Menu
‘The Wicked and the Damned’ follows three characters who chance to meet on a desolate planet, and each try to remember how they got there. It is essentially three short stories linked together by a few lines of dialogue between the respective main characters.
The three stories are:
‘The Beast in the Trenches’ by Josh Reynolds
‘The Woman in the Walls’ by Phil Kelly
‘The Faith and the Flesh’ by David Annandale
I’ll be frank. The first story very much carries the other two. ‘The Beast in the Trenches’ is (in my opinion) leaps and bounds better than the other two. That’s not to say that the other two aren’t good, they are (sort of). It’s just hard not to feel a sense of disappointment that they don’t live up to the high bar set by ‘The Beast in the Trenches’. With the benefit of hindsight (something the original authors obviously didn’t have) I would say that the first story should have been put in last, and perhaps if you’re feeling adventurous, you might want to try listening to/reading the stories in that order.
‘The Beast in the Trenches’ stars Commissar Egan Valemar, a stiff and brooding commissar with a dangerous sense of self-righteousness who will do whatever it takes to maintain his company’s morale. The “plot twist” is less of a twist than a sickening realisation that you don’t want to believe until you can no longer deny it. It’s narrated incredibly by Doug Bradley, who’s dreary and pessimistic tone helped set the tone for the story.
It’s got a lot of the cool Astra Militarum themes that you’d expect from a story about the Emperor’s finest. They’re not Astartes, they’re not immense ageless warriors, they’re people. They feel hunger and fatigue and their psyches are fragile. I remember listening to the Garro Anthology and Katanoah Tallery (an administratum worker) notes that one wrong digit or decimal place could send a ship lightyears off course. This feels very real in ‘The Beast in the Trenches’. The whole war they’re fighting feels so pointless, as they take orders from people far, far away who literally see war as nothing but numbers.
The title probably tells you all you need to know about ‘The Woman in the Walls’. It’s your typical haunting story, only set in space. When a fellow Militarum officer is brutally murdered, Leana Vendersen and her co-conspirators know there will be consequences, but the consequences they face are of an entirely different nature to what they expected.
I feel as though this story would have worked really well as a movie or even an audio drama with a soundtrack and sound effects. Sadly, the literary form isn’t quite able to give the story the tension and paranoia that it deserves and even the narration by Emma Gregory could not create the proper atmosphere.
It toys with the Krueger esque fear of falling asleep but doesn’t really go into it enough in my opinion. A good haunting must have rules. Freddy Kruger only being able to kill you in your sleep is a classic example. The limitations of the ‘ghost’ in this story are never clearly defined and this saturated what could have been a tense struggle to survive with an overwhelming sense of bland hopelessness. This made it hard for me to root for the characters as their objective was never really made clear and I wasn’t really sure what they had to do to win.
‘The Faith and the Flesh’ is the third and final novella of ‘The Wicked and the Damned’. Oswick Marrikus is an Ecclesiarchy Missionary who’s struggling with his faith. He’s trying to choose between continuing in his Holy Mission or quitting and settling down with his newfound love. But soon he finds himself with much bigger problems, and much harder decisions to make.
Choices are a key theme of the story and the character of Marrikus seems haunted by the choices that he has been forced to make. He’s stationed with a wrecking crew who finds something on a wrecked ship. I won’t spoil what it is, but I’ll tell you that it grabbed my interest. They bring it aboard their own station and Marrikus becomes convinced that this thing is the solution to his crisis of faith. In the end the whole thing is essentially his fault and each death increases the guilt he feels.
Still I think this story couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. It had potential as a sort of Lovecraftian slasher and as an internal struggle amidst a fight for one’s life. But by trying to be both, it sort of becomes less than the sum of its parts and fails to grab me or scare me in a way I wanted to be scared. I’d say this was probably the weakest of the three stories, though not by much. I’ll go more in-depth in my spoiler review about why I felt this story was a let-down as it’s difficult to explain without giving too much away.
The three stories are technically connected by the fact that the three main characters are all recounting them to each other. But these parts of the book felt lazy and obvious. Each of the characters reveal profound things to each other in their stories and it would have been nice to see the characters reacting strongly to each other’s tales. But we don’t really get any of that. They just exchange idle chit chat and then they move on like nothing happened.
The beginning of the story was effective in grasping our interest and for that I won’t claim that the overarching plot was unnecessary. But it did feel underdone. There’s a big twist at the end that anyone could see coming from a mile away, though I was pleasantly surprised at how well executed it was nonetheless and I hope you are too.
All in all, I think this book is worth getting even if it’s only for the first story. The other two are still good but less than they could have been and ‘The Beast in the Trenches’ is the only one I’ve listened to more than once.
The Emperor Protects