Forged by Chaos by C. L. Werner

I finally got into Warhammer Fantasy. I had the pleasure of reading The Chronicles of Malus Darkblade: Volume Two by Dan Abnett & Mike Lee, and loved it. So I wanted to give it another go. After hearing good things about C. L. Werner (author of Blood for the Blood God), his newest novel, Forged by Chaos, the third novel in the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning series based on the video game of the same name.


Forged by Chaos follows…well, here is the first problem. For a 400 page novel, it follows a massive cast of characters, many of whom are small enough that they could have been consolidated. The Chaos characters in particular just gelled together in my mind, and their unpronounceable names didn’t help. A first chapter filled with too many names and facts that didn’t mean anything to me and a fight that had no meaning behind it in my mind, left me with an immediate coolness, and it continued this trend from there. The characters felt flat, the action was frequently without motive, and it just didn’t work.

I wanted to like this book, but it wasn’t happening for me, and I could tell that pretty quickly. Based on the NEW Luke Reivews scale, a book I couldn’t get halfway through receives a 1. That may seem overly harsh, but the rules are the rules, and when I leave before I can make it halfway, it seems like a failure for me.

1/10