Gunheads

Main Review:

I will be honest: Gunheads by Steve Parker was not what I was intending my first post of 2022 to be about. And yet… here we are. Allow me to explain how this particular state of affairs came about.

A lot of book bloggers have incredibly strong feelings about the whole ‘physical v digital’ book reading debate. On one side, you have those who insist that you cannot say that you’ve read a book if you haven’t bodily thrust your nose between its pages and smelt the ink of your favourite passage. One the other, you have those who praise their e-readers for their ability to store thousands of books in just a fraction of the space, and making it that anyone with good perseverance but average wrist strength could get through a door-stopper like Les Misérables or War and Peace.

My two-penneth on the whole argument is it doesn’t make a sniff of difference how you read, and we shouldn’t be trying to accuse anyone of not being a proper reader. Whilst I enjoy the heft of a good book, there’s advantages to digital books as well. Back in the day, my ‘tablet’ books were reserved for the trashier stories that I didn’t want people on public transport or other such locations to be able to tell that I was reading. With everything going on however, the amount of ‘public’ reading I’m doing these days is greatly reduced, and instead it’s found itself often being used just before bed when I can get through a chapter or two without the need to keep the light on to be able to see.

And so that’s how, over the last few days, I found myself distinctly not reading the book I’d meant to review, and instead smashing my way through Steve Parker’s Gunheads, a pulpy action adventure set in the grimdark 41^st Millennium of Warhammer 40,000. In a setting dominated by super-humans, hyper zealous nuns and aliens that want to eat entire planets – Parker focuses instead on the closest thing the setting has to an ‘Average Joe’ – a bunch of soldiers (or Imperial Guard as they are known) fighting on the red waste world of Golgotha to retrieve a special tank that their leaders are convinced might make all the difference in the never-ending wars throughout the galaxy.

I’ve had my copy for over a year, acquired in a Humble Bundle compilation, quietly waiting for the stars to align and my interest in the bleak but dynamic setting of Warhammer 40,000 to return to the forefront of my mind like a giant tank crashing into an outpost of aliens, mutants and heretics. Once I actually took the leap and started reading Gunheads, I was engrossed from pretty much the first page.

It’s not a timeless classic of literature by any means. It doesn’t speak to the realities of the human condition or ponder the role of individual action in shaping collective memory or anything even remotely as high-brow as all that. Instead, it’s an explosion-heavy rollercoaster of soldiers fighting angry space monsters (distinctly called orks to distinguish them from the generic monsters of a million and one fantasy worlds) and it’s just fun. We watch the soldiers struggle and falter in the face of impossible odds and just keep going and I loved every minute –it put me in mind a lot of Rogue One and Halo: Reach, both of which have a special place in my heart.

As we’ve seen on the blog, stories set in established (and licensed) settings can vary woefully in quality. My most common criticism of the Age of Sigmar novels I’ve read is that they feel like increasingly blatant attempts to try and lure prospective nerds into parting with their money and buying a cupboard’s worth of gray plastic. Gunheads by contrast, doesn’t seem to have this underlying scheming. It feels like a story being told for its own sake and coming from a place of genuine passion and love for the setting. But even so, it avoids the pitfalls that plague so many Star Wars stories and doesn’t rely on an elaborate series of shallow shout-outs to other, better, stories for it’s entire duration.

The story of Gunheads is told through several characters, from the glory-hound General in charge of the whole operation and his beleaguered seconds-in-command to the cybernetic tech-priests secretly plotting to divert the campaign to their own ends. For me though, the real stars of the show are the soldiers Wulfe and Van Droi, both of whom are tank commanders in the 10^th Company (known as the Gunheads). It’s obvious very quickly that both care deeply about the men under their command, and they’re very easy to root for, especially in the face of the overwhelming odds stacked against them, both from the orks they fight and the scheming and politicking of the higher echelons they follow.

As became clear when I made Tank Men my favourite non-fiction read of 2021, I’m really rather fond of tanks. I’ve even got another tank-related book lined up to read sooner rather than later. I didn’t have to get particularly far through Gunheads to realise that Parker probably is too. It was his use of the phrase ‘brewed up’ to refer to tanks being blown up that gave it away and left me feeling like that pointing Leonardo DiCaprio meme – it being a phrase constantly used by real-world tank crews throughout the Second World War. This and other little touches meant that, regardless of how sci-fi and ‘silly’ some elements of the story were, the whole thing felt incredibly grounded and, for want of a better word ‘real’.

I could probably say more about Gunheads, but the fact that I felt obliged to push my intended ‘next read’ back to write about it instead hopefully speaks volumes. My enjoyment was much greater than I ever expected it to be. Practically the second I finished it I recommended it to a number of friends and family who I suspected would enjoy it, from hardcore 40k fans to complete newcomers to the lore. More broadly, it was also a good reminder that not every book needs to be a seminal classic. Especially after the last few years, maybe we all need to take the time to treat ourselves to the things we enjoy, whether that’s knitting, walks on the beach or books about space soldiers blowing things up in tanks.

Whatever’s on your shelf (or e-reader) at the moment – happy reading to you all!