Customer Reviews

Chaos Child (Warhammer 40,000)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I will keep it short and very un-sweet. The first book in this trilogy is awesome. The second book was so-so and naturally I thought the final book of the trilogy would boost the worthiness of reading the second book. I got to a point when reading this book that I just wanted to discard it and move onto something better. I do not expect spectacular dialogue or likeable characters from the Warhammer universe because it is a very dark and depressing atmosphere. This book made Watsons work with that horrible A.I. flick seem genius. My greatest problem with the book is that none of the storylines from the trilogy come to a conclusion. I am not going to put up spoilers.

My suggestion is to read Jaq Draco(First book) and be happy with how that one ends and forget the other two were ever made.

The final part in Ian Watson's Inquisitor War series finds Inquisitor Draco and his warband traversing the Eldar webway to find the legendary Black Library and possibly the key to saving his love. Unfortunately, like Harliquen, Chaos Child falls utterly short of the wonderful work of sci-fi fantasy that is Draco. Fortunately, this third part of the series attempts to rise out of the valley and back up the hill of action and suspense. It does a valient attempt but stops abruptly short of the summit. The thing that bothered me the most was that you can see Draco already falling from grace long before even he knows it. But you have no choice (along with his naive warband) to follow along to see how far he will go down the path of Chaos and ruin all for love.

Out of the three it ranks 2nd. A bit drawn out but still readable. You want to see what happens, but when it does you want to forget about Inquisitor Draco and explore the travels and happenings of other characters. Unfortunately, Mr. Watson stopped writing for Games Workshop after this novel so we will never know.

Boy was I suprised to find out how horrible this book was, especially after how good the first two in the series were. The impression that I had was that Mr. Watson grew board of writing this book and just gave up. This book leaves the reader with more loose ends than a cheap afghan, and its characters devolve to cardboard simpletons, however I lack the superlatives to to describe how poor the ending was. My advise read the first and second books .....then STOP.

Warning warning - don't buy this book. Warning warning. Donate your money to a worthy charity. On no account buy this book. Ostensibly written by Ian Watson who did such a astonishingly marvellous job with ''INQUISITOR'' (the 1st in this trilogy), ''Chaos Child'' (the 3rd book in this trilogy) does not have any meaningful plot, no action to speak of, no logical sequencing, just utter, utter inexplicable confusion. Its as if Ian Watson commissioned a ghost-writer who is unfamiliar with the rich and baroquely complex WH40K universe, then did nothing but proof-read spelling errors and lent his name to the titlepage. An utter utter waste of time and money for the reader. This is the first book EVER that I have reviewed that I use the term execrable. Its not even so bad that - sometimes - it became good. Its just bad. Avoid it like the plague. Ian, what happened??? I wished to give it ZERO star but was not allowed to do so by this website. B-(

Watson's prose is its usual gimmicky, convoluted narrative. If his aim was to make the reader wallow in self-obsessed grief along with the main character, he does manage to hit the mark. This book shouldn't have been written. It goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing. It provides no furtherance of the plot established in the original two books. Read the Abnett "Eisenhorn" series instead.

Utter misery to read this. I couldnt stand Dracos bemoaning and wanted him to hurry up and die. The plot could have had so much more with the depth of characters in the 40k universe. An utter insult to the readers of 40k universe.

It pains me to think that there are others who even liked the series at all? This is quite possibly the worst book I have ever read...perhaps the worst series I have ever read. One of the other reviewers is spot-on when they mentioned something about Watson devalues the WH40K Universe... Draco is more a pot-bellied rogue clown dumbing his way through realms of the WH40K universe better authors respect...

After this series started out with the excellent Draco and then onto the above average Harlequin, Chaos Child is very disappointing. Nothing in this book was extraordinary, the plot, the characters, nothing. There are interesting things that do happen but they're barely covered while relatively mundane events receive top notch coverage. All of the subplots, the intrigue, everything is abandoned except Jaq's personal quest. Half of the time this book seems to be rushing to finish and then it feels like it's dragging it's feet just to extend the book. Horrible job, the only reason this gets 3 stars is because it finished Jaq Draco's story.

The first book of the trilogy "Draco" is fantastic and a wonderful study of the insanity that is the Warhammer 40K universe. Everything is conspiracy, lies, insanity and doubt all intermingled and the book uses that setting to weave a wonderfully convoluted web of madness, setting up a lot of interesting antagonists and companions for Jaq Draco, the ostensible hero of the piece. The second book "Harlequin" follows this up pretty well, following and expanding upon the plot, continuing with interesting encounters and ends strongly with a very well formed plot point around which to base the third book.

Unfortunately the third book makes only passing reference to the plot of the first two parts, beyond the first two chapters none of the antagonists appear or are mentioned again and the story focuses around a single event that happens in the second book but which, while significant was unrelated to the plot as a whole. The first two thirds of the book moves quite slowly, the last third moves at a ridiculous pace such that it feels more like a story outline rather than an actual ending. The ending is very weak and resolves pretty much nothing, it feels like there should have been a fourth book to actually end the story. The author also relies on deus ex machina type events far too often and several times incredibly improbable but fortuitous events either save the day or allow the story to progress which leaves the reader feeling a bit cheated. Certainly many of the events in the last third of the book feel like so much unnescessary cruft.

The book is technically pretty well written and I enjoyed Ian Watson's use of language but the story is unfortunately the weakest point. Read it to get the ending of the trilogy but don't expect the ending that the trilogy deserved. It's well written, the characters aren't too bad but you can't help but wonder where the rest of the story went all of a sudden.

This book has put me to sleep every time I had picked it up and tried to read it. There was hardly any action in the book it seem like the author just ran out of good ideas and started to stretch out the plot of the book.