of other Black Library books at this point. The protagonists die with a last gasp of self-righteous fulfilment on their lips, wow I'm so glad I got to read that one yet again.

This series was so captivating when in started. At the end though, it's a literary Hollow Mountain. A narrative Carrion Throne. A prosaic Dark... well that one doesn't really work but you get the idea.

Not rating this, everyone else seems to love it and I'm sure you will too, dear reader. I'm just mad I probably yoinked a hardcover from someone who would have been really into this.

[DarkChaplain]

I actually pretty much agree on the first paragraph.

It doesn't help that they just keep poking in the dark for a while, asking around but nobody knows anything. I feel like those little sections about asking X and Y are basically just there to paint Terra being a hellhole right now, rather than because they contribute much if anything to the ongoing plot. There are some interesting bits here and there, but they could've probably skipped straight to the Rogue Trader and had the rival Inquisitor make his entrance in a less will-she-wont-she-betray way.

A lot of window dressing for the sake of showing how far out of their depth this retinue is, but the frequent "another few troopers died, Courvain is gonna be a little emptier if we ever return to it" lost its meaning real quickly.

And I might be misremembering, but I had the impression that Crowl didn't get to talk to his buddy about half the things that he seems to have done in this book. Didn't he go back to the guy just to find his place trashed and some cryptic notes being the only thing left? Here it seems like they had a nice chat over tea that offered up far more information than anything we've seen when they did have a chat last time around.

One part that actually made me laugh though was when Spinoza saw recordings of herself and commented on how much of a pain she was/is. To someone who still doesn't really like her as a character, regardless of small improvements to her attitude, I could only think "you still are a pain".

[DarkChaplain]

Finished it as well, had a few chapters left last time. So now I can comment on the end as well

It honestly left me dissatisfied. I felt that Revus and Khazad had a good, fitting ending. But that's the ending specifically. What didn't fit was the build-up. This book in particular didn't progress their relationship nearly enough to make me feel like Khazad's (first? and) last jest was actually earned.

Then we have Crowl, who I think gave all he had to give, and needed to die. I'm glad he did, because honestly, that's always been coming. One thing I have to give Wraight credit for is how he managed to alienate not just Spinoza, Revus and even Khazad with this depiction of Crowl, but also me, as a reader who really liked him in The Carrion Throne. That was the point, and he achieved it.

What I didn't really like was how Crowl actually achieved his small victories here. They were all by way of xenos macguffin / accidental blood mixing. Few of the things he did after we meet him again halfway through the book feel to have been achieved on his own merits and smarts. Some he is basically told by an Eldar who thought he was so much cleverer, he could spite Crowl and tell him everything without him ever putting 2+2 together. Some was weird whacky intuition and connection to the xenos.

Gorgias almost vanishes off the stage halfway through. He's a vital part in the search for Crowl, but by the time they reunite, he immediately plummets in relevance, at most offering a condemnation. The epilogue, too, seemed weird, because it implies hope at the same time as it is worse than a needle in a haystack. I wonder if we'll see him just so happen to be found by one of the crusade fleets in a few years, or if it's just going to go forgotten, like the whole Pandorax system emergency message was at the end of The Damnation of Pythos.

And Spinoza... I never really grew to like her, even if she got more bareable. I, too, think that her conclusion of going for the purity ending was weird. It sticks too close to her starting point of being a dogmatic jackass, while aligning too closely with Crowl's madness, and going against Navradaran seemed a bit forced. Her and Zijes seemed to think that it was clearly necessary for fixing the Throne and the evidence was stacked in favor of the deal... but she just couldn't accept that.

She starts from a position of doubt in Crowl, and a belief in the sanctity of the High Lords. She goes in to find Crowl, not thinking further than that - deliberately so. Then she basically gets convinced by the necessity of what Raskian is doing, the doom it'd spell not to go ahead with it, and the arguments are enough to convince even the Custodians she trusts as the guardians of Him on Terra. Even Zijes is pretty much convinced by it all.
....but she convinces herself that it can't happen anyway, because dogma, something she seemed to finally be overcoming in favor of pragmatism. It's the plotting to sabotage the deal that I struggle with here; once Crowl makes his reveal, her decision is an easy one. It's the teetering between choices that I find unconvincing.

I, too, would have prefered if she'd shown agency of her own instead of just following either ingrained teachings of faith and purity, or her mentor, and budged from her amalathian stance more heavily.

And then she escapes, or does she? Unconclusive endings to a trilogy like this are a bane. Especially jarring as we see a "post-credits" scene of Gorgias in Jurassic Park. I don't care if timey whimey got involved to delay her getting back, or her having a whole new journey ahead of her from Imperium Nihilus or somesuch. Either kill her off in some fashion, or make it clear she survives but has a whole new world of woe ahead of her. I didn't find her potentially getting stuck and chased through the webway particularly interesting of an end, and Gorgias can't do anything on his own in Dino Land anyway, so it's little more than bait.

At this point, I hope that Navradaran actually made it and will be rejoining the other Custodes in Watchers 3, by way of another exit, because it'd be rather lame if he didn't. Valerian wonders in the second book where Navradaran had gotten to:

Quote

‘Tidings of Navradaran?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing,’ Kalluin said, grimly. ‘Nothing at all.’ He shook his head. ‘I often wondered if he would be lost, sent out on those long missions to gather the Sisters back, and yet he never was. Only now, as the ground is retaken, does his light fade at last.’ He drew in a long breath. ‘I should wish to see him again, if His Will permitted it. Perhaps, when this world is restored, much that is currently obscure will be made plain again.’

I'd imagine the payoff from Navradaran returning to meet Valerian & co, and sharing news of what transpired in the Webway, the doom of the Throne, even if it was years later, would be much, much larger than him simply leaving the stage off-page, with an implied death. The revelation of it all would shake the Custodes more than just losing a few cool dudes.

Honestly, it was clear that this book wouldn't come with big, earth-shaking reveals that'd shape the narrative going forward. But it's disappointing to see just how little actual holdover it has as things stand. Yes, they prevented a potential disaster, but allowed another that we've known about all along to continue, with no actual direct effects on any of the ongoing unfolding plotlines. It created a conflict / twist that it wrapped up in a wholly isolated fashion. It illustrates the state of Terra, Luna and the sheer despair of the imperial leadership, but in the end, that's kind of all it actually did in the long term.

....and I could go one step further: Even THAT illustrated despair among the High lords is made irrelevant, as the epilogue shows: With Guilliman's arrival, basically everything that came before is rendered moot. Heck, even the involved High Lords are gone or dead, their involvement hidden or forgotten. Not even that lingering despair from those in the know is carrying over from here.

It's a whoooole lot of setup for events that did not occur in this trilogy, and when - or rather if - they actually do occur later on, the narrative of this trilogy will have little to no bearing on it, having built up the danger in isolation, so when things go to hell again, it'll be a complete surprise to everyone left alive. It's wasted potential.

[cheywood]

Finished this up a little while ago. It’s a great ending, maybe one of my favorites, but as a story it has its faults. Overall I’d call it my third favorite BL book of the year so far (behind TDK and Kingmaker). I was expecting it to be my favorite, so at some level I’m a little disappointed, but that’s the risk you take when go in with high expectations. I think it will read better on reread in a couple of years when I go back through the whole trilogy, or however many books Wraight’s Terra works end up being. 

The Good:

Wraight knows good prose. Even in his weaker works this is obvious. Characters feel believable and speak about the truths of the Imperium in a refreshingly honest manner, Terra is beautifully described in ruinous detail. It is always so pleasant to read a BL work where the sentences are things of beauty, as opposed to words to slog through. 

The ending. Others have been more specific in the praise and criticism. Personally I love it. So dark, so hopeless in the most perfectly needless yet inevitable manner. You’re cheering and despairing at the same time by the last few pages. In a way it embodies a big theme of 40k: the beauty and bravery of individual human resilience juxtaposed with the horrific ignorance and violence of the Imperium at large. 

The character development. Wraight’s not necessarily who I think of for great character development in 40k. Not that’s he’s bad at it by any means, he’s too talented a writer to struggle consistently with such an essential piece of storytelling, but looking at the way Spinoza and Crowl have changed across these three books there’s a really satisfying arc within for each character. It’s nice to know that even in the dust saturated halls of decrepit Terra people can grow. 

The rogue trader. Blanking on her name at the moment but I need a trilogy about her and I need it yesterday. 

The bad: 

The first half of the book. I knew what I wanted out of this book before it was even written, and the first half resolutely refuses to deliver. This wouldn’t be a fair criticism in and of itself, some of the best art is initially confounding, but the first half is also, by Wraight’s standards, somewhat dull. It’s still fun to read his words, but between my impatience to get on with a rather slow moving plot and the focus on some characters over others I found myself a bit letdown until a little way into the second half. 

Overall 9.5/10. Thank goodness for that ending. Wraight had some early troubles but stuck the landing brilliantly. 

Edited August 16, 2022 by cheywood

[Sothalor]

Vaults of Terra: The Dark City by Chris Wraight

 

What a magnificently grim climax to the Vaults of Terra. The Dark City further cements Chris Wraight as one of my top authors for this franchise – and frankly, as a writer in general. In many ways, this is peak 40K for me; it doesn’t get much better than this. The Dark City completes a trilogy, and when taken as a whole, the Vaults of Terra forms one of the most profoundly allegorical works in the body of 40K literature. In doing so, it displays one of the most nuanced grasps on the depths 40K’s appeal as a setting.

Now, let me just say up front that the rest of this review is going to devolve into a bunch of subjective aspects that resonated with me to an astounding degree. These personal biases undoubtedly strongly influenced my opinion, so bear that in mind. A whole lot of what worked for me may not be your thing.

If you want a succinct, “objective” take, I’d say this: it’s a Chris Wraight novel. That means it’s a safe bet you’re getting: great prose, atmospheric descriptions, top-notch worldbuilding, wonderful character work, solid plot buildup, and thematic depth to appreciate. If you want to “just” read this as an action-adventure investigative thriller, or a “40K plot development” novel, there’s plenty here to recommend.

From here on, let me get into the hows and why The Dark City resonated so much with me. Much of that revolves around the finale and how it contextualizes the Vaults of Terra as a whole, so some spoilers will be implied ahead.

Spoiler

The Dark City was where it really clicked for me why I’ve liked Luce Spinoza so much as a character – it’s because she’s an allegory for the Imperium on many levels. In one sense, she represents a sort of idealized Imperium, the way the Imperium would want to see itself: devoted, faithful, simple and obedient, ruthless, martially mighty and more eager to punch than think. There’s an earnestness, a straightforward simplicity to her that goes beyond an incidental trait. Spinoza herself sees it as a virtue – a moral good. She also embodies a rigidly hierarchical worldview that sees all things as ordered into their places by the will of the Emperor. At the same time, she is ruthlessly used by her superiors and those in positions of power, a tool for their agendas. Even her relationship with the Space Marines is a reflection of the broader Imperium with the Astartes: one of irreconcilable difference, yet bonded by honor and veneration from her, and oathbound obligation from them.

Spinoza’s arc in The Dark City reflects that of the Imperium post-Gathering Storm: a dogmatic, hidebound entity forcibly confronted by a series of such catastrophes that their entire understanding and worldview must be upended and rebuilt, all while confronted with realities once thought impossible. And where things ultimately go with The Dark City is just such a rich use of that allegory – but we’ll get there.

 

Regarding the slow, pacing of the first half – I actually liked it a great deal. Or, perhaps liked isn’t quite the proper term. The experience of it wasn’t a pleasant one, per se. It was, rather, quite uncomfortable. The intimate, cloying pacing really drives home the scale of the catastrophe of the Great Rift and its cost on people in a way that a codex blurb or battle scene never could. It reminded me a great deal of 9/11 actually, especially the way that the survivors of Courvain were trying to conduct their investigation while the world burned around them.

Spoiler

I was in high school when the planes hit the twin towers. The thing is, if you read about it now, or look at images, or even video footage, you tend to get a compressed view of it. You get single pictures, or little clips of the most dramatic highlights. It’s hard to appreciate that it took nearly two hours for the towers to collapse. That must have felt like an eternity for those trapped in the towers.

My point, if you’ll forgive the perhaps insensitive comparison, is that catastrophes may be summarized in the span of a paragraph or two. They frequently take much longer to play out in actuality. And all the while, people are doing their best to go on with their lives. I was in class while the towers were burning, sitting through high school literature with my mind on the other side of the country

And I’m by no means special or unique in this regard. Hell, I had it easy. My grandfather was traveling the Chinese countryside to complete his studies during the second world war. He had to actively dodge war crimes.

That first half of The Dark City does the most immersive job I’ve experienced in a 40K novel at depicting this particular bizarre reality of life. That surreal sensation of just grinding through this task in front of you right now, of dealing with this stupid, inconsequential thing even though it feels like the world should have stopped for the moment but life doesn’t work like that. It felt like going to school the day after my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It felt like sitting through a university class listening to my professor rant about how all the Jews should be driven into the sea while my grandfather was going into a surgery he would never wake up from. It felt like having to go into work while my grandmother was dying in the hospital.

As I said, this wasn’t fun to read. But it evoked a barrage of emotions and memories in away few other 40K novels have even come close to doing.

 

Another aspect of The Dark City I greatly enjoyed is how it completes Vaults of Terra at a thematic and allegorical level. Like the keystone of an arch, this last novel completes the structure of the trilogy and distributes the allegorical weight of the work across the entire body. It’s what made the Vaults of Terra as entirety click into place for me; the series uses the state of Terra as an allegory of the Imperium as a whole – a condensed reflection of humanity. A decaying, rotting empire – cramped, stratified, oppressive, and miserable. It is constantly seething with turmoil and discontent. It wracks itself and burns its own future for the sake of just drawing out one more miserable breath in the next minute, constantly teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Vaults of Terra, in its antagonists, is also representative of the foes besetting the Imperium: the Enemy Within, the Enemy Without, and the Enemy Beyond (admittedly Hollow Mountain and Dark City reverse the order of these last two). Yet throughout it all there’s this constant undertone that ultimately humanity is its own worst enemy. The drudgery and oppression, the unthinking zealotry and blind adherence to tradition.

And that’s where The Dark City’s magnificent climax comes in. As others have noted, this is one hell of a grimdark finale to the series. There are dire consequences both personal and for the broader setting. And yet in a very odd way I found the climax – or perhaps more specifically the lead-up, the reason for it all to go down the way it does – to be one of the most uplifting I’ve read in a long time – maybe ever, when it comes to 40K.

Spoiler

Bear with me here; it’s not about the outcome of it all, it’s the motivation. We come to it thusly: if one reads this series as an allegory for the state of mankind in the 41^st millennium, then it paints a particular image of humanity’s mindset and ways. Namely, so much of what the Imperium does – who they are – is unthinking, unreflective, and unexamined. From the daily drudgery of the lowest laborer, to the mid-level managers who just rubber-stamp forms with no comprehension of what they are, to even the highly ranked like the Inquisition which immediately moves to the torture of apprehended suspects because they cannot fathom that people may not be guilty of accused crimes. Running throughout all the strata of Imperial society is this deep-seated pattern of doing things from a combination of unquestioned tradition and reflexive submission to authority.

The first book, Hollow Mountain, actually has a great little passage illustrating this mentality: ‘…and the act of duplication is preferable to the act of creation, for duplication is an abundance of what has been sanctified, whereas creation is, by virtue of the principles of mortal fallibility, the destruction in potentia of the righteous and the introduction of the suspect. In all things recall the lexicon of precaution and do not deviate from the…’ In other words: don’t think, just repeat what has been done before.

Socrates has been attributed as saying, “the unexamined life is not worth living” during his trial. The Dark City echoes this idea in Crowl’s conversation with the Dark Eldar Haemonculus in the latter part of the book – a grim irony in the representatives of two decaying empires running on inertia each accusing the other of being a species that has forgotten how to live, merely knowing how to exist.

It’s in this context that the final confrontation occurs. Crowl and the others make their decision with the question of “is anything non-permissible in the name of survival? Should there be?”

And Crowl, Spinoza, and the others ultimately decide that yes – life is more than existence, that there are lines that ought not be crossed even if that comes with heavy costs. They make a choice, a deliberate one, having actually tried to examine the issue at hand. When they go down, they go down ultimately on their terms, having made a decision they know will cost them everything. But it was their decision. There’s a defiance, an agency on display here about the human spirit that not even the Imperium can fully extinguish.

It’s about a timeless, transcendent element of humanity. It’s been showcased across time and space in stories, from Hector marching out to duel Achilles in the Illiad, to Obi-Wan’s duel with Darth Vader in A New Hope, to Morpheus tackling Agent Smith so Neo can escape in The Matrix, to Marcus going out on his own terms in John Wick, just to name a few off the top of my head.

It’s this aha moment in The Dark City that brings into focus one of the reasons Warhammer 40,000 is so compelling. The Imperium of Man is a horrible, broken, monstrous entity. It’s all the worst impulses of humanity exaggerated and magnified. It’s the Jungian Shadow on hyper-steroids. But that’s just it; the Imperium is undeniably human, with all that entails. As much as we recoil from its horrible aspects, our human selves recognize and resonate when those elements of the human spirit peek through the darkness. Love of something beyond ourselves, honor in dealing with others, self-sacrifice, even the drive to improve ourselves and our skills like Revus in The Hollow Mountain.

And that needle’s eye is one that the Vaults of Terra threads with impeccable nuance. It doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrors of Terra and the oppressive nature of the Imperium. The characters are unflinchingly products of their environments and the systems grinding them down. That works to its credit, because they are the Imperium. They are the embodiment of humanity in this terrible and awesome setting. And it makes the climax of The Dark City that much more powerful. When the characters make their choice, it’s also the human spirit choosing to stand for something, to consciously live and act in defiance when all it needs to keep existing is to do nothing.

 

There’s even more that one could dig into with the Vaults of Terra, like the symbolism of the protagonists’ names – Erasmus and Spinoza and their theories of religious and civic society and reform in European historical development, or how supporting characters like Revus and Khazad themselves also function as allegories of aspects of the Imperium.

But I’ve rambled on long enough.

I get that not everybody will view this book and series the way I do. I might well have certain life experiences and worldviews that predispose me to see this series a certain way. Nonetheless, I’d encourage people to read this allegorically, like Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or Dante’s Divine Comedy or C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. This series offers a wealth of thematic depth and richly multi-layered storytelling.

The Dark City was not a ‘fun’ read. The emotions and memories it invoked from me were hardly the most pleasant ones. But in so doing it stimulated me to a level of self-reflection and examination that few novels demand. So, if I may lean again upon Socrates’ words again, I found The Dark City – really, the Vaults of Terra as a whole – to be one of the most worthwhile reads in a long time.

[Ubiquitous1984]

4 hours ago, Sothalor said:

Vaults of Terra: The Dark City by Chris Wraight

 

What a magnificently grim climax to the Vaults of Terra. The Dark City further cements Chris Wraight as one of my top authors for this franchise – and frankly, as a writer in general. In many ways, this is peak 40K for me; it doesn’t get much better than this. The Dark City completes a trilogy, and when taken as a whole, the Vaults of Terra forms one of the most profoundly allegorical works in the body of 40K literature. In doing so, it displays one of the most nuanced grasps on the depths 40K’s appeal as a setting.

Now, let me just say up front that the rest of this review is going to devolve into a bunch of subjective aspects that resonated with me to an astounding degree. These personal biases undoubtedly strongly influenced my opinion, so bear that in mind. A whole lot of what worked for me may not be your thing.

If you want a succinct, “objective” take, I’d say this: it’s a Chris Wraight novel. That means it’s a safe bet you’re getting: great prose, atmospheric descriptions, top-notch worldbuilding, wonderful character work, solid plot buildup, and thematic depth to appreciate. If you want to “just” read this as an action-adventure investigative thriller, or a “40K plot development” novel, there’s plenty here to recommend.

From here on, let me get into the hows and why The Dark City resonated so much with me. Much of that revolves around the finale and how it contextualizes the Vaults of Terra as a whole, so some spoilers will be implied ahead.

  Hide contents

The Dark City was where it really clicked for me why I’ve liked Luce Spinoza so much as a character – it’s because she’s an allegory for the Imperium on many levels. In one sense, she represents a sort of idealized Imperium, the way the Imperium would want to see itself: devoted, faithful, simple and obedient, ruthless, martially mighty and more eager to punch than think. There’s an earnestness, a straightforward simplicity to her that goes beyond an incidental trait. Spinoza herself sees it as a virtue – a moral good. She also embodies a rigidly hierarchical worldview that sees all things as ordered into their places by the will of the Emperor. At the same time, she is ruthlessly used by her superiors and those in positions of power, a tool for their agendas. Even her relationship with the Space Marines is a reflection of the broader Imperium with the Astartes: one of irreconcilable difference, yet bonded by honor and veneration from her, and oathbound obligation from them.

Spinoza’s arc in The Dark City reflects that of the Imperium post-Gathering Storm: a dogmatic, hidebound entity forcibly confronted by a series of such catastrophes that their entire understanding and worldview must be upended and rebuilt, all while confronted with realities once thought impossible. And where things ultimately go with The Dark City is just such a rich use of that allegory – but we’ll get there.

 

Regarding the slow, pacing of the first half – I actually liked it a great deal. Or, perhaps liked isn’t quite the proper term. The experience of it wasn’t a pleasant one, per se. It was, rather, quite uncomfortable. The intimate, cloying pacing really drives home the scale of the catastrophe of the Great Rift and its cost on people in a way that a codex blurb or battle scene never could. It reminded me a great deal of 9/11 actually, especially the way that the survivors of Courvain were trying to conduct their investigation while the world burned around them.

  Hide contents

I was in high school when the planes hit the twin towers. The thing is, if you read about it now, or look at images, or even video footage, you tend to get a compressed view of it. You get single pictures, or little clips of the most dramatic highlights. It’s hard to appreciate that it took nearly two hours for the towers to collapse. That must have felt like an eternity for those trapped in the towers.

My point, if you’ll forgive the perhaps insensitive comparison, is that catastrophes may be summarized in the span of a paragraph or two. They frequently take much longer to play out in actuality. And all the while, people are doing their best to go on with their lives. I was in class while the towers were burning, sitting through high school literature with my mind on the other side of the country

And I’m by no means special or unique in this regard. Hell, I had it easy. My grandfather was traveling the Chinese countryside to complete his studies during the second world war. He had to actively dodge war crimes.

That first half of The Dark City does the most immersive job I’ve experienced in a 40K novel at depicting this particular bizarre reality of life. That surreal sensation of just grinding through this task in front of you right now, of dealing with this stupid, inconsequential thing even though it feels like the world should have stopped for the moment but life doesn’t work like that. It felt like going to school the day after my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It felt like sitting through a university class listening to my professor rant about how all the Jews should be driven into the sea while my grandfather was going into a surgery he would never wake up from. It felt like having to go into work while my grandmother was dying in the hospital.

As I said, this wasn’t fun to read. But it evoked a barrage of emotions and memories in away few other 40K novels have even come close to doing.

 

Another aspect of The Dark City I greatly enjoyed is how it completes Vaults of Terra at a thematic and allegorical level. Like the keystone of an arch, this last novel completes the structure of the trilogy and distributes the allegorical weight of the work across the entire body. It’s what made the Vaults of Terra as entirety click into place for me; the series uses the state of Terra as an allegory of the Imperium as a whole – a condensed reflection of humanity. A decaying, rotting empire – cramped, stratified, oppressive, and miserable. It is constantly seething with turmoil and discontent. It wracks itself and burns its own future for the sake of just drawing out one more miserable breath in the next minute, constantly teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Vaults of Terra, in its antagonists, is also representative of the foes besetting the Imperium: the Enemy Within, the Enemy Without, and the Enemy Beyond (admittedly Hollow Mountain and Dark City reverse the order of these last two). Yet throughout it all there’s this constant undertone that ultimately humanity is its own worst enemy. The drudgery and oppression, the unthinking zealotry and blind adherence to tradition.

And that’s where The Dark City’s magnificent climax comes in. As others have noted, this is one hell of a grimdark finale to the series. There are dire consequences both personal and for the broader setting. And yet in a very odd way I found the climax – or perhaps more specifically the lead-up, the reason for it all to go down the way it does – to be one of the most uplifting I’ve read in a long time – maybe ever, when it comes to 40K.

  Hide contents

Bear with me here; it’s not about the outcome of it all, it’s the motivation. We come to it thusly: if one reads this series as an allegory for the state of mankind in the 41^st millennium, then it paints a particular image of humanity’s mindset and ways. Namely, so much of what the Imperium does – who they are – is unthinking, unreflective, and unexamined. From the daily drudgery of the lowest laborer, to the mid-level managers who just rubber-stamp forms with no comprehension of what they are, to even the highly ranked like the Inquisition which immediately moves to the torture of apprehended suspects because they cannot fathom that people may not be guilty of accused crimes. Running throughout all the strata of Imperial society is this deep-seated pattern of doing things from a combination of unquestioned tradition and reflexive submission to authority.

The first book, Hollow Mountain, actually has a great little passage illustrating this mentality: ‘…and the act of duplication is preferable to the act of creation, for duplication is an abundance of what has been sanctified, whereas creation is, by virtue of the principles of mortal fallibility, the destruction in potentia of the righteous and the introduction of the suspect. In all things recall the lexicon of precaution and do not deviate from the…’ In other words: don’t think, just repeat what has been done before.

Socrates has been attributed as saying, “the unexamined life is not worth living” during his trial. The Dark City echoes this idea in Crowl’s conversation with the Dark Eldar Haemonculus in the latter part of the book – a grim irony in the representatives of two decaying empires running on inertia each accusing the other of being a species that has forgotten how to live, merely knowing how to exist.

It’s in this context that the final confrontation occurs. Crowl and the others make their decision with the question of “is anything non-permissible in the name of survival? Should there be?”

And Crowl, Spinoza, and the others ultimately decide that yes – life is more than existence, that there are lines that ought not be crossed even if that comes with heavy costs. They make a choice, a deliberate one, having actually tried to examine the issue at hand. When they go down, they go down ultimately on their terms, having made a decision they know will cost them everything. But it was their decision. There’s a defiance, an agency on display here about the human spirit that not even the Imperium can fully extinguish.

It’s about a timeless, transcendent element of humanity. It’s been showcased across time and space in stories, from Hector marching out to duel Achilles in the Illiad, to Obi-Wan’s duel with Darth Vader in A New Hope, to Morpheus tackling Agent Smith so Neo can escape in The Matrix, to Marcus going out on his own terms in John Wick, just to name a few off the top of my head.

It’s this aha moment in The Dark City that brings into focus one of the reasons Warhammer 40,000 is so compelling. The Imperium of Man is a horrible, broken, monstrous entity. It’s all the worst impulses of humanity exaggerated and magnified. It’s the Jungian Shadow on hyper-steroids. But that’s just it; the Imperium is undeniably human, with all that entails. As much as we recoil from its horrible aspects, our human selves recognize and resonate when those elements of the human spirit peek through the darkness. Love of something beyond ourselves, honor in dealing with others, self-sacrifice, even the drive to improve ourselves and our skills like Revus in The Hollow Mountain.

And that needle’s eye is one that the Vaults of Terra threads with impeccable nuance. It doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrors of Terra and the oppressive nature of the Imperium. The characters are unflinchingly products of their environments and the systems grinding them down. That works to its credit, because they are the Imperium. They are the embodiment of humanity in this terrible and awesome setting. And it makes the climax of The Dark City that much more powerful. When the characters make their choice, it’s also the human spirit choosing to stand for something, to consciously live and act in defiance when all it needs to keep existing is to do nothing.

 

There’s even more that one could dig into with the Vaults of Terra, like the symbolism of the protagonists’ names – Erasmus and Spinoza and their theories of religious and civic society and reform in European historical development, or how supporting characters like Revus and Khazad themselves also function as allegories of aspects of the Imperium.

But I’ve rambled on long enough.

I get that not everybody will view this book and series the way I do. I might well have certain life experiences and worldviews that predispose me to see this series a certain way. Nonetheless, I’d encourage people to read this allegorically, like Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or Dante’s Divine Comedy or C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. This series offers a wealth of thematic depth and richly multi-layered storytelling.

The Dark City was not a ‘fun’ read. The emotions and memories it invoked from me were hardly the most pleasant ones. But in so doing it stimulated me to a level of self-reflection and examination that few novels demand. So, if I may lean again upon Socrates’ words again, I found The Dark City – really, the Vaults of Terra as a whole – to be one of the most worthwhile reads in a long time.

This is one of the best reviews I have read for a BL book.  Thank you, and I hope Chris Wraight gets to read this as I am sure it would be very gratifying for him. 

[cheywood]

@Sothalor This is best review I’ve read on B&C. Thank you for recontextualizing the series like this, going to keep it in mind when I reread them all.  

[Orange Knight]

I just finished the book.

Honestly my mind is still reeling from that ending. It was so grim, and so dark. The Vaults of Terra is now the best Inquisition series from the Black Library, and has eclipsed both the Eisenhorn and the Ravenor trilogies.

It will take me a while to digest everything fully.

[Knockagh]

Finished this loved it. Great trilogy, well done Chris. Some superb threads to be followed up on. Hopefully someone will champion the story of what’s happening in the dark city now. 

[Petitioner's City]

Brilliant if meandering - at some points it felt very stretched out, especially early on, but then was very very good by the end. 

I do feel sad that this doesn't seem to be so well read.

[Orange Knight]

22 hours ago, Petitioner's City said:

Brilliant if meandering - at some points it felt very stretched out, especially early on, but then was very very good by the end. 

I do feel sad that this doesn't seem to be so well read.

I've noticed this pattern for a while.

Generic and overrated Horus Heresy books in particular received a lot of attention. Incredible novels like this, which frankly surpass 99% of the stories in the Horus Heresy are ignored. People pick up random Marine books and ignore the Dark Imperium trilogy or the Great Work, or the Watchers of the Throne series etc.

It has always been the case

[Ubiquitous1984]

We must remember how hard it is to find this book in print - it sold out within 25 minutes when it went on sale.  For people who dont like ebooks or audio, they will have to wait until probably 2023 for a paperback option.  

[DukeLeto69]

Just finished this and yep, a damn fine trilogy.  The ending, as others have said, is very grimdark 40k. Perfectly suitable. With the read across to the other Wraight trilogy (and the timeline these stories are set in) I am curious how book 3 of WotT will pan out.

[Anthedon]

Of all the various books that have pushed the storyline forward in recent years, the contributions of Wraight have been fantastic. The Dark City is no exception. If you are only going to read a few works dealing with the new lore, make it these ones.

[Orange Knight]

Spoiler

So, are we to assume that the Fabricator general has been lost?

 

And if so... how far down the pecking order would Cawl be? He is a Dominatus Dominus, so probably one of the most important and powerful in the Mechanicus.

 

I jest, I just. But I think this a plot they could pursue in the future. Was Cawl being honest in the Great Work, or was his AI telling the truth?

 

 

[Scribe]

On 9/14/2022 at 6:35 AM, Petitioner's City said:

Brilliant if meandering - at some points it felt very stretched out, especially early on, but then was very very good by the end. 

I do feel sad that this doesn't seem to be so well read.

 

Blame BL and their horrible pattern of release.

 

Outside of the Siege series it's tough to get books in paper.