Gaunt's Ghosts, books 1-999, by Dan Abnett
2.0 Stars
6-5-2024

The Emperor protects

I went into this with high hopes, knowing that this is the illimitable Dan Abnett's magnum opus, his largest and most famous series which ties together the threads of his various standalone books. Turns out, not that great though! Let us enumerate the reasons:

The main issue is that the fundamental verb of the series is not interesting. Abnett's other books are about futuristic aerial dog-fights, or giant mechs blasting each other, or post-human bio-tanks fighting each other with lasers, chain-saws, and magic powers. These are fine activities and perfectly sufficient to carry a book or two. In the Gaunt's Ghosts books though the basic action is "they tried to shoot me with a rifle but I shot them instead". And there's only so many variations of that you can do. And so many of these variations have been covered so many times in so many previous books and movies. You can tell that Abnett can tell that this isn't working; around book 5 or so he starts trying to recast the series as basically anything else but what it started as. So you have a book of blood and snow where it's just a few main characters being hunted in a magically becalmed and be-blizzarded city, a haunted house book of them occupying a billion year old and slowly awakening alien tomb-fort, a book of ship-board naval adventure, a guerrilla book or two of them hunting a single high value target on a Chaos planet, a visit to a dusty Mars world where they decide that it's really just a silly place and the best thing to do is just f-off to somewhere else, a book where the OCs are foolishly fighting a contest of armies and logistics while their enemies are fighting a contest of narrative and religious symbolism, etc. etc. Each of these books tries to vary things up and tell a different story, but also to a greater or lesser degree it still has sections of that basic, uninteresting verb.

Another issue is that it's not clear that Abnett's story telling really stretches to a long running series like this. He does perfectly fine over the course of one or two books, but he's not really able to stretch these characters and their arcs over the longer term, and so at best they just all fall into stock roles that they repeat for book after book. He also occasionally loses the context over too long a period; memorably one of the characters makes an impassioned and apparently honest minor speech about his dedication to pacifism in an insane universe, while 2 books earlier the same character was using malign blood runes to explosively desanguinate multiple people. I think Abnett just lost track of some earlier bits when it came time to write the later bits. Oh right, and one final quibble, the last book really does not stick the landing.

Ok, so what is good? I like that they use chain-saws to carry out their honor duels. I like basically any section where Abnett tries to portray things from Chaos' perspective; the lore has set him up with basically an impossible task of trying to organize and make sense of the senseless, but the effort is at least usually ludicrous and wild. I liked the book that at various points found an excuse to give ~15 characters a chance to make a minor speech about how they interpret the insane universe they are in. I liked the invasion of Garillon and how life in a real Guard unit should be like, I liked the Mars-ish book where they, for once, genuinely acknowledge that they could just bombard the place from orbit and save everyone a lot of time and sweat. I liked the insane ED-209 kill-bot that spends 90% of a book slowly making its way through an aquifer while the rest of the plots goes on above it.

Finally, shout outs to the few characters having a decent time in this universe:
- that head Scout guy, who manages to do a Shrek and escape to a swamp to live without anyone bothering him
- Fazekiel, the autistic commissar, who a) has a heart of gold and b) is basically in this situation, living in and enforcing the all encompassing edicts of a rigid authority
- basically any of the Chaos characters or ships, who are all just out there trying to live their best lives