The series of novels, novellas and short stories that form the Dark Coil have taken on their own semi-legendary status in the annals of the Black Library. They are unquestionably a very different take on 40k, sitting in their own little sub-universe that exists parallel to the main world of 40k. Peter Fehervari has been writing in the Dark Coil for a decade, producing a twisting, turning set of tales that interleave to produce a very distinct – and unique – corpus of writing. With the first anthology, Dark Coil Damnation, hitting the shelves, it’s time to deep dive into why these are worth reading.
The core of the anthology, for all that Dark Coil stories have their connections and weavings of mystery and endurance, are two very different novels, written in very different contexts and for different purposes. There’s some short stories in here too – very good ones! – but Fire Caste and Spiral Dawn will be the focus here. There’s innumerable angles for writing about Fehervari’s work, whether tracing connections like the most obsessive post-credits-marvel-fan or waxing lyrical about prose and poetry. The best have been in taking the Dark Coil in different directions – you should definitely go read Dark Coil in contact with Gestalt Therapy – and what has struck me most is the interesting place the series, and individual novels within it, sit within the Black Library.
I am not an expert in the limits and boundaries of licensed tie-in fiction. I read a lot of it, I know people working in the industry and I check out what writers have to say about working for Games Workshop, but I’m not party to the faustian pacts authors sign in order to play in someone else’s universe. It’s fascinating to me though, how individuals carve out their space, pick up plot hooks from decades-old gaming material, or receive from on high the mandate to “Include more Nemesis Dreadknights.” The Black Library seems to have gone in waves of more and less editorial control, spaces when they’ve allowed writers a long leash, and others where there is tight, model-mandated control over content and form. Some writers seem to be allowed more space – a prove yourself then fuck around kind of thing – ranging from inventing new worlds and new minor chapters of Space Marines at the thin end into the Daniverse and its potential path to 11th edition at the thick. Overlying that is the use of books as supporting props for new model releases, where anything from a hastily written direct tie in (anyone remember reading Island of Blood?) to new-game-new-novel (Eisenhorn remains the most spectacular of these) forms a varyingly symbiotic relationship between tabletop and bookshelf. While editorial control comes and goes over time, it also comes and goes between book series – it’s ok to introduce a new type of enemy vehicle in Gaunt’s Ghosts, much less so to invent a new type of Leman Russ for Minka Lesk.
The Dark Coil: Damnation as a collection presents novels united in theme and – to an extent – in content, but with substantially different approaches to that freedom.
Fire Caste
Fire Caste is certainly an odd one. The first book for many a Black Library author is a Guard story – and this is no different, Fehervari going from short story to Guard as so many have before and since. From the off there’s something odd about it though – the deeply misleading title, the author-attested push to freely explore the T’au, even the fact that first books these days write something about Cadians (near each and every time) and here we have a brand new regiment, the Arkan Confederates, and new worlds to go with them.
Even the timing is odd, released and quickly forgotten in the dark days of sixth edition (can’t think that the title helped there – strangely named after the Tau and seemingly promising their first protagonist role), going a long time without a reprint. Hidden behind the title and the very stock cover image, there’s a strange book – in plot, characterisation and sheer weirdness there’s little to rival it for authorial freedom in the 40k playground since the Inquisition War. This isn’t really a review so I’ll keep this bit quick – it’s well worth reading this book, it’s well written, the prose is nice and poetic without being over-dense, there’s an interesting mystery and a satisfying 40k-nonsense end.
Many people have written many things about Fire Caste and why they find it interesting. It’s certainly my kind of book, with echoes of some of my favourite scifi either in theme, setting, or language (Life During Wartime, Transfigurations, fair bit of Bester). It stands out to me as in a world where just about every war movie gets lifted, space marined and slammed back in to the Black Library in one form or another, Fire Caste isn’t that. That isn’t to say it doesn’t take a plot and run with it – Fire Caste is very much Apocalypse Now – but that it doesn’t just take the shooting set pieces.
You can get away with quite a lot if you take a war movie and stick lasguns in the hands of the soldiers, and 40k’s predilection for close combat means you’ve got films about the entire history of warfare to pilfer from. Fire Caste takes a lot of the battles in Apocalypse Now: Redux, and puts them to Imperial Guard uses. There’s night time scrabbles, the tiger ambush, Kilgore’s aerial assault, but what’s different here is that the theme – even the feel – of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is there. This isn’t men entering a jungle to deal violence, but a dissolution of certainty and moral superiority, horror not found but brought, an enemy that is powerful and violent but not to the extent of the powers back home. The 40k layer adds to these themes, rather than masks over them – using the faint ridiculousness and all-pervading horror of a universe distilled from the very worst of human history to reflect a light back through colonialism’s most famous horror story.
I think that is exceedingly difficult to do well. You’ve probably read quite a lot of science fiction or alternate history where “thing from a novel, movie or history” is presented with a thin gloss of whatever the setting is. The Stars My Destination is the Count of Monte Cristo in space, Star Wars is The Hidden Fortress, etc etc etc. In the best versions of this, you explore something new about the original, some angle or approach that wasn’t possible before, using the new framing to do something different. I think Fehervari manages that, with Fire Caste using 40k to expand out from the Mekong/Congo, pulling in more of the (metaphorical and literal) demons that warfare brings with it, teasing out a twist on the sins of the father in way almost impossible in any other setting.
If there’s anything in Fire Caste though that speaks to a little more freedom to create than is usual, it’s in the Arkan Confederates. I could talk at length about the Arkan, but, honestly, I’ll restrain myself. We don’t have a lot of explicitly US-coded stuff in 40k. You could, legitimately, make a comment here that the use of excessive violence to police racial/species hierarchy in a system run by a decayed fascist corpse makes the whole setting basically the US in space (and you’d be right to do so), but I’m talking about models and factions. The Mordians are the Marines in dress uniform, the Cadians are Arnie, a couple of other bits here and there. But for full-throated, fully erect, Bald Eagle and Hotdogs, you’ve got these lads. It’s a mix of Vietnam, WW2, Black Hawk Down, and the internal wars/genocides of the 19th century, passed through a not-quite 40k filter, a little Bioshock Infinite in the steampunk Zouaves. What that creates is undoubtedly good in a very 40k-is-still-satire way, with no fly zones, shoulder mounted speakers, and slouch hats taking broad aim at the good ol’ USA while the “soldiers haunted by their actions in wiping out a village” pins a very specific reference to the board.
I think we grudgingly accept some of the easier shorthand for our nation-coded Imperial Guard regiments – Tallarns as faithful Arab adherents of the God Emperor, Praetorians probably having tea or some shit – but this goes well beyond “Valhallans are Russians because they wear Ushanka”. The guardsmen feel, act and sound American – all sorts of (mainly white, waspy) American tropes and figures through history. There’s Colonel Kurtz, Custer’s Cavalry, Whitman and Seeger, born again fanatics, Rambo and even Old Mexican guy – America through the lens of a British game about Thatcherite England. Not bad, that. There’s a world where I write a lengthy piece about the Dark Coil exploring post 9/11 American exceptionalism, the road through murder to the fall of Kabul, but it isn’t this one – not because it isn’t there, but because it feels like rubbing salt in a wound at the moment.
I got distracted there. Freedom was the point (how very American). Fire Caste is weird, off-brand. Faction identities and motivations are blurry, Chaos and corruption uniquely portrayed, even kit and equipment (Jumping sentinels! Guard in power armour!) is radically different to other mainline 40k portrayals. It feels early – it was a shock to see the publication date (2013) – very mid to late Nineties, that same second edition 40k feel, without set boundaries on who does what and what they use to do it. I don’t know how the editorial conversations went; “Do you mind if I create a completely new Guard regiment that fights uniquely and all their stuff is different, and by the way, I’m not going to describe a single thing you can buy?” seems like a stretch to imagine, but that’s what we’ve ended up with.
Spiral Dawn
You don’t get that in Spiral Dawn. Once called just “Genestealer Cult,” it’s much more explicitly – and obviously – a faction tie-in, written very closely to the boxes on store shelves. It was the closest novel accompaniment to the rereleased Genestealer Cult line, and clear mentions of Rockgrinders, Primuses, Abominants and the other elements of the refreshed and renewed model line are all present and correct – occasionally even given their shopfront names. Spiral Dawn even released into the short lived “Legends of the Dark Millennium” series (Doesn’t the Black Library love a short, loosely themed rebrand series?) that served as straightforward interactions to specific factions.
I’ve read quite a few books like that, either in new edition tie ins or first-novel-for-factions. In some ways, Fire Caste is that for the T’au, at that point still relatively underserved with novels. It’s sometimes the bit of the Black Library I really don’t enjoy, where you can see someone, somewhere, saying “make sure you mention this specific model, this Primaris Sergeant with special flamer,” where editorial control and the need to make novels about models that sell tends to strangle even the very best authors.
What is interesting to me about Spiral Dawn is that you don’t notice. I think there was once – possibly when someone said “it’s a looted vehicle for mining called a RockGrinder™” that I realised I was reading a novel about a model range. That’s achieved through layering “free” elements onto those “tied down” by the need to talk about units and models. Spiral Dawn is another freewheeling mystery plot, layer upon layer of enemy – Imperial, Cult, Chaos – with Inquisition shenanigans and a lurking undescribed threat at the heart of it. Fehervari clearly has fun with the tension at the heart of writing about Warhammer 40k – the universe is mad chaos with infinite variety, the tabletop is made of plastic and looks like *this* – the Cult in hiding is unique, their Imperial Guard adversaries are tormented weirdos with anime-style champions, and whatever the hell is happening at the centre of the planet is left almost completely unexplained, but everyone has the right weaponry.
How this works in Spiral Dawn is fascinating. It takes the editorial line to write about these models and effectively sequesters it, locking it away where it serves the purpose of the plot. You’re supposed to see that the cult revealed is what we get on the tabletop – that’s the bit you play. It’s a lovely bit of work, clever and laden with intent. It echoes the freedom you have in collecting, thinking and painting your army – however you damn want. Your Genestealer cult has a plan long in the making, and so do you. All the bits that Fehervari plays with, how the cult is concealed, how its structured, what it does in the shadows (and how), are the bits that are entirely up to you in making your army. When the metaphorical and literal dice are rolled, though, it’s about statlines and correct basing. Capturing that in a novel form is huge, huge fun – when the Cult throws off the suspiciously concealing cloaks and picks up the autogun, the plot transforms from mystery to a game of 40k.
It’s another one where the author has picked up a story and placed it onto a planet, and all to the good. In much the same way as Fire Caste lifts set pieces and themes, Spiral Dawn explores an older myth – many elements touching on the religious-mythological cycle of Tartarus and the Titans. A chained presence – something – is trapped by a succession of inheritors, with the final action of Spiral Dawn being less about calling the Hive Fleet and more about the Olympians inheriting the mantle of responsibility from the Titans. Responsibility, blame, tragedy, the divine in the face of mortality – and descent most of all, as characters repeatedly fall into the abyss literally, metaphorically and spiritually. Everyone fights in the face of a nebulous, greater threat that finally rears it’s head in the very final pages – I’m torn between hope that we’ll see what this is in further Dark Coil novels and the certainty that mystery is ultimately more satisfying. The jungle and rot of Fire Caste is replaced with fire, stone and darkness – the entire novel flitting between the three, a fitting and suitably Hadean setting for the story to unfold.
Warhammer 40k Is a Place, Not a Setting
Fire Caste and Spiral Dawn are still within the same Dark Coil setting, but they show very different sides of the editorial control line – something that, cribbing from my favourite Star Trek podcast, I’m going to call “40k is a place.” The world of the Dark Millennium is well developed, old (perhaps even ancient by the standards of modern scifi franchises), and rich setting. 40k as a place means that it can be explored, visited, inhabited, expanded by stories of any type, form or meaning. You can genre hop within it, write for different age groups or target audiences- something I’ve had a think about before – and it will remain identifiably 40k. We’ve seen Crime and Horror develop as sub-prints of the Black Library, we arguably have young adult novels, the occasional space opera, and children’s fiction, but mainline 40k falls squarely into military sci-fi. It can break that boundary though – whatever take you have (how we haven’t had Warhammer Dark/Urban Romance yet I do not know – you’re leaving horny nerd money on the table GW, you can thank me later), you can do it within 40k.
Both Fire Caste and Spiral Dawn fit into that idea in different ways. Fire Caste is perhaps the most obvious – 40k is a place and that place is in the cinema watching Apocalypse Now, or riding with the Cavalry out in the west. I don’t think I’ve read another book where the Guard are so rooted in near-contemporary history where it worked so well – they’re Americans and Conrad’s traders, but identifiably 40k versions of them – in a novel that spends as much time flirting with the boundaries of pastiche as it does doing the shooty-shooty. Spiral Dawn extends the themes of Fire Caste and much of the symbolism and explores the more familiar 40k-as-place, the tabletop, with the final third of the novel being a series of set pieces that read (and are written) like legitimately exciting game narration, mixing a classical setting with high fantasy characters with identifiable models released in the Genestealer cult range refresh. Despite the shooting, chopping and general 40k murdering, there’s very little about either book that could be described as an action novel – and all to the good. Instead, we have Heart of Darkness with T’au and Kroot and Hesiod’s Theogony with Genestealer Zeus – both work well, expanding to the limits (and perhaps a little beyond in Fire Caste) of the modern editorial line.
The Dark Coil is itself a place within 40k, sustaining what occasionally reads like “we have the Warhammer 40k Universe at Home (positive connotation)” in it’s own little sub-universe of ornate grim-darkness. The weirdness, differences both slight and substantial, poetic rhythm, and clear obsession with Sentinels and fungus allows the Dark Coil to lift stories almost wholesale from our shared monoculture and slot them into itself and the Warhammer universe, a matryoshka of settings befitting the interleaving worlds that Fehervari has created. They’re a testament in many ways to what you can do with Warhammer novels when you treat the setting not as a specific world to explore, but a place you can inhabit, and their return to prominence with the new anthologies hopefully speaks to a Black Library willing to embrace the unique. I want to see where we can go when the leash loosens, because when Fehervari is off and away he’s giving us some of the best writing that GW have produced – let’s see what everyone can do with the freedom to explore.
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