Warhammer 40K: “Kal Jerico, Sinner’s Bounty” (part 1)

Yup. I'm actually doing this.

How to describe Warhammer 40K? It's so many things to so many people. Nearly all of those things are stupid, and the people in question, well...there's a pretty broad spectrum in terms of how aware they are of this.

To start at the beginning for anyone reading this who doesn't already know (I doubt there are many, but just in case), Warhammer 40K started out in 1987 as a tabletop miniatures wargame by British developer Games Workshop. It was a science-fiction-y reimagining of GW's older (and soon to be overshadowed) Warhammer Fantasy game. Warhammer Fantasy was about playing out battles between orcs, elves, mummies, and demons. Warhammer 40K, on the other hand, was about playing out battles between space orcs, space elves, space mummies, and space demons, all of whom have for some reason adopted a heavy metal album cover art aesthetic, planet-sized superweapons, and a penchant for atrocities of such vast carnage and pointless sadism that it rolls back around from horror into a weird kind of cartoon slapstick.

Then it got multiple editions worth of lore and flavor text, a galactic map and history more detailed, intricate, and contradictory than Star Trek, Star Wars, and Dr. Who's put together, a million billion novels and comics following the exploits of literally hundreds of major characters over the course of millennia of in-universe history, and a legion of psychotic fans who will literally vote for political candidates because they remind them of whichever magical space fascist they happen to like the most. The background lore of WH40K is so labyrinthine that there's no point in me trying to explain the parts of it that I know ahead of time, I'll just define terms and concepts that I'm familiar with as they come up in the review.

So yeah, WH40K is a lot of things. One thing that Warhammer 40K is absolutely not, though, is dignified. It's a socially awkward kid who gets bullied constantly, thinks that he actually deserves the bullying, and yet refuses to change the behavior that he thinks he deserves it for. WH40K is a college girl who goes to a disreputable fraternity's party specifically because of its history of sexual assault. Warhammer 40K painted its car black and blood-red and wrote the words "faith-killer" across the hood when it got it as a gift from its longsuffering parents at age 16, and still drives it without any redecoration twenty years later. Warhammer 40K is your dad introducing himself uninvited to your friend group and using the word "groovy" in every sentence. 40K is a famous anti-gay televangelist who got caught sucking off an underaged boy in a truck stop outhouse, and showed up to work the next day to give the same sermons as always to the shock and dismay of all. It's also a successful enough franchise that you can be every bit as disrespectful toward it as it wants you to without hurting its bottom line.

Now that we're all up to speed and on the same page, it's time to begin listening to the Warhammer 40K novel "Kal Jerico: Sinner's Bounty" in audiobook format. Written by one Josh Reynolds, and read and recorded by Mark Elstob. I haven't heard of this particular book's titular character before. The book says that he lives on a planet called Necromunda (yes, all the places in WH40K have names like that), which I think I've heard of once or twice, but I don't recall anything about it. So, let's see what happens when I hit play!


First things first, a long, tryhard musical overture. I sort of expected as much, given that, well, you know. Next and more hilariously are the soft, erudite, and almost posh accent and speaking mannerisms of Mark Elsob. According to Amazon, he has audiobook narrator credits for a few other fantasy and scifi novels, but is mostly a reader of nature documentaries and science books. His tone and voice are much more appropriate to those, and they give this ebook an almost Douglas Adams sort of irony.

We open on a loving description of the planet Necromunda, a "hive world" dotted with titanic industrialized cities with populations in the billions apiece. Said cities rock the Blade Runner techno-classism hard, with the upper tower-tops being inhabited by the nobility, the middle maze of walkways, concrete slabs, and flying car lanes being the land of the workers, and the lightless few hundred meters at the bottom being home to the unemployed, the unwanted, and probably at least five or six distinct species of sewer monster. The capital city of Necromunda, the creatively and subtly titled Hive Primus, is both the biggest and the most starkly stratified. There's an extremely long, boring, and probably mostly irrelevant listing off of the names and unpleasant characteristics of each noble house in the upper spires and each scavenger gang in the underhive, a la the most boring stretches of the bible.

Then we reach the prologue.

No, seriously. That was all just the pre-prologue.

Oh Warhammer 40K, you bloated little recursive tapeworm you.~

Prologue: Desolation
​

A pair of underhive "scummers" named Dozerman and Finks are climbing up some corroded industrial hell-tunnel, weapons in hand. Dozerman is a born and raised scummer. Finks is a military veteran fallen on hard times. The malodorous, filthy, and malnourished state of them is described in pornographic detail, because well, you know. Elsob does a great job with their voices and not-quite-cockney accents, especially in how they contrast with his erudite reading voice. The two of them are traveling between two "villages" within the underhive, separated by many kilometers worth of uninhabitable toxic waste, collapsing foundations, and probably tribes of mutant cannibals or whatever idk, and make a rendezvous with another ex-soldier named Hasp.

Hasp is noted to have closely-set eyes that suggest she might be "part ratskin." Ratskin have been mentioned in passing as a gang or subculture that's prominent in the area. If there are physical features associated with it though, then it might be more of an ethnic group. Or they could be literal "rat's kin," ie anthropomorphic rats that for whatever reason can interbreed with humans. That wouldn't even be the fiftieth weirdest thing in this setting.

They're meeting here as part of a job from some slightly-higher-status thug named Bogdan who sometimes does recovery work for the "Guilders." Whoever they are. A professional guild of some sort, I assume. And...I guess he and some other people have also just arrived a minute behind Hasp. It seems like Bogdan has hired Dozerman, Finks, and the others to ambush another group of travelers as they pass nearby. A group of travelers that includes someone who just robbed the Guilders. That someone is a notorious "redemptionist" who goes by the Mad MAx-ish name of Desolation Zoom. So, Bogdan is hunting Zoom for the bounty the Guild has placed on him, and Dozerman, Finks, and the others are local subcontractors.

Starting this narrative off with Dozerman and Finks wandering around together before they've met up with the rest of the gang seems pretty pointless. It might as well have begun here, with the group setting up the ambush.

Well, speaking of Mad Max, their target comes into view of their lights, and they're driving a background extra from Fury Road. An old ore-hauler that's had a bunch of extra metal plates, spikes, and semi-functional weapons welded to it to make a mobile fortress. It's a much tougher-looking vehicle than they were expecting to have to deal with, but they need the money, so they'll have to crack it open somehow. In addition to metal slabs and rusty guns, the hauler also has speakers stapled all over it, and these speakers are blaring a cacophony of nonsensical prayers and hymns.

Just a second ago, the characters were arguing over whether or not the target was actually inbound, and literally putting their ears to the ground to listen for tire vibrations. The loud heavy metal concert prayers weren't mentioned until the hauler came into view. Sorcery.

I don't know if I'm being facetious or not. This might be an oversight on the writer's part, or it could actually be the work of sorcery wielded by the hauler's occupants.

Anyway, I guess a "redemptionist" is a thief who also blares religious sermons at people. Or an evangelist who also steals.

The armored vehicle churchwagon tank hits a land mine Bogdan set for it, and halts, its blaring sermons finally cutting out. Then it opens up with its guns, which are both more numerous and in far better condition than it initially appeared. The entire ambush party, including our viewpoint characters, is wiped out. The hauler moves on, having taken only minor damage. That's the end of the prologue.


Introducing decoy protagonists and killing them off in the prologue is a time-honored tradition, and one practiced by some very well regarded authors. The thing is, the point of that type of prologue should never just be "these decoy protagonists are dead, on to the actual main character now." It has to set up a mystery. Or establish a threat. Or spur the actual protagonist(s) into a response.

I don't think that this book's prologue is doing any of these things. There's no mystery, except maybe "where did this rando evangelist highwayman get so many working guns?" I guess. The only threat established is to other people who plan to get in Desolation Zoom's way, and we're given no reason to care about anyone wanting him stopped. As for inciting the actual hero...maaaaaybe? If Actual Protagonist Kal Jerico is a relative of Finks' who wants to avenge him, this could work, but the narrative made it pretty clear that nobody cares much about any of these hired guns, so that's unlikely. So, yeah. A criminal killed some other criminals who were trying to kill him, and we never even got to meet a member of the victorious party. Why the fuck should I care about this incident? What relevance can it have for the story going forward? It just reads like a "how my Dark Heresy party TPK'd" story.

I think a better prologue would have been the robbery that started this. Managing to rob the Guild is implied to have been a more impressive feat than fending off some starving tunnel-scavengers, and it would also let the author put more focus on what exactly Zoom stole and why this is important. That would be setting up an actual plot for the book to follow. You could still have a doomed decoy protagonist in the form of a Guild security guard or whatever, for the obligatory WH40K bleakness.

Well, on to chapter one.

Chapter One: Back In The Sump
​

Back in the "sump," you say? Maybe I'm mishearing, and it's actually "Sun?" Or "Sum?" IDK. I looked for a written chapter listing, but couldn't find one short of buying the book in text format. It sounded like he said "sump," which is not a word I'm familiar with, but it could be some sort of Necromundan slang term that will be explained shortly.

In a different part of the underhive, Actual Protagonist Kal Jerico is making a fighting retreat across a steam-shrouded causeway, chased by a tribe of cannibal mutants wielding ax-chucks. You thought I was joking when I predicted tribes of cannibal mutants? I was not joking when I predicted tribes of cannibal mutants, and the text has justified my prediction. I didn't expect the ax-chucks though, I'll grant that much. Kal has a noted tendency to wink before shooting down injured opponents. He doesn't actually say the words "nothing personnel, kid" when he does this, but you can tell that he's thinking it. After he kills enough of the mutants to satisfy the hunger of the rest (I'm actually not making this detail up), he moves on along his way.

There's some nice scenery description of bioluminescent plants climbing up the steel girders and pipes from the irradiated swampland far below, and the cloud of glowing pollen they release all around themselves. Very Half Life: Alyx sort of vibe, with the dissonantly pretty infested urban decay full of monsters. Unfortunately for Kal, there's also another gang of cannibal ax-chuck mutants moving to intercept. They've been expanding up out of their usual region of the underhive lately, and there are more of them than people realized. Which is generally a good thing for hired guns like Kal Jerico, but unfortunately he doesn't have time to collect scalps right now. Also, he gets his foot tangled up in a length of old wire and ends up hanging upside-down above an underhive abyss just barely out of reach of the hungry mutants, so that also kinda sucks, albeit in an action comedy Jack Sparrow sort of way.

There's some attempt at witty internal banter and monologueing from Kal as he dangles, and...okay, yeah, sorry, this guy is no Jack Sparrow. He might be if the writer was slightly better, but he's not. Or else the writing is great, and Kal Jerico is supposed to be kind of a lame dashing rogue wannabe who isn't as charming as he thinks. It's unlikely, but possible. Also, it turns out that the mutants can talk. Unfortunately, they can't be talked out of wanting to eat him. Kal muses that despite retaining at least something close to humanlike intelligence, the planet would be better off if every single one of the mutants was exterminated. I'm not sure why the text needed to bother specifying this, it already says "Warhammer 40K" on the cover. Also, it turns out that Kal got separated from his companions Scabs and Yolanda and his pet cyberdog Wotan, and he wishes the mutants had gone after them instead of him. Nothing personnel, kid.

There's also an aside about how Wotan has been a little buggy ever since an unspecified fiasco that Kal was involved in during his most recent visit to the upper spires where the rich people live. Did his dog get hacked in the wake of that incident? Maybe his dog got hacked. Also also, Yolanda is his wife, or maybe ex-wife. And the mutants eating her would be not-too-terrible in his estimation. They've tried to kill each other multiple times. But they supposedly have each other's backs on dangerous missions, or something.

Anyway. He's hanging over the pit. The mutants can't be reasoned with, and eventually start fighting each other over how they should be trying to get at him. He manages to get himself swinging hard enough (while shooting mutants who try to take advantage of his approaches) to catch on something and start climbing the cord he's stuck by. One particularly reckless mutant jumps on him, and the two's combined weight is about to snap the cord and send them both tumbling to their deaths, when someone shoots the galaxy brained mutant right off of him and scares the others into scattering before the unseen sniper.

Kal climbs up to the causeway above the current level and cuts himself free. He's less grateful for the rescue than annoyed that they waited that long. Nothing personnel, kid. Then he hears the mystery sniper's gun cocking behind him. End chapter.


Nice scenery. Some good atmosphere. The writing of the action was so-so, though, which made an already excessively long chapter really drag. Like, what is most of this chapter for? It establishes everything that it establishes about Kal Jerico within the first couple of pages, and then is basically just repeating those things over and over again while he fights group after group of mutants. We don't know why he and his (ex?)companions were down here before the mutants attacked them, so there's no sense of plot advancement.

So, just like the prologue, I feel like this was a whole lot of wasted space. Like the novel hasn't actually begun yet. Everything that actually matters could have been told in a fifth as many words.


I'll call this the first of several posts. More likely than not, I'll intersperse Kal Jerico with the other upcoming reviews.