Like most multimedia empires, Games Workshop maintains its own publishing arm for tie-in books. There's hundreds of the damn things, of variable quality and bleakness. The problem in doing this is, I feel, is that Warhammer 40,000 and other GW settings are so relentlessly grim it presents a narrative barrier. Books written in universe, say as a military history, work out great, others I can take or leave. The main exception to this are the Commissar Cain novels, a slightly repetitive series of War memoirs that seeks to ask "what if 40K was also Blackadder the 4th?“. Brutal Kunnin happily joins it as a second exception.
Brutal Kunnin makes the rare choice of telling a story from the Ork perspective, something well-loved in rulebooks and short stories, but to the best of my knowledge not attempted in novel format before. It sees our protagonist Ufthak Blackhawk, a recently "elevated" Nob as his Waagh attacks a Forge World. Author Mike Brooks immediately and consistently nails the Ork approach to life as Ufthak faces the GRIMDARK with utter indifference, dumb luck, brute force, and sheer audacity. If Ufthak is on the page, you've usually got something laugh out loud funny, and always Orky. The novel never treats the Orks as simply comedic characters either; they don't know what they are doing is funny, so they don't act like they do. What they find funny is stuff like severed limbs sent flying from an exploding grenade, which the the writing does not gloss over. However, at this point, I must mention the main similarity to the aforementioned Cain series: the presence of alternate viewpoints written in a different style.
Narrative tasks like "exposition", "plot development", and "thinking for 5 minutes" are handled by a variety of non-Orks, mainly of the Adeptus Mechanicus. While these changing viewpoints were not advertised, quite the opposite, this makes a certain degree of sense. Orks are about as introspective as a stag-do, and stuffy/allegedly-logical Techpriests are good foils for them. I also liked the unexpectedly diverse selection of pronouns on display, Orks being the personifiication of toxic masculinity, although maybe I'm just showing my age on that front. At the very least, I didn't feel that the fundamental Orkyness of events was being upstaged by a bunch of umies, and those umies are quite well rounded given thier page count. The author also uses this as an excuse to have fun with chapter titles.
All in all: Brutal Kunnin is not a deep book, but it never would have been. Its just a good laugh.
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