"Butcher's Nails" (audio drama) by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Face-offs between the Aurelian and the Red Angel!!! Dark hints at hidden agendas and schisms between the 12th and 17th!!! Void war against foul xenos scum!!! TWO TRAITOR LEGIONS ON THE VERGE OF ARMED CONFLICT!!! And the (heretical!!!!) revelation that the Black Templars custom of chaining their weapons to their armour, comes from Sigismund's time in the World Eaters fighting pits!!! 'Butcher's Nails' is everything you want from an HH audiobook. While it builds on characters established in the HH series before, it also gives you a tonne of bolter-blasting, chainsword-revving action.

Even back then, chain-axes had helpful arrows on them, like "this is the direction you want to swing it".

Except. Except that it's an audiobook. So it's not on the page. So for a dude like myself who's used to writing, directing, and scoring a movie in his head as he reads a story, we've got proooooooblems. Egomaniacal as that may sound... But more on that later.

The actual story is fairly simple, and while it sets the scene nicely for 'Betrayer', you don't really have to listen to 'Butcher's Nails' to understand the full length novel. Though a few things from 'Betrayer' made more sense to me after listening to this. In fact, since I found 'Betrayer' seemed a bit... short (well, same length in pages as 'Angel Exterminatus', but it had like 20 words per page... damn font wizards), I find myself wishing the 'Butcher's Nails' had been a sort of self-contained frontispiece to that book. Cut out the exposition that was in both 'Butcher's Nails' and 'Betrayer', and it could have been an excellent way to ease in to the action. But... that won't happen. Maybe in a few years we'll get a 'director's cut'...

Let's talk now about the actual presentation. This was only my second Black Library audiobook, the first being 'Garro: Legion Of One'. What I quickly learned was that Black Library (or the varied studios that produce their audibooks) like sound effects. A LOT. They like battle sound effects particularly. And, well, the majority of 'Butcher's Nails' takes place in battle. Whaddya want? It's Angron. This does mean the narrator is often straining to be heard over plasma bolts, gunfire, clashing swords, and naturally, snarling chainblades (Angron cares not from whence the blood flows...). You know what? I don't want to be negative, but I found the whole thing incredibly tiresome. Mainly because some of AD-B's best writing will come out in the thick of a battle sequences, and this kind of drowns it in overdramatic audio treacle. The actual score itself can be quite intrusive as well.

Perhaps I'm just being unfair on the medium. I haven't been too into them for the last couple decades but I listened to audiobooks way more as a kid. OK, I was spoiled, on some 'Winnie The Pooh' shit. While I know it's probably too much to get Alan Bennett to read my HH audiobooks ("Oooh Erebus, I said, dropping the cracker into my disappointingly cold tea, you really must meet Dudley and Peter, they probably would get on well with this Slaanesh fellow you talk so much about") can a motherfucker get a little pause for effect once in a while? Damn.

The 5-year-old me listened to this ALL THE TIME...

Now on to the voice acting.

First off, I really liked the voice of Kharn. I never thought of Kharn as Russian, but it works very well. I also like how calm and almost morose he sounds, it makes the 'GRRRRRR' stuff when he really cuts loose all the more effective... something most of the other actors on this could have stood to learn.

Can you picture this guy as 'melancholic'?

Captain Lotara is a great character and shows that AD-B might be one of the only HH writers who can convincingly write tough-as-nails female characters who can stand shoulder to shoulder with Primarchs and give as good as they get (OK, Cyrene is not a GREAT example...) The voice actor here is... hmm, I'm not sure, perhaps not hard-bitten enough. There were a few moments where she got a bit whiny, and the sing-song 'smack talking' to the eldar captain was a bit... too... Whedon for my tastes. There's good Whedon and bad Whedon, and her reading was bad Whedon. Had it been delivered utterly deadpan, it could have been the *fist pounds into open palm* YEAAHHHHHH moment of the whole audiobook. Anyway she was still pretty great, it's just a few direction choices which I think could have gone better.

Lorgar... well, he seems a bit fucking moribund, really. In my mind, Lorgar should sound charismatic, smooth, perhaps a little slimy a times, but incredibly self-assured. Roger Allam or Alan Rickman would be my first choices (sadly, James Mason is not available for this role). Instead, the Lorgar in Butcher's Nails sounds like he's taking the 'priest' aspect of the character as the primary trait. It's all solemnity and chiding. When he talks, I just hear Christopher Lee sitting in an abandoned vestry weeping at the death of his only friend (a palsied crow). I guess this is just down to my personal interpretation of Lorgar, and this guy's voice acting is objectively pretty damn good, so... haters gon' hate.

Lorgar loves a twix.

Angron, O, Angron, my prince! Angron is arguably the centrepiece of Butcher's Nails, so he's on-mic a lot. Well, how WOULD Angron sound? We can't know of course. Many think of him as a roided-out ripoff of Spartacus, so perhaps an incoherent Kirk Douglas imitation would be apt. Maybe a Ron Perlman vibe, since he is one of the most brutish/badass of all the Primarchs. Or maybe going RRRRRooshan, like Kharn was. But I don't know how many people would think of him as a fruity-voiced Brit character actor pretending to be high on speed and QUITE MIFFED. Shit bro, I guess this is ultimately a matter of directorial choice again, but I found it to be pretty fucking awful.
How would I have preferred him to sound? I guess the compromise would be a little like Vin Diesel in Pitch Black: animalistic, almost suave growls when in repose, rising to a feral shout when roused. But the secret truth? Ever since After Desh'ea, when I'm thinking Angron, I'm thinking... DMX.

The inability to follow a conversational thread for more than a few seconds. The psychotic appetite for violence. The guttural growls and shouts that seem to involuntarily derail his own sentences. The pain machine beating a hole in his psyche. Yeah, Angron is everyone's favourite Ruff Ryder. Would it have been too much to ask to have Earl Simmons come out of crack-smoking retirement to throw down a few barks? WHAAAAAAT!!!!!!

Argel Tal, luckily, doesn't show up much. I dunno, I guess I thought of his voice as having more subtlety than this... also, maybe racism on my part, but since Colchis was a 'desert world' and the Colchisians 'dusky-skinned' I thought, perhaps, he'd sound like a slightly sullen Middle Eastern prince or cleric or something. Perhaps that would be too obvious, but THIS... And the voice of Raum just sounds like the generic 'demon voice' from any videogame or horror movie. Two voices speaking in unison is tough to do, especially when chainblades are howling and crashing all the time in the background, but 'cackling twat' and 'vocal equivalent of a bowel spasm' don't really go too awesome together. Unless you're a black metal frontman.

Finally, well shit, guess I never thought about how eldar should sound, but... it wasn't the way this dude sounded, that's for sure. I guess in my head they were more... French.

Of course, this shit is all just my opinion, and that's the beauty of audiobooks - it doesn't fit with my personal views on the characters' voices, but you might have imagined them sounding exactly like this. Despite my whining about the voice acting, this definitely grew on me after several listens - and I never had any complaints regarding the story. I think it's dope AD-B's writing is being given more attention by moving into audiobook form.

For writing, 8/10. For production and sound, 6/10. Splitting the difference, I'm gonna hit it with a 7/10...

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