Outside the Book Club Review: Where Dere’s Da Warp Dere’s a Way by Mike Brooks

Where Dere’s Da Warp Dere’s a Way originally released in Inferno! Volume 4, but as I’m not reading that series, I never heard of it until it graced my inbox last week. I’m not gonna lie: I bought the short story strictly for the title alone. It’s a story about orks with that funny of a title? You better believe I’m in. If it’s half as funny as Robbie MacNiven’s ork dialogue in Blood of Iax, it was going to be money worth spent.

But was it? Let me put it this way: I haven’t laughed this hard at reading a WH40k book since Lords of Silence.

I’d follow a mob boss named “Snazzhammer.”

Ufthak Blackhawk is second-in-command in Badgit Snazzhammer’s mob. Badgit has the “Snazzhammer” name, because he has a giant hammer that has destroyed a competing war boss in one hit. If that doesn’t make a hammer snazzy, then I don’t know what does.

This particular mob is part of Da Meklord’s warfleet, which has decided to attack and plunder Adeptus Mechanicus ships. As his name implies, Da Meklord likes shiny new tech. His most trusted mek is Da Boffin, who “replaced his own legs with a single wheel, powered by a fuel made of concentrated squig dung.” This is all in the first two pages of the short story, folks. Right here I knew I was going to be more than pleased.

I nearly highlighted every piece of dialogue that made me laugh, but I stopped when I was highlighting entire paragraphs. How can you not laugh when the mob boss acts like a mom yelling at her kids in the car?

If you gitz don’t settle down den I’m turnin’ dis fing around!

That’s just one small sample of the hilarity in how Snazzhammer treats his underlings.

Only thing funnier than their speech is their planning.

I’m not delving into the plot too deeply, because the orks ambushing the Mechanicus ship is really all there is to it. There is a small side plot as well, but I’m not touching it for spoiler reasons. To be frank, when it comes to orks, do we really need a complex plot? The answer is no, no we don’t. Why?

For starters, the orks are not a complex bunch. They like to krump the humies and beakies and even one another. They really have no other motivations for their odd lives. Because they don’t strategize often, or rather they rarely strategize when it comes to krumpins, when they do come up with plans, it’s utterly delightful.

Urthak’s group has to halt when they come across a Mechanicum-version of a tinboy. He deduces that it will only fire upon orks, not other humies. So Urthak’s brilliant plan to fool the tinboy is to strap the dead bodies of the humies to steel plating. As the orks walk past, they’re holding up the plates to shield them from view. Urthak even attempts to speak humie to the tinboy, to fool it even further:

‘We’z just humies, walkin’ down dis corridor!’

Yes, it shocked me too that the tinboy was not fooled. I want a video of this scene alone, if not the whole story, complete with cockney accents.

One final note of hilarity I have to drop before closing is Ufthak’s explanation of a “bombstikk.”

It was basically half the mob’s stikkbombs all taped together courtesy of Da Boffin’s toolbox, and by ‘basically’ he meant ‘exactly.’

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

During this time of quarantine, we need laughs more than ever. Mike Brooks’ Where Dere’s da Warp Dere’s a Way short story was exactly what I needed, and every WH40k fan needs this in their lives. It’s only $3.99 on Amazon, and it’s worth every penny.