Unfettered Blather

Dark Adeptus is a sequel to Grey Knights by Ben Counter. This is not a follow-on to the first book, but a completely self-contained story. In fact, it is so self-contained that outside of a handful of references to past events you could read Dark Adeptus as a stand alone novel. A good thing in my opinion.

In this novel, Justicar Alaric, the primary suriving protagonist from the first book, is leading an expedition to a Adeptus Mechanicus planet that disappeared a thousand years ago and has reappeared in a completely different place. The Adeptus Mechanicus are humanities temple of technology, they are responsible for maintaining all of the devices humans use on a daily basis, including the huge war engine of the Human Empire. As such, this is a Very Big Deal™.

The action in Dark Adeptus is twofold. There are the events on planet, which is where our protagonist has most of his dealings and a desperate battle in space. There is even more action in this novel than Grey Knights, and Counter displays that he is the master of action driven storytelling, as his depictions never get tiresome and he does a great job of building to ever greater intensity. He also corrects some mistakes he made in the previous novel in regards to the necessary level of familiarity one needs with the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Dark Adeptus is not only a good stand-alone novel, but more accessible than its predecessor.

If the book has a weakness it’s that Counter ratchets up the tension to a point where survival looks a little too impossible, and then just sort of jumps forward without giving great detail to how the survivors went from the final battle to leaving the planet. I apologize for being vague here, but I don’t want to give away whether or not the mission was successful or who lived and died. Let’s just say there is a big battle, impossible odds, and the characters who do manage to come out alive seem to do it in the usual all too convenient manner. Think Luke Skywalker escaping from the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Wasn’t that just a little too easy and clean under the circumstances.

That hardly makes the book unreadable. Counter does a great job in all areas, whether it is dealing with the frustraing internal politics of the Empire of Humanity or detailing the intense action sequences. He does tend to stick closely to archetypes, and so you won’t see a lot of surprising character development outside of a very core group of characters. Even so, he makes good use of common archetypes and I can’t fault him too much there.

At the end of Dark Adeptus he hints at what the future might hold for the Grey Knights series of books. I hope that means there will be more coming. One can only hope.

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