Army of One Review

This is from Index Nocturnus, whose review and podcast site can be found here.


"Army of One by Rob Sanders


A 40k eblurt review by Sam.

This blurt has made a liar out of me, because below in the review for Immortalis I stated that it was practically impossible to write a convincing three act structure within the blurt format, and it was much better suited to doing one scene and doing it well.

This story is the ascension of an Eversor Assassin (the particularly psychopathic combat explosive assassin) from ganger to pit fighter to crazed killing machine. The ganger introduction is your standard Necromunda-style stuff, nothing too interesting there. The pit fighter paragraph is really creepy as it introduced the ‘bloated Baron,’ which immediately evokes an image in my head of floaty Baron Harkonnen from David Lynch’s Dune movie, and there is the very subtle intimation of sexual abuse.

The jump to becoming an Eversor is summed up in one sentence about an ‘offworlder’ which is easy to miss, and I did have to read it twice to pick up that some senior Assassin talent-spotter had come and taken the guy off to be trained. But it is easy to miss and maybe could have done with slightly more exposition.

The narrative cycles back so that – naturally enough – the target of the newly born Eversor is the Baron. The narrative is dense and one needs to read it carefully, but is well worth it. Beautifully slain with a neural gauntlet, 4 ½/5"