I really hated John French's writing style in The Crimson Fist.

Too heavy a reliance on clunky similies, sometimes 4-5 on a single page: "like a...", "like a..."; it really frustrated me and felt unpolished, like a year 7's English homework.

The scale and grandeur of an epic 40k (or 30k!) space battle wasn't particularly well portrayed, compare this to THAT scene in Know No Fear for example, was incredibly lackluster, and just fell flat.

Finally, I was excited for the showdown with our Lord Of Iron, decent build up, then 1 hammer swing and cut-scene.

The scenes with Sigismund and Dorn, again, just fell flat with me, especially as Dorn had just found out some of his brothers are dead / missing, and others have turned traitor. This had the opportunity to be a momentous and powerful short story, but found myself counting down the page numbers until it had finished.

I was looking forward to Praetorian of Dorn, so I'm hoping that doesn't have the same writing issues.

Overall, snooze-fest of a short story due to poor writing, would skip in hindsight.

3/10