Death’s Head: Day of the Damned by David Gunn reviewed

David Gunn is steadily making a name for himself as a master of the military SF genre. If you’re a fan of non-stop shoot ‘em up bang bang bloody action, you should check out the third book in his Death’s Head series, Death’s Head: Day of the Damned, and the first two books in the series, Death’s Head and Death’s Head: Maximum Offense. All feature Lieutenant Sven Tveskoeg, a killing machine and the leader of the remnants of the Death’s Head regiment in the army of totalitarian Emperor OctoV.

Sven and his Death’s Head auxiliaries are at the capital city of Farlight for a little bit of R&R. While there, Sven visits his old friends Debro and Anton, whom he freed from the prison planet of Paradise, and their teenage daughter Aptitude. It doesn’t take long before his “rest and relaxation,” turns into a mission of “wreck, destroy, revenge, and rescue.” Sven and his auxiliaries find they have plenty of enemies around to expend their bullets upon, and plenty of reasons to do just that.

Aptitude’s fiance, Colonel Vijay Jaxx, son of General Indigo Jaxx (whom Sven has had many dealings with in the past), is an obstacle in the way of several interested parties who want to see him dead.

There’s the leader of the Wolf Brigade, General Luc, who has promised Aptitude he’ll deliver Vijay’s heart to her on a platter. There’s Senator Thomassi, the head of the Thomassi High Clan, who have had a long-standing rivalry with the Jaxx clan. Then, there is the U/Free (United Free), who are practically all-powerful and are the overseers, the rulemakers, the arbiters, the rulers-behind-the-scenes who might be feeling that it’s time for the OctoV Empire to come to an end. That’s a dangerous thing if you earn your daily bread working in the military service of OctoV, as do Indigo and Vijay.

Suffice it to say, Sven and his buddies wind up right in the center of a bloody planet-wide civil war. They have to fight their way through it or die, and Sven is torn between his promise to Aptitude to make sure Vijay doesn’t come to harm, and his allegiance to Vijay, after  he is taken captive by General Luc and has ordered Sven to cooperate with him.

One thing I really liked about the novel is that, though Sven is a very agro dude who sports a cybernetic arm because a ferox tore it off and ate it, he is not two-dimensional. He possesses wit and intelligence, and his AI gun, a SIG-37, is an often darkly humorous and argumentative foil to him. The SIG-37 is like another character in the book, and reminded me somewhat of Philip Linx’s (Flinx’s, of Alan Dean Foster’s Pip & Flinx series) AI spaceship, Teacher. It can switch from among multiple types of bullets, tell Sven how many opponents he’s facing and how heavily they’re armed, and give him advice about who to take out first. It also has a tendency to sulk when it feels Sven is mistreating it, and occasionally to swear.

The plot is complex, with enough twist and turns, allegiances switched, and characters with conflicting motivations to hold the readers’ attention and provide sufficient reasons for the violence that ensues throughout the book. This complexity is one of the hallmarks of great military SF. Blood, gore, and tons of action are part and parcel of military SF, but in order for the plot of a novel to move smoothly along, and for it to be an above-average read, other elements are necessary.  Gunn delivers them smoothly.

Adding carnage and gore to the book are the bloodsucking humanoid creatures called furies.  They’re bipedal beings who are partially metal, and they drink people’s blood through their fingers, first tearing into the bodies of their victims with their extremely powerful arms and hands. They sometimes rip the hearts out of people. While they generally roam around on their own, leaving blood-drained corpses in their wakes, they are sometimes made the tools of others, like the U/Free, who enslave them and use them for various purposes like assisting in military coups. Sven discover they’re used for this purpose in the city of Farlight, when he and the Death’s Head aux see them being prodded with sticks to different areas of the city by military personnel wearing armbands which serve as a deterent to themselves being attacked by the furies. The following example shows how ruthless the furies are in attacking the citizens of Farlight, with them even attacking children:

My next round blows half a fury’s head away.
The creature barely notices. Next time I see it, the fury is in an upstairs window, feeding from a girl who tries to throw herself into the street below.
Dropping to one knee, I center the scope’s crosshairs.
The hollow point takes the fury under its chin, spreads on impact, and blows fragments of spine through the smashed mess I made of the skull earlier. My second shot kills the screaming girl. Like most people in the city she’s beyond saving.

Though I liked reading the book as a whole, I thought the ending had a little bit too much of a deus ex machina feeling to it. There’s no gods who descend down from the heavens to save Sven, Colonel Vijay Jaxx, Aptitude, and the rest – but, without going into exactly what does happen, let’s say that their climactic escape from a seemingly impossible situation is not the result of their military skills. I found it kind of a letdown.

One thing the author ensured by writing this type of ending, though, is that further sequels are in the works. This is good news for anyone who’s a fan of Gunn’s novels, and for anyone who loves reading military SF. While I thought the ending could have been stronger, Death’s Head: Day of the Damned is, on the whole, an action-packed, bloody, and violence-filled novel that fans of military SF should include on their reading lists.

Hardback, August 2009 from Del Rey.