With much of my contemporary reading in service to writing reviews, audiobooks are my chance to “play catch-up” on the older catalogue of Black Library books. What you will find in this occasional feature is neither a full, formal book review nor a simple blurb, but rather something comfortably in between: impressions.
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“I was both surprised and flattered to be asked to curate an annotated edition of For the Emperor,” notes Sandy Mitchell in the foreword to the newly-released edition, “a book which will always have a special place in my heart. Of course, if I’d known back then what all this was going to lead to, I’d probably have been too intimidated to write a single word!”
It’s a great wink and a nod to those who have already enjoyed Cain over the years, the “if I’d known [X], then I would’ve [Y]” construction. It’s peak Ciaphas, a motif he returns to again and again through his adventures- often multiple times within the same book.
Touches like this helped make Cain one of the universe’s most distinctive personalities- though as we’ll discuss today it was not without downside.
Highway to Hell
The fourth installment of the Ciaphas Cain series, Mitchell took the opportunity here to go back in time rather than forwards. “Like C3PO and R2D2,” I summarized in my recent Heroes of the Black Library piece on Commissar Cain for Tabletop Battles, “an ork attack on their voidship sees the pair unwittingly cast down to the surface of desert planet Perlia in an escape pod. There, they must make their way back to civilization, picking up scattered reinforcements in the form of PDF remnants along the way.”
The story is terrific stuff, with Cain and Jurgen having to rely on their own wits to survive a harsh planet and surrounded by a relentless enemy: orks.
“Lots and lots of orks.”
That’s Keri of the terrific WH40K Book Club Podcast, who as a fellow member of the Hall of Fame Committee wrote up the book for its induction in the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame.
“Cain survives the only way Cain can,” she continues, “with his wit, charm, luck, and tinkering abilities that would make MacGuyver beyond jealous. Death or Glory is one of my personal favorites in the series just for its use of pop culture references. When you read them, you’ll know1. And you’ll probably laugh as hard as I did.”
Cain and Jurgen make their way across the desert, collecting the dribs and drabs of Planetary Defense Force survivors and reclaiming transportation from various salvaged Ork conveyances. Mile by mile as their supplies dwindle, their hope begins to grow- a hope that will spread throughout all Perlia by the end of the tale.
You Can Say That, Again
Death or Glory obviously worked- it is, after all, in the Readers’ Hall of Fame alongside For the Emperor, Caves of Ice, and The Emperor’s Finest. But conventional wisdom on the series holds that the best way to read through the Ciaphas series is with breaks in between.
In his writeup for Caves of Ice, Hall of Fame Committee member Michael Dodd (of Track of Words) called the Cain series the “AC/DC of the Black Library.”
“The whole point of the series is to hit the same beats and play the same jokes, because those beats and those jokes are just so damn good! There’s nothing wrong with wanting more of the same,” though he does go on to admit that “some of the later books suffer a little for that.”
By the time we get to Death or Glory, Mitchell’s reliance on that formulaic element has become increasingly apparent and indeed it tamped down my enjoyment of the otherwise terrific audiobook production. It’s not so much that the Cain’s core conceit is wearing thin- our hero’s career of perpetually failing upwards is still quite amusing- but rather that Cain and Jurgen have become almost “Flanderized.”
I talked a bit about that concept in my review for The Relentless Dead by Steve Lyons, noting that the community had exaggerated the most identifiable characteristics of the Death Korps- the gas masks, the shovels, the fatalism- to the point where they’d become the stuff of memes.
There’s a similar quality at play here, one especially noticeable with Cain’s aide-de-camp, Ferik Jurgen. Were we to hold a public reading of the book where everyone had to take a shot whenever Jurgen’s body odor was referenced, for instance, it would be a short (if memorable) evening indeed. Inquisitor Amberley Vail’s frequent asides- used so well in earlier stories to provide the kind of contextual information that’s not always easy to deliver in a first-person POV book- also suffered from overuse at points.
An Ensemble Cast
Stephen Perring
While I’d certainly caution against a binge-listen for all the reasons stated above, Mitchell’s Cain series easily makes the list of essential 40K audiobooks in no small part due to its casting. Stephen Perring is extraordinary as the good Commissar, pitch-perfect in both voice and personality. He embodies the role to such an extent that I would imagine any other narrator would suffer for the comparison, similar to Andrew James Spooner’s Malus Darkblade or John Banks’s Roboute Guilliman.
Like some of the other voice actors we’ve profiled here, Perring has a theatre background that he’s parlayed into small roles in television (a lawyer in EastEnders here, a police officer in Manhunt or The Bill there) while seeing a much larger body of work in voice acting for books, podcast dramas, and video games.
While best known for Cain, he’s also popped up in other Games Workshop productions. He was Sergeant Zachariah in the 2017-18 Elysia trilogy of audio dramas, as well as Hamilcar in the audio drams The Beasts of Cartha, written by David Guymer and published in 2016.
I’ve spoken before about a voice actor’s range, the number of different characters they can embody, and if you do nothing else take a moment to appreciate Perring’s demo reel here.
Penelope Rawlins
While the cast list for the Cain books can vary from book to book, Perring and Penelope Rawlins are the two that anchor the production. Rawlins plays Inquisitor Vail, who Cain meets for the first time in-story in For the Emperor, but whose contributions are far more prominent in serving as a sort of editor and curator of the “Ciaphas Cain archives2.”
Rawlins’ acting resume is extensive, with long-running roles in television animation shows including Inazuma Eleven Go, Smighties, Yukee, and Rainbow Rangers. For video games, she’s lent her talents to Horizon Forbidden West, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, a couple entries in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise, and Baldur’s Gate III, amongst many others.
Not only that, but she was part of the cast for the WarhammerTV series Angels of Death, as well as the follow-up Angels of Death: Origins.
Having narrated over 300 audiobooks, she was even nominated in 2013 for Audible’s Narrator of the Year.
Bits n’ Pieces
Overall it took me longer than I’d expect to get into this one, though in fairness once I did (about halfway through) I genuinely enjoyed it. I do worry, though, that as I continue down the Cain path things will become more and more Flanderized. It’s been remarked that around book seven Mitchell seemed to course correct, apparently in reaction to this sort of criticism. I don’t know to what degree that’s accurate, but regardless Cain is one of the great characters of 40K and even legends like Gotrek & Felix began to overstay their welcome.
When Robert Rath’s The Wicked and the Warped was recently announced, one of the first thoughts I had was to wonder how much stress Rath put himself under by following in the footsteps of a breakout hit. The Infinite and the Divine has been a tremendous success; what does it feel like to try and capture that lightning in a bottle twice? I can understand the thought process behind wanting to repeat the elements that made a story successful, but like making copies of copies sometimes you risk diminishing returns.
These are the things that will be top of mind when I pick up Duty Calls, book five in the series.
But I’ll be giving a little time to cleanse the palate first.
I caught references from Back to the Future (‘flux capacitor’) and Star Wars (‘don’t get cocky, kid’), but there are undoubtedly more.
The Cain novels are presented as selections from Cain’s memoirs, with Vail being your guide through them.