Iron Guard (Imperial Guard) by Mark Clapham

Iron Guard (Imperial Guard) Reviews

• 
  Replicasex

  Great ideas, mediocre execution. Still a fun entry in horror 40k.
• 
  David

  Entertaining and keeps you interested til the end with a few twists
• 
  John

  A very interesting guardsman novel, I liked the way the character "Hool" ended up becoming similar to someone that he didn't understand initially.
• 
  Ulzeta

  Quite fun.
• 
  David Ledeboer

  Warhammer 40k Imperial Guard novels are one of my guilty pleasures and Iron Guard by Mark Clapham didn’t disappoint. The novel is structured around the Unbreakable Mordian 114th, and in particular, newly initiated guardsman Fernand Hool along with those closest around him.
  
  For the 114th battle on Elisenda was simple enough: eliminate the rebel never ending and production cannot be stopped. However, simple and routine evolves rapidly when Major Geiss is appointed a strike force and tasked with investigating an unknown situation on the mining planet, Belmos VII. Belmos VII, appearing dead and abandoned upon initial contact is anything but, and the strike force is quickly under duress when day turns to night.
  
  Hool, Sergeant Polk, and Lieutenant Smoker provide your core group, and you couldn’t ask for a more unbreakable trio to cover your backside. The relationship existing between Polk and Hool isn’t anything new to Imperial Guard novels. (At the beginning of the book Polk is the reason for Hool joining the guard, a solid introduction lending Polk a watchdog role.) also I enjoyed the slow-played transition of Hool and his character advancement throughout the novel, especially upon conclusion. He was always a solid shot and stand-up guardsman, now he is both something more and perhaps something less.
  
  Without giving too much away, Major Geiss tries fervently to dig to the bottom of what’s behind the malaise affecting the citizen population on Belmos VII and their “change in demeanor” during the night. Let’s just say it is something of Xenos in origin and most of the 114th strike force won’t live to see it through to the fiery conclusion.
  
  I loved the collage of forces crashing together at the end and especially the raising battle field hidden deep beneath the surface. Clapham did a fantastic job with the introduction of one other main character and I hope to see more of his and the Iron Guard’s interaction in further developed Guard novels, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ll get straight to the point, Iron Guard was a brilliant and excellent introductory novel by Mark Clapham. You can be assured I would be overjoyed at reading a follow-up. But so far most of the Imperial Guard novels have been simple stepping stones for other Black Library author and sadly, those novels have become stand-alone pieces as their authors whisk away to other more vaunted works with “Space Marines” and such. So it is with a heavy hand that I am afraid that I may have turned the final pages on the 114th Iron Guard, Hool, and Smoker, most likely never to read of their exploits again.
• 
  Michael Alexander

  First of all, my copy of this book was missing about 30 pages. It skipped from page 192 to 225. I'm not sure if this is common, or if I just got unlucky.
  That out of the way, this was one of the better Imperial Guard books that I've read. The start was rather slow with the Imperial Guard facing off against some rather generic zombie-like enemies. I admit I was rather disappointed at first, there are so many great villains in the Warhammer universe and these were not interesting at all.
  The last 100 pages or so of the book change everything, introducing a new character and the real foe that made the book quite a bit more enjoyable.
• 
  Robert McCarroll

  While the overall tale was well done, and entertaining enough that the handful of errors were insufficient to make me stop reading. That said, everytime a lasgun recoiled, I did too. It is a pet peeve mistake to have a laser-based weapon generate enough kickback to be felt by the user. This was less of an issue than the desu ex inquisitor who showed up just to allow the author to deliver a pat anti-war diatribe in a book whose universe's tagline ends with "There is only war". This was an out of joint intrusion into the enjoyment of escapist fiction.
  
  Still, those two flaws aside, it managed to be an entertaining yarn regardless.
• 
  Nicolas Quattromani

  It's a decent book overall. I found the quality of the prose to be somewhat less than impressive, with poor word choice abounding, but at least the plot was riveting and the characters were likeable, if not particularly well-developed. Certainly, it was interesting to see the exploits of the Mordian Iron Guard (my favorite Imperial Guard regiment) as they investigated a mysterious outbreak on a remote mining world. The middle of the book felt fairly slow. However, the ending was actually very well done, my only qualm with it being a minor case of deus ex machina.
• 
  Adeptus Fringilla

  Excellent story about the 114th Mordian Guard setting out to rescue a planet and encountering many threats. Well crafted and told and full of epic battles.
• 
  Dave

  Not a bad story and deals with a regiment that sees little attention in the Black Library stories. Sadly i'm not sure it does much to differentiate them much from the other regiments despite quite a bit of effort at the start to go into detail and some back history of the main character you follow. The story attempts to cover a lot of ground incorporating pacification of a rebellious world, "plague", Inquisition and finally Dark Eldar by the 114th Mordian who are seemingly blessed with incredibly bad luck. Unfortunately i found it came across more of trying to get more cool things in than doing the Iron Guard justice. The first two aspects of the story i think would have served the author just as well. The final commentary on the state of the Imperium and thought processes which i found interesting as a result of meeting the DE and Inquisition seemed hurried and somewhat forced. Perhaps if this was the true goal then either dealing with this exclusively or perhaps separating the book into two stories would have been much better. Lastly I feel some additional editing could have been done. Badly constructed sentances or reuse of similar descriptors dropped the quality of writing in a few places and i found it distracting. Overall an interesting story but not something i'd read again.