Let's Read Warhammer: the Dark Coil Series

A friend recommended Peter Fehervari's Dark Coil series of Warhammer novels, so after the sheer disappointment of Deliverance Lost, I gave it a shot.

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‘Don’t go out tonight, father,’ Mina said.

 - Requiem Infernal, Peter Fehervari

The first Dark Coil novel I read was Requiem Infernal, and it's just really good. It's a supernatural horror story set on a very unusual Imperial shrine world, starring some fairly strange characters. There's grisly murders, demonic possessions, and whole thing just drips atmosphere. Fehervari very much knows what he's doing, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of it.

There are objections online that Requiem isn't really a Sisters of Battle book, in that the Order of the Last Candle and their homeworld is so unusual. I get where that comes from, but the Imperium is huge, and I love that Fehervari has been let loose to carve out his own little niche of it. I liked Requiem Infernal enough that I decided to read the rest of the series.

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‘We have to go,’ the ghost boy whispered into the darkness.

 - The Reverie, Peter Fehervari

The fourth Dark Coil novel stars the Angels Resplendent, a Blood Angels successor chapter who appeared in Requiem. They're a bunch of crusading artists, who collect interesting people they call Muses on their homeworld. It's quite similar to the Remembrancers on the expeditionary fleets in the Horus Heresy novels. However, all is not well on Malpertuis, the Painted World, with some of the Muses and even some of the space marines becoming corrupted.

It's all rather Fulgrim, in other words, if much less boring. But for whatever reason it didn't grip me nearly as well as Requiem, although it gets better toward the end. I think that part of it is that frankly, loyalist marines are kinda boring, and the parallels to Fulgrim were quite strong as well. But I was entertained.

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No matter how often Voyle relives it, the end always begins the same way.

 - The Greater Evil, Peter Fehervari

The first two Dark Coil novels are collected in an omnibus called Dark Coil: Damnation with a bunch of related short stories. The first novel is Fire Caste, and it's basically Apocalypse: Now 40,000, with the Imperial Guard protagonists going upriver in search of a Tau leader who might as well be called K'urtz. It's very Fehervari with its haunted characters, very properly grimdark, and very good.

I'm a little disappointed that GW's barely done anything with the Gue'vesa, that is, the humans who've gone over to the Greater Good. One of the only recent games with rules for them was Aeronautica Imperialis, before it switched over to 30k, and I enjoyed painting a bunch of Imperial flyers in Tau colors. I've kind of lost interest in 28mm lately, but Fire Caste almost makes me want to build some Gue'vesa.

Fire Caste is followed by Cult of the Spiral Dawn and its associated short stories, all of which are quite good. Again, this is dangerous stuff, because I've still got the Genestealer Cult half of a Deathwatch: Overkill box hanging around, and now I want to actually paint a cult.

I like Fehervari's characters, his writing is good and effortless to read, and I think he really nails the dystopia of the Imperium without descending into grimdark for the sake of grimdark.

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So yeah, I'd say that if you want to read Warhammer 40,000 fiction, I don't think you can do much better than the Dark Coil series. Highly recommended.