Goonhammer Reviews: Tomb World, by Jonathan D. Beer

Image credit: Games Workshop

It’s usually obvious when you’re enjoying a book. Whether it’s the story, the characters, or perhaps the prose itself, when a book’s got you in its grip it’s a delight to turn the pages- even as each turn of the page hastens its inevitable end.

Other times, though, you may not realize how much you’re into a book until you discover you’ve become lost in it. Maybe you find yourself taking it with you to the doctor's office to squeeze in a few more pages in the waiting room. Other times, it’s when you glance at the clock and realize you’ve overshot your bedtime by an hour- and decide to keep going.

For me, that moment recently came when I happened to awaken twenty minutes before my alarm went off for work. Rather than try to squeeze out a little more shut-eye, I instead sat up, turned on the light...and reached over to my nightstand for my copy of Tomb World, sneaking in one more chapter before starting the day.

Indeed, as author Jonathan D. Beer found his stride with the book I found myself making more and more time for it beyond my nightly reading ritual before bed. The turn of the book's last page came during a work break- and I'm one of those guys who usually just works through my breaks₁.

So I'll kick things off with this: Tomb World is a contender for my own 2025 Book of the Year.

Image credit: Games Workshop

The Story

No-one will be surprised to learn that the Necrons take center stage here, with the book centered on a Praetorian named Khemet. Praetorians occupy a unique role in Necron society, acting as judge, jury, and executioner in upholding ancient Necron codes of law and honorable conduct. This goes well beyond just enforcement and compliance; indeed, they help ensure the cultural homogeneity and endurance of Necron civilization itself. Remember, these are an ancient people whose history, while interrupted through slumber, spans across epochs. When a tomb world begins to awaken, Praetorians will be there to help ensure everything unfolds as it should.

As a reflection of this tremendous responsibility, Praetorians are also given a great deal of latitude and independence. They aren't beholden to any particular lord, and can act against even the nobility with impunity. That doesn't mean, however, that they can act without consequence, as Khemet finds to her dismay after failing to secure an awakening tomb world for Anrakyr the Traveller. For great failure there must be great punishment, and Khemet is consigned to an oblivion in stasis.

Only later is she awakened when duty again calls her to action. Offered a chance at redemption by Hekasun, a Necron lord, she must secure and awaken a newly-discovered tomb world on the planet Orymous. The only problem is, Orymous has long since been paved over by the Imperium and serves as a staging world for the Astra Militarum.

With millions of Human soldiers embarking and disembarking, retuning from the far-flung battlefields of the sector and departing for others, the world is a buzzing hive of perpetual martial activity. And while the Necrons have all the soldiers they'll need to claim the world by force, hidden sleeping far beneath the surface, they must take care not to give themselves away too soon and risk an Exterminatus destoying the tomb world before they can awaken.

Khemet must not only thread that delicate needle, but she must do so while contending with the schemes, dreams, and politics of her own kindred. With Khemet's vaunted office overshadowed by her past disgrace, opposition comes from within as well as without with millions of Necron lives hanging in the balance.

Meanwhile on the surface, a series of unfortunate accidents and occurrences begin to throw the orderly Orymous into disarray. When a Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites, Solome Sinos, arrives to investigate whether these are more than just simple misfortune, the game is afoot.

Tomb World is Beer's third novel for the Black Library, following 2023's Warhammer Crime novel The King of the Spoil and last year's Dominion Genesis (reviewed here).

When writing in the Special Edition's afterword, Beer confessed that he was 'terrified' to write a Necron book. "Over the last few years they have gained an impressive back catalogue of stories," he wrote. "In particular, Rob Rath's rightly lauded The Infinite and the Divine has had a seismic impact among the Black Library readership, and Nate Crowley's novella Severed and his Twice-Dead King novels are masterful explorations of the Necron psyche. And now I had to follow them."

Image credit: Games Workshop

Ramping Up

There's a lot that works in Tomb World, particularly as everything starts to come together in the second act. Having used the first to set up the Necrons, he now brings all of the ingredients to the table. You've got the 'enemy,₂' a Necron army slumbering beneath the surface. A strong, no-nonsense protagonist in Marshal Sinos. And best of all, a fantastic setting.

As mentioned above, Orymous is a staging world, a transitory station where Astra Militarum soldiers are temporarily stationed awaiting deployments. As you'd imagine, such a place consists at any given time of a million moving parts, and Beer leans into the logistical element of his setting brilliantly. You're never far from feeling just how intricate such a relationship by necessity must be- and therefore just how vulnerable it is to disruption.

Neither, it seems, are the Necrons.

A snip here, a cut there, and the whole thing starts to unravel. It's telling that the main threats to the Astra Militarum that Beer presents aren't gauss rifles and annihilator beams, but rather panic and hunger. As Alfred Henry Lewis famously observed over a century ago, "there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." While these are tactics we usually associate with the Genestealer Cults (and given the employment of mindshackle scarabs there's more than a little overlap here), they work just as brilliantly under a layer of necrodermis.

Meanwhile, the Arbites investigator is forced to play a game of cat-and-mouse. Are these just tragic accidents, or is there a guiding hand moving behind the scenes. And if there is such a hand... who (or what) is it attached to?

This part of the book is such wonderful fun that I wished it had another hundred pages and a little more room to breathe.

Perhaps the biggest criticism I had of Tomb World is a sort of negative image of the criticism I had for Dominion Genesis. That book had a very strong opening and middle, but came off the rails a bit with its ending (Beer agreed, and was wonderfully candid about some of the reasons why in our interview).

In Tomb World, it was the opposite. The first act was perfectly serviceable in setting up the characters and story, but doesn't quite live up to the rest of the book. To be clear it's far from bad, but at times it almost seemed like part of a different book. That's because once Beer had all the pieces on the table he really hit his stride and took off like a shot. The rest of the book is so good that those first hundred pages seem a bit more ordinary by comparison. It’s hard to find fault with that, and the advantage of having the weaker part of the book in the beginning as opposed to the end is that it detracts less from the overall narrative.

But that also led me to wonder- were there the bones of an even better book in there?

Image credit: Games Workshop

Tomb World: Remixed

Much of the book's middle act is the chess match between the Humans occupying the world and the Necrons, hidden beneath their very feet, engaging in a shadow war of assassination and sabotage. Would the pacing of the book picked up a little if we led with that rather than the get-to-know-you of the Necron protagonists, then threaded that part through in alternating passages or chapters?

Because ultimately for me the Necrons (while great) weren't the best part of this book- it was the shadow war itself. There's a terrific sequence on a moving train where the humans start getting picked off by their hidden enemy. Beer masterfully wove this scene with horror-writer's sense of suspense and the tension of the unknown as the realization slowly dawns on the train’s crew that something very wrong is happening. It’s one of the book’s highlights, but one that would have been improved by being twice as long, teasing out every delicious strand of dread along the way.

That would have made for a hell of an opening sequence.

I’m not saying that this should have been a Warhammer Horror novel, but I think trimming the first act by half and using that content in service of fleshing out the scenes to come would have paid dividends.

Tomb World is a very good book- and with a bit more editing it could well have been a great one. Even still, it’s terrific fun and a serious contender for my Book of the Year. Beer is quickly becoming one of the more dynamic talents in the Black Library as he refines his craft from book to book. The ambition he has, the willingness to get out from the comfortable and keep pushing himself to write the complex and uncommon hint of great things to come.

Footnotes

Not great for the work-life balance, I realize. But I also don't sweat it if my lunch runs a bit over, either. It all comes out in the wash.
One could make a case for the Necrons being the heroes of the story, or at least some of them. Beer paints a deep, dimensional portrait of Necron society here, with a full tableau of honor and dishonor, heroism and villainy.

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Tags: black library | jonathan d beer | Tomb World