I stayed up much too late last night finishing Gotrek & Felix: The Second Omnibus by William King.

Honestly, I don’t have a real lot to say about it. If you haven’t read any of the Gotrek & Felix books, then you should start with Omnibus 1 (or one of the stand alone volumes, but these Omnibus re-issues are a great value). If you have read that and enjoyed it, stop reading and go order Omnibus 2. King just gets better and better the further along he goes.

All three books in the collection (Beastslayer, Dragonslayer and Vampireslayer) are full novels (the early books were collections of short stories and novellas) each of which stands alone nicely but strung together they form a continuous narrative of the adventures of our two heroes, one-time poet and scholar Felix, and gruff, death-wish driven Slayer Gotrek. The cast of characters broadens quite a bit in these books though, making them feel like a richer experience. King even finds room for some romance-driven subplots, and even Gotrek starts to show some signs of humanity by the end (and is self-aware of this fact, grumbling about spending too much time around humans).

A broader cast of characters lets King dispose of a few here and there as well, which alleviates the one weakness of a series with character names in the titles. We pretty much know that neither Gotrek nor Felix is going to fall in battle, given that there are more books to read!

I have to admit I came in to these books with pretty low-expectations given that they are based on a game. And at first my expectations were met: fun stuff, but with not a lot of meat to them. But that feeling faded away back in the midst of Omnibus 1, and the three books in this volume are great fantasy that could stand up against any non-licensed sword & sorcery fantasy novels. It doesn’t matter if you know what Warhammer is; if you love a good fantasy adventure yarn, the Gotrek & Felix books are for you.