Welcome to this week’s Lore Friday on Goonhammer, where today we’ll be diving into the latest release in the Warhammer ‘characters series,’ Grotsnik: Da Mad Dok by Denny Flowers.
Flowers is no stranger to writing the greenskins. Although perhaps best known for Lucille von Shard, the Imperial Navy ace of Outgunned (2022) and Above and Beyond (2024), he also wrote from the Grot perspective in Da Gobbo’s Demise (2022) and Da Wrong Type of Green (2024)- both of which were featured in last year’s Da Red Gobbo Collection anthology.
In addition, we were given a foretaste of his treatment of Da Mad Dok in last December’s Black Library Advent Calendar with the eShort story Irreplaceable.
In Grostnik: Da Mad Dok, we are taken to Hive Prome, the last remaining Imperial holdout on a world ravaged by the Waaagh! of Beastboss Bakmun. The Guard have dug in like ticks around the planetary capital, prepared to fight to the bitter end having their backs against the wall. With a vast (but acidic) lake all that stands between them and a final, decisive victory, can the Orks work together to find a path to glory? Oh, and what is that smell?
In assessing the book, there are three things in particular I’ll be focusing on. First is the humor- this is, after all, an Ork-centered story. Then there’s Da Mad Dok himself, and we’ll get to the third thing in a bit.
“Orks are funny.”
So begins the author’s afterword (amusingly referred to as ‘Autopsy’ in the limited edition), and he’s right to note that humor is at heart of the Ork character in Warhammer 40,000.
In my review of Dominion Genesis, I discussed how some factions are harder than others to “get right.” Imperial Guard, because they’re the closest to our current modern-day military (with tropes pulled from the last two World Wars) are probably the most straightforward, while more arcane ones like the Adeptus Mechanicus have a lot of esoteric details a writer needs to be familiar with to convincingly channel their essence.
Orks- and your mileage may vary, of course- are at their best when the writer manages not only to channel their details, but also gets their tone right. That makes them something of a moving target, since humor can vary from reader to reader. Mike Brooks’ Orks really thread then needle well, frequently leaving me giggling as I go. Guy Haley’s Orks (at least in Evil Sun Rising, reviewed here) on the other hand, just weren’t for me at all.
Flowers landed somewhere in the middle. There were parts that were genuinely hilarious, but nestled amongst plenty of other attempts that seemed to rely overmuch on the presupposition that ‘Orks are inherently funny’ to carry the gag. Where he shined here though was not in crafting comedic moments, but rather comedic scenes where the delightful ridiculousness is a setting in which the characters play it straight. More than once I was reminded of the old Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny cartoons, such as one scene at the shore of a toxic lake that involved a malfunctioning giant hand engineered to ‘throw’ the Orks to the other side, or another where a particularly enterprising Grot served as the “voice” of a mute mechanical Mekboy.
“Orks are funny,” notes Flowers, but “perhaps it would be more accurate to say that orks know how to have fun. Even the old dok finds amusement in his work, chuckling along with his orderlies whilst elbow-deep in his latest victim. But despite his jovial facade, sometimes there’s a shadow lurking behind his good eye.
“And the shadow never smiles.”
The Pledge
Flowers always intended for this book to be an examination of Grotsnik, as much a subject as a protagonist. “It feels like there’s been quite a lot of versions of Grotsnik throughout the tabletop, somewhat in the novels,” he said in a recent video clip on Warhammer Community, “so one of the things I wanted to do is try and find a way of unifying all that. And when I realized that it was very simple, which is that… he’s mad.”
What’s particularly interesting about Grotsnik, however, is the nature of that madness. This is no malaise of the spirit or gross imbalance of humours, but rather a manifestly physical thing. Cutting and stitching, Grotsnik excels at replacing or upgrading body parts. Lose a leg in battle? Dok’ll stitch on a new one. Want to trade in your ordinary fist for a power klaw? Go see the dok.
But what happens when rather than parts of the body, you find yourself needing to replace parts of your brain? Whether from chasing enhancements or repairing misadventure, Grotsnik has replaced so much of his own brain that it’s not entirely certain that what’s left is itself entirely Grotsnik. Flowers invokes the Ship of Theseus paradox in his interview, and throughout the book we see glimpses where Da Mad Dok might be somehow more (or less) than the sum of his parts.
Flowers conveys this madness largely through spontaneous personality shifts in the Dok, and to his credit they flow well with the story rather than being overdone or shoehorned in. He also gets credit here for not milking the conceit for laughs, but rather weaving it into the story with a very light touch that if anything, only adds to the character’s latent menace and creepiness.
In my review of Fulgrim, The Perfect Son I looked at the role of tragedy in the 40K stories, finding it central to the richness of the setting. Flowers no doubt agrees, as he states in his video.
“40K themes are always about degeneration, everything falling apart. We don’t think of orks in that way because they are comical, but I think there’s some pathos and tragedy behind it. Because I think although they’re having fun, they don’t really understand why, and they’re not really capable of being anything other than their impulses and their knowledge that lurks in the background.
And I guess that’s how Grotsnik’s a little bit different because he gone beyond that. But whether it’s a Speed Freek just chasing the buzz or a Goff just obsessed with violence, they’ve all got a drive. Grotsnik’s drive to some extent is surgery for its own sake but there’s a bit of trying to get back what he was.
And maybe trying to become something greater than what he was.”
Ultimately, Flowers crafts a solid story of Ork adversity, combat, and glory while giving us a look into the politicking that keeps them ever wary of one another. I didn’t love the first half of the story as it took a bit to hit its stride, but I enjoyed it well enough overall.
Now, if you’re the kind of reader who doesn’t like to have any surprises spoiled and intend to read Grotsnik: Da Mad Dok, our time together here has drawn to an end. Please bookmark this page for a later return and navigate away, because in the next section we get a little deeper into the book.
The Reveal
A good plot twist in a story isn’t just a development that you didn’t see coming or an unexpected surprise, but rather is one that forces you to reexamine everything you’ve experienced up to that point.
The Sixth Sense, for instance, had a twist so well executed that it saddled director M. Night Shyamalan with an overshadowing burden of expectation he tried (but arguably never quite managed) to live up to again. It is perhaps a measure of its endurance that now, a quarter century after the movie was released, that I’m reluctant to say much more than that for fear of spoiling it.
With Grostnik: Da Mad Dok, there was no one ‘clubbed-over-the-head’ moment like The Sixth Sense, but it had an altogether more insidious twist due to its subtlety that- once it finally dawned- made this delicious reading.
This naturally presents some challenges for the reviewer. I’d love to give you my full impression, but I’d also like to preserve as much of the mystery as I can. It’s a bit like the observer effect in physics- even simply knowing that there’s a plot twist coming up somewhere changes your experience of the story.
I invited readers to get off at the last stop if they wanted to preserve the experience for themselves. If you read this far you’re now aware there’s a plot twist in the book, and so I’ll add one more section break before the full reveal if you still want to preserve some of the surprise.
If not, keep on reading.
The Prestige
Alright, you asked for it, let’s go! Spoilers ahoy!
So all those intrepid Imperial Guardsmen we see bravely standing before the Ork menace? Yeah, they’re Genestealers.
Where the book really makes this sing is that Flowers drops hints along the course of the story but deftly avoids overplaying his hand. In fact, very few of the human POV scenes (until the book’s climax) allude to this at all. Rather, we’re left with lots of very vague clues and hints from the Ork perspective, such as the notice of a strange and unsettling smell in some of the previously human-occupied structures.
Flowers, for his part, quite happily engages in misdirection. The strange smells, could they have something to do with Grotsnik? On the Imperial side, the “Emperor’s Angels” that reinforce the Guardsmen when the Ork assault gets in full swing, well, of course that’s just a romanticized reference to Astartes…right? And the things in the water that smell strangely like the humans (or, more accurately, “humans”)… what’s that about?
The drip-drip-drip of these hints across the story is so slight (at first) that it can take awhile before you even begin to get suspicious, but at a certain point I realized that this was no simple Ork story but rather a genuine (and compelling) mystery. I wasn’t even sure what the mystery WAS at first, just that something was up, which had the effect of making it even more intriguing.
At that point, Flowers had me hooked and the pages flew to the end.
Overall, I may not have been the biggest Ork enjoyer in the world as I opened this one up for the first time, but I remain delighted by the direction this book took as well as Flowers’ ambition in making something unexpectedly fun and a little subversive in the assignment.
And while if you’ve come this far you now know the book’s secrets, it doesn’t hang its hat fully on them. There’s still plenty of to enjoy.
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