‘Waiting Death’ – Steve Lyons (Black Library)

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while then you’ll know only too well just how much I loathe and despise the London Underground on a daily basis. If there’s anything I truly hate it’s being forced onto a commuter train while everyone else on board is trying their level best not to move up for you. What’s worse is when it’s so packed that you can’t even get a book out of your bag to read…
I’ve beaten this little predicament by listening to audio books on my ipod, mostly from the Black Library Warhammer 40,000 range. The standard has generally been pretty good so far so when I received my copy of ‘Waiting Death’ I was looking forward to a nice distraction from the morning commute.It didn’t work out quite like that though…

Colonel ‘Ironhand’ Straken’s Catachans have a well-deserved reputation as the toughest jungle fighters in the Imperium. On their chosen terrain, no-one can stand against them so a little job like rooting a Chaos cult out of the jungles of Borealis Four shouldn’t even have them breaking a sweat. That’s what you’d have thought but Borealis Four has a surprise in store for Straken and his men… ‘Ironhand’ and his men are about to find out that when the Chaos powers take root in your head, the most dangerous enemy you will face is… yourself.

As with ‘Thunder from Fenris’, ‘Waiting Death’ suffers from a lack of background sound affects that an audio book needs in order to be able to convey the atmosphere of the story to the reader. The only reason I really knew that the story was set in a jungle was because the narrator made that clear right at the beginning. Apart from a few birds whistling I never really got a clear sense of where I was which made it more difficult to engage with the plot.
While any military sci-fi based audio book is only going to have a set number of sound affects to call on, I do draw the line when these effects are clearly lifted from an earlier tale. It might just be me but the sounds of Catachans fighting sounded very suspiciously like the Space Wolves fighting in ‘Thunder from Fenris’. Again, this was detrimental to my being able to engage with the plot at all.

Once I’d got past this, the story itself was ably delivered by Toby Longworth but seemed to signpost its intentions a little too obviously and too early. If you’re a newcomer to the Warhammer 40,000 universe then the narrative may catch you out. If you’re a long term fan (or, like me, have been reading for a short while) then you’ll see what’s coming a mile off. The big problem here is that there isn’t enough time here to flesh a generic plot out with any interesting tangents. What you get is a plot that moves you from A to C via B; not bad if that’s what you’re after but for me it was all bone and no meat...

The Black Library have produced a couple of audio books that give listeners an entertaining tale as well as a window into the turbulent Warhammer universe; ‘Waiting Death’ (to be released in April) isn’t one of them I’m afraid. Check out ‘Heart of Rage’ or ‘Raven’s Flight’ to see how it should be done.

Six and a Half out of Ten