Book Review- Gaunt's Ghosts: Necropolis

                                                         Black Library

Dan Abnett's Necropolis is the third book in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, which follows the heroic commissar Abram Gaunt and his dwindling Imperial Guard regiment as they fight across countless warzones in the 41st millennium. Even a military fiction writer as competent as Dan Abnett can’t make an uninterrupted stream of battles interesting. Thankfully Abnett’s strong point is that his Warhammer fiction is never just about the fighting.

A considerable amount of Necropolis lacks Gaunt and his Ghosts. Most of the opening act is spent establishing Vervunhive and its rival Ferrazoica. Both are “hive cities,” termite mound like superstructures that house a considerable portion of the Imperium’s population.
Old grievances flare up between the two cities, though what’s in store proves to be unprecedented. While Vervunhive’s nobility prepare for another trade war, the now Chaos corrupted armies of “Zoica” have a far more nightmarish conflict in mind.

Necropolis has some well-executed battle scenes, but the political and material circumstances surrounding them serve as the book’s real draw. The fiercest struggles come from the hive’s local rulers butting heads with their off-planet reinforcements. The merciless forces of Zoica serve as the main threat but they’re far from the only one. Similarly, Abnett fully conveys the human costs of Warhammer 40K’s exaggerated, relentless style of combat. The thoroughly described aftermath of the Chaos assault carries more impact than any skull covered tank or overdramatic antichrist figure.

The Chaotic antagonist’s depiction is one of the more polarizing aspects of Necropolis. Abnett is one of the few writers to grasp that the two most important aspects of Warhammer’s main antagonist. He always incorporates their corrupting influence and dizzying variety of pawns, establishing both as the dark gods’ greatest weapons. Necropolis represents it through the Zoican army, which consists of the hive’s weaponized populace and bizarre war machines.

Their bizarre, ruthless but effective tactics also reflect the nature of the deities they serve without ever naming a single one of them. The book also draws out their appearance, as the characters encounter their artillery barrages long before any foot soldiers arrive. It's only towards the end of the book that the real mastermind is revealed.

Said mastermind is one of the weaker parts of the book. The long believed dead warlord Heritor Asphodel is responsible for corrupting Ferrazoica. Abnett builds a compelling mythology around this antagonist, one that the narrative never properly integrates. The very memorable Zoicans have been stripped of their agency by him, so from a certain perspective he’s characterized through them. However, Asphodel still could have benefited from some kind of development or even a more substantial appearance. Abnett knows how to turn Chaos into an enigmatic threat but the main antagonist ends up a little too faceless in the process.

This book has little in the way of character development, which is unsurprising considering how many different elements are introduced. We do get a more human look at Gaunt, which leads to a reminder that the needs of the Imperium leave little room for anything else. The individual Ghosts are mostly too busy being soldiers to do anything else. The same goes for all their newly recruited allies The Vervunhivers get an acceptable amount of characterization but also lack any real development. Thankfully there are strong interactions and even the throwaway characters are memorable. They’re not completely blank slates but previous Ghosts books set a certain standard that Necropolis doesn’t quite live up to.

Necropolis manages to harness licensed fiction’s obsession with multiple perspectives in a very inventive way. The constant switching between characters captures the scale of millions of combatants fighting over a massive city. It also conveys that combat is only part of a war. While Necropolis might lack the rich characterization at the center of previous Gaunt’s Ghosts books, it makes up for it by having a well-defined conflict that captures the essence of Warhammer 40,000, despite only featuring a handful of the miniatures. Of course, Abnett’s books work so well because they take place in the Warhammer like a setting and not just a backdrop for plastic model kits.