I first became mindful of the application of the law of diminishing returns to books in a speculative fiction series when I ran out of steam on Wheel of Time.
I mean no disrespect to Robert Jordan in saying so, but while the story had me for a handful of books I eventually lost interest, took a break from it, and never picked it back up again. It got me to thinking, though, what sort of drop-off writers can expect to see when they write books in a series.
To be clear, I’m referring to an explicit series here. While the mainline Horus Heresy boasts more than fifty novels, they are largely self-contained. One need not read James Swallow’s Nemesis (book #13) to enjoy The First Heretic by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (book #14). But it’s comparatively unlikely that there are a lot of folks out there who read The Dragon Reborn (book #3) without first consuming The Great Hunt-Â especially when right there on the cover it says “Book Three of the Wheel of Time.”
It would be fascinating to see how many souls read 1990’s The Eye of the World, then look at the trend in readership numbers all the way down the line until, thirteen books later, you arrive at A Memory of Light in 2013. What’s the slope of that line, and where would you suppose it experiences its steepest drop?
In the comics industry, the accelerated pace of publishing has made the problem much more acute. How do you get someone to jump in on The Mighty Thor #700 if they’ve never read any of the preceding 699 issues? The standard industry answer is to have relatively self-contained story arcs that provide new readers with regular jumping-on points, though the issue persists enough that occasionally comic publishers may decide to ‘restart’ a comic back at issue #1 to generate renewed interest.
While Shade of Khaine isn’t specifically a book in a series, it shares some of the potential pitfalls of its more sequentially-minded peers. In starring Malaneth Witchblade, it centers on a character who has already had a significant literary presence in the Black Library. Author Evan Dicken himself in the Introduction1 notes that his first run-in with her was in the pages of Robbie MacNiven’s The Bone Desert (2018), and that the prospect of writing so established a character was “terrifying.”
This presented Dicken with several challenges. First, how should you make a story accessible to readers picking it up for the first time? And second, how to portray Malaneth in a way that was true to her character. “We have followed Maleneth through a bunch of novels and short stories,” said Dicken in an interview on Warhammer Community2, “so there’s not only a lot of history to contend with, but the fact that readers (myself included) have a big investment in the character. I wanted to put my own spin on everyone’s favorite Khainite assassin; but I also wanted Maleneth to be recognizable to fans of the Slayer novels.”
Finding the Right Angle
What’s interesting is that, at least from a reviewer’s perspective, these two questions are somewhat at odds with one another. Both are important, but are perhaps best assessed by readers with a different level of enfranchisement in the character, series, and even setting. In that spirit I’ll advise that I am far better placed to opine on the former over the latter, as up until last year I’d been almost exclusively a 40K reader. While the Gotrek and Malaneth Omnibus sits patiently on my shelf waiting its turn, I’ve never even read a Gotrek and Felix story. So many books, so little time and all that.
So while I’m not able to dive very deeply on how well Dicken’s Witchblade feels like a progression from his predecessors, I’m in great position to assess its new-reader approachability. And on that score I can say quite confidently that Dicken knocked this one out of the park.
The story follows the now-solo Malaneth making her own way through the world, which soon brings her full circle to her old stomping ground, the city of Nightcliff. There she gets pulled back into the inter-coven intrigues that saw her old coven destroyed and her enemies ascent to power and prominence. As she unravels the plot that saw her sisters brought to ruin, there’s only one kind of justice that will square the debt: the kind delivered at the end of a blade.
Throughout Shade of Khaine Dicken wrote with a breezy, accessible style that demanded very little of the reader in terms of lore foreknowledge. The opening sequences of the book see Malaneth grappling with amnesia as a result of an (off-screen) run-in with some Idoneth Deepkin, and by narrowing her range of experience this device is particularly helpful to newer Age of Sigmar readers.
Anything in the lore than Dicken invokes he makes sure to explain and provide context around, so I didn’t find myself (as sometimes I do) grabbing for an AoS Core Rulebook or having to Google the unfamiliar. That makes Shade of Khaine an easy book to recommend for newer readers, while not being filled with long passages of expository fluff liable to bore veterans of the property.
Getting By with a Little Help from Her Friends
Malaneth may by the main character of the story, but hers is a tale very much enriched by the supporting cast Dicken weaves for her. From Splendid the Ogor to anarchist trapmaker Stromund Goldless, voice-in-her-head Mistress Sybelline to friend-turned-enemy-turned-friend Xarissa the Shadowstalker, she has no lack of company along the way.
Splendid was an interesting contrast deserving of a mention, a brute savage of a gourmand who was amiable and charming (as Ogors go). While I enjoyed how he was written, he didn’t quite capture the same element of other-ness that Adrian Tchaikovsky did so masterfully with On the Shoulders of Giants (review here). Splendid is a character who happens to be an Ogor, while Tchaikovsky’s Slobda felt more like an Ogor character. When Tchaikovsky’s very human lead character notes that his Ogor companion was “a child of a different god entirely,” you feel that in a way I didn’t really pick up on in Shade of Khaine.
There’s one more steady companion who has a significant impact on Malaneth, yet never actually appears in the novel. As Dicken reveals in an early passage,
Malaneth still dreamt of Gotrek Gurnisson. The Slayer hung like a stone around her neck, dragging her into a sea of shouting violence, rune glittering, his axe as bloody as any Khainite altar. He cleaved her memory like a blade. There was a time before she had met Gotrek… sure of her purpose, her duty, herself. Then, she had been set upon that damnable Slayer and everything had stopped making sense.
Dicken really sticks the landing here, finding just the right amount of Gotrek that lets him loom large as a figure of great significance to Malaneth without overstaying his welcome. He feels like an old friend, woven tightly within the tapestry of her life and given to fond remembrance. The temptation here may have been to simply work him in with some flashback sequences, but Dicken does the harder work of making him an emotional presence, not a physical one. “Her relationship with Gotrek was integral to her development,” he said in the Warhammer Community interview, “and I wanted to be respectful of that. The Slayer figures prominently in her makeup, for good and ill; but ultimately I didn’t think anyone would want to read a novel that revolved around Maleneth just rehashing her time with Gotrek.”
Not only did Dicken succeed in that aim, but he even managed to make the prospect of reading the earlier stories with both characters in them even more appealing. Terrific work.
Final Thoughts
Overall Dicken’s written a cracking, swashbuckling adventure of a tale, one which shows off a nice cross-section of the world of Age of Sigmar but doesn’t expect the reader to arrive with a great deal of knowledge of the setting. Nor does he lean on the reader for the characters of Malaneth or Gotrek themselves, letting her amnesia keep the nonessential details largely offstage while he acclimates the reader to the storyline. If there was a single word that came to mind more than any other as I read Shade of Khaine, it would be fun. With short chapters and a brisk pace, the pages all but turned themselves.
If there was one hiccup I found in Dicken’s prose, it was the occasional tendency to find a world he liked and run with it. For instance, I considered the prospect of a drinking game- where every time he used the word fool I’d take a shot- a frightening one for my liver given at one point it’s used three times in seven sentences2. The less-common panoply was another one with conspicuous proximity. There’s no formal rule for word overusage by authors that I’m aware of, with the guideline generally being whether or not the reader happens to notice. Once I did, it was a bit hard to un-see, and thus acted more as distraction than descriptor.
But where it matters- the story, the characters, and the accessibility- Dicken delivered here. More like this, please.
Footnotes
- From the Limited Edition (2025)
- Original here.
- Page 100, for those keeping score at home.
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