Konrad

Some books arrive in your life at exactly the right moment and lodge there for good, and Konrad is one of those for me. I came to it as a young reader, at a time when the Warhammer world was still new and strange and dangerous in my imagination, and whatever its flaws, and I will be honest about the flaws because they are real, it holds a place in my affections that more polished novels have never quite managed to take.

A word first about where it came from, because the story of its making is half the charm. The name on the cover is David Ferring, but that is a pen name; the book was written by David S. Garnett, a British science fiction author and editor of some standing, whose career had brushed up against Michael Moorcock and the New Worlds tradition. He was, in other words, a proper writer slumming it, and that matters. Konrad belongs to the very first wave of Warhammer fiction, the short-lived GW Books line that ran at the tail end of the 1980s, before Black Library existed, overseen by David Pringle of Interzone. Pringle brought in genuine genre talent, mostly working under pseudonyms, and gave them a longer leash than the later, more commercially managed tie-in novels would ever enjoy. The result is a run of books, Konrad and Drachenfels chief among them, that are stranger and more personal than the franchise fiction that followed. They feel like the work of a real author rather than the output of a brand, and that is exactly the appeal.

Konrad appeared around 1990, and it opens, as so much fantasy does, in a quiet corner of the world about to be destroyed. Konrad is an orphan, mistreated and overlooked, scratching out a living in the stables of a tavern in an isolated village deep in the forests of the Empire. His one source of light is Elyssa, the daughter of the local lord, who gives him his name, teaches him to read and to shoot a bow, and teaches him, too, the first stirrings of love. And then the beastmen come. The village is razed, everyone Konrad knows is slaughtered, Elyssa is seemingly killed, and in the chaos Konrad glimpses two things that will haunt the rest of the story: a strange, silent Bronze Knight, and the scarred face of a man he will come to know as Skullface, whom he wounds with an arrow as the world burns around him. Saved from death by a hard-bitten mercenary called Wolf, who takes him on as a squire, Konrad sets out into a savage land in search of vengeance, and of the truth about his own mysterious origins. It is, as the cover promises, an adventure that drives him to the dark edge of the world, where Chaos waits.

What makes the book special is the texture of it. There is something almost fairy-tale about young Konrad: the despised orphan of secretly significant birth, the capricious and possibly dangerous sorceress-lover, the grizzled mentor with, of course, an evil twin. Garnett leans into these archetypes knowingly, and lays over them the genuine eeriness of the early Warhammer world, all blood and darkness and mutation. There is real strangeness here, a dreamlike quality, and a hero who can unnervingly glimpse fragments of the future. The journey carries Konrad from the forests of the Empire all the way to the frozen wastes of Kislev, and from boyhood to something like a warrior, and the early Old World, beset on all sides by beastmen from within and Chaos from the north, is conjured with real conviction.

It is not, I should say, flawless. About two-thirds of the way through, the book stumbles into one of the most shameless lumps of setting-exposition you will ever encounter in a published novel, the kind of background dump that reads as though a sourcebook had fallen open mid-chapter. The prose elsewhere can be awkward, and the plotting leans hard on coincidence. But the surrounding material is good enough that I forgive it all, and the ending pulls the surreal threads back together beautifully, setting up the two volumes to come.

So who is Konrad for? Not, perhaps, the reader expecting modern, polished franchise fiction, who may find its rough edges off-putting. But for the reader hungry for something dark and odd and grand, or for the enthusiast curious about where Warhammer fiction actually began, it is a flawed but vivid delight. It shaped the way I imagined the Old World, and it did so with more imagination and more heart than the licence ever required of it. A strong, strange, hugely promising start to a trilogy, and one I have never quite been able to shake.