Having recently finished my 1,5 journey through the fantasy world of Malazan it was time to dive into something new and entirely different. Having taken an interest in the universe of Warhammer 40,000 through video games lately I've known for a long time that the next few books I would read would be from this universe. One week later I've finished my first book; Xenos.
What is Xenos?
Xenos is the first book in a series set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It follows the adventures and life of Gregor Eisenhorn, an inquisitor whose main task is to protect the empire of man from alien corruption and heresy. An inquisitor is basically a secret police that hunts down criminals of a specific nature and are authorized to do this by, close to, all means necessary.
The book is written by Dan Abnett and has been praised as a great starting point for those who want to get into the universe of Warhammer 40,000 by the way of books. What I learned beforehand is that the series is considered light reading among the several hundreds of other books set in the same universe. It doesn't use a lot of the deep terminology that a lot of other books in the universe does. The lore of Warhammer 40,000 is deep, vast and contains a lot of alien nouns.
A weeklong, joyful read
Having spent close to 18 months on the last series I read where it would take several days for my Kindle to increase the %-completion by even one point it was somehow freeing to read a book where I managed to get through 7-10%% in a single day. I mostly read on my commute to and from work and on bed before I go to sleep, totaling roughly 50-80 minutes a day. I started this book on a Friday night and finished it early Monday morning a little over a week later.
Xenos was a joyful read all the way through. I mentioned further up that the lore of Warhammer 40,000 contains a lot of alien nouns and terminology. I was afraid that I would have to stop and check a wiki for a lot of these throughout the book, but Abnett does a good job of explaining the deeper terminology or writing about them in a way that you get a rough idea about what they mean.
The book reads like a mixture of crime novel and an action hero novel with just a sprinkle of politics and mystery. The pacing was very well done and the overall writing style made me glued to every page and sentence. There were very few points throughout the book where my mind drifted away to think about other things which is always a good sign.
There's three more books in the series about Gregor Eisenhorn and I'm definitely finishing those. I've also learned through my research for this post that there's several trilogies also written by Dan Abnett about characters we meet in the books about Eisenhorn. I might be looking into those later.
I'm definitely not going to read all the 400+ books set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe but I will definitely be doing more research into the universe to see which novels might interest me. If anyone has any recommendations then please drop them down in the comments.
All images in this post are from the Lexicanum pake (wiki) for Xenos.