Drachenfels

By Jack Yeovil

Yes, I read a Warhammer novel. If you go into the Sci-fi/Fantasy section of a bookstore, and look down at the bottom of the last shelf, you'll see a big section of books based on various geek franchises. Star Trek, Star Wars, Dr. Who, Buffy, Dungeons and Dragons and so on. They're almost always at least as bad as you'd expect, unless you're a thirteen year old boy, in which case you will probably think they're pretty awesome. When I was a thirteen year old boy I must have read dozens of these sort of books. Eventually my reading material expanded beyond books with 'Dragon' in the title, but I still have a vague nostalgia for a few of the better ones, Jack Yeovil's Warhammer books being among them. So when I saw Drachenfels in the bookstore for ten bucks I grabbed it.

Warhammer is a table top fantasy war-game, which means you get a whole bunch of little miniatures representing dwarves, vampires, unicorns etc, and make them fight each other. As you can imagine, this is not the ideal source material for great literature. Drachenfels is definitely a cut above most of these kind of books, but I can't say I enjoyed it as much this time as I did when I was thirteen. It starts out OK, with a portentous and intriguing set up, but gets steadily cheesier and more melodramatic, until the author pulls out a genuine deus ex machina for the ending. But at least it was relatively short and painless to read, and there was plenty of gore and hardcore shit to satisfy my inner thirteen year old.