The words 'Cursed City' are beginning to feel pretty cursed themselves these days. Here we are scarcely a few weeks on from the pre-order date of the Cursed City board game, and already both the game and its tie-in hardback novel have been mysteriously removed from sale. I was lucky enough to grab a copy of both and, though there remains a big question mark over whether the novel will ever appear in paperback, it's still available as both an eBook and an audio book. I've read the book and I have opinions - opinions that I will now form into a series of words and sentences.

This review contains mild spoilers for the Cursed City novel.

For the uninitiated, Cursed City is a novel that takes place in Games Workshop's Age of Sigmar setting, and more specifically in the benighted city of Ulfenkarn. This once-proud human city has fallen on hard times and is now ruled over by the vampire tyrant known as Radukar the Wolf. A motley band of heroes and allies of convenience have come together, working in the shadows to overthrow the vampire and his undead minions so that Ulfenkarn might be restored to its former glory. Chronologically, the novel is set immediately before the events of the Cursed City boxed game. The novel is written by C. L. Werner, who has previous form with vampires in the Warhammer setting, having written the Warhammer Fantasy novel Red Duke - a novel that I'd previously read and enjoyed, so I went into Cursed City feeling positive.

Allow me to say right at the top that I enjoyed this novel. I want to make that clear from the get-go, because shortly I'm going to share a litany of criticism that under most circumstances would kill my appreciation for a story stone dead. That wasn't the case here, for reasons that will become clear.

Let's begin with an utterly unambiguous positive - the city of Ulfenkarn itself. Rarely has a location in the notoriously nebulous Age of Sigmar setting felt so tangible, detailed and lived-in. If you've been wondering how ordinary, mortal humans can possibly survive in a crumbling city plagued by undead horrors and ruled by vampires (or why they don't simply leave), this book will satisfy your curiosity and then some. This is a city in which the banality of evil has been assimilated into its residents' daily lives, where it's people have sacrificed their humanity piece by piece, and where fear is applied as a tool of civic governance. Decay - both moral and physical - seeps from its mouldering stonework, and the rich history of a once-proud city is written in the ruins.

All of this is explored and detailed throughout the novel in ways large and small, and the dark workings of this benighted city are never less than fascinating. It's a shame that we're unlikely to see any more stories told in this setting as with time, care and further exploration, Ulfenkarn has the potential to become Age of Sigmar's dark answer to Ankh-Morpork - Werner really does paint it that well. For me, the city itself is the most successful character, so much so that it outshines the novel's human (and inhuman) characters.

Let's talk about the characters. Bizarrely for a tie-in novel, of the eight protagonists and five antagonists that appear in the Cursed City boxed game, only two are featured as primary characters here, with two more receiving only the briefest of cameos. I appreciate that finding a place for all thirteen game characters in the story would feel horrendously contrived, but I spotted a number of obvious places where additional cameos could have naturally occurred. Even more strangely, two of the primary characters created for the novel already have direct analogues in the boxed game, and could easily have been swapped out for their game-based doubles with almost no effect on the story. For a reader with no investment in the game this is irrelevant of course, but it was a decision I found myself questioning as I anticipated playing the game that this novel is intended to whet the appetite for.

The characters we do get are fairly typical fantasy archetypes for the most part; an ex-soldier of noble birth named Emelda Braskov, Gustaf Voss the pragmatic witch-hunter and a suspicious wizard named Morrvahl Olbrecht (who would be considered a necromancer in any other universe, but in the Mortal Realms is an 'amethyst wizard' - essentially a necromancer with scruples). I think the book wanted me to find Morrvahl repugnant, but he's easily the most charismatic and self-aware of the main trio, so I found myself warming to him the most. I wish the story could have spent more time with him.

Radukar, the main antagonist and vampiric tyrant of Ulfenkarn, also deserves a special mention. In the novel he's presented as a point of view character; we get to spend as much time with him as we do with the more heroic protagonists, and it's to Werner's great credit that Radukar succeeds in being a more complex and compelling adversary than you would typically expect of the fantasy pulps. He's smart, ruthless and surprisingly hands-on, essentially taking on the role of a detective for large sections of the story. His interrogation techniques are a particular delight.

Speaking of detective work, it's worth pointing out that this novel is essentially two stories running in parallel; a murder mystery and a coup attempt. This gives rise to some pacing and structural issues. Most glaringly, the coup plotline slowly fizzles out so that the events of the boxed game can happen (Radukar is the game's main antagonist after all). And despite the two threads intersecting frequently, the novel never truly convinced me that the murder mystery needed to be addressed in order for the coup plot to move forward, despite the protagonists' repeated insistence that this was so. Their justification for spending so much time investigating what amounts to a side quest as opposed to directly pursuing their ultimate goal felt thin. This ceases being a curiosity and becomes outright tiresome when they continue investigating the murders for some considerable time, after the solution to the mystery has already been revealed to the reader. Speaking of which, this resolution is clearly signposted quite early on (so early that I assumed it was a red herring, but it wasn't), so when the reveal finally does happen it's less a surprise and more a matter-of-fact confirmation.

In fact, the murder mystery stalls the novel's momentum more often than driving it, and nowhere is this manifested more clearly than in the frequent 'interludes' (essentially short chapters or vignettes) in which the same sequence of events is repeated several times - almost beat for beat - by a series of briefly sketched and ultimately inconsequential characters. The first interlude is intriguing. By the third interlude the pattern is sufficiently established. By the seventh I found myself rolling my eyes. Although these interludes serve a function and eventually result in a fun subversion of expectations, there are just far too many of them and most are far too similar. Most feel like padding, plain and simple. That said, a lot of facets of the city, its people and their daily lives are sketched out in these interludes, but I suspect this material could have been incorporated more organically elsewhere in the story.

Repetition is a problem elsewhere in the plot too, with the protagonists seemingly trapped in an endless cycle of setting up shop in a new hideout, being discovered, then fighting their way out before setting up shop again in another hideout that's functionally identical to the last. On one occasion they even return with few qualms to a previous hideout that they'd made a big fuss about leaving just a few chapters earlier, which does nothing to allay the frequent feeling that the story is spinning its wheels while it waits for the next fight to break out. Thankfully the action set pieces are all varied, imaginative and bursting with energy - a major plus since there are so many of them.

The plot isn't the only thing stuck in a holding pattern though. With the exception of one secondary character (one of the few I genuinely warmed to), no-one in the story has anything that you could describe as an arc. Ulfenkarn is an exceptionally harrowing place, and Werner could have absolutely put his protagonists through the wringer, but they largely take the horrors that the city throws at them in their stride. No hidden depths to their personalities are gradually unveiled, they're never truly challenged emotionally or psychologically, and they each end their story as precisely the same people they were at the start. The protagonists are also almost entirely reactive, being buffeted around by events rather than taking decisive action and, more than once, choosing to literally sit and do nothing for days at a time while they wait for something outside their control to fall into place. Our action heroes have only two modes - fighting and dithering. Only Radukar actively pursues his goal and gets things done with any sense of urgency or determination (a contributing factor to his being a standout character), though even he falls into playing the waiting game on occasion.

But enough about the negatives. What elevated this novel and kept me reading was the quality of the prose, the first class world building and the richly macabre atmosphere. Cursed City is an easy read, and I mean that in the most positive sense; Werner's writing is rich and evocative without ever falling into the perennial pulp fantasy trap of being laboured or pretentious. Every sentence feels delicately and thoughtfully constructed, and the prose flows beautifully from one page to the next even when the plot doesn't. Regardless of any criticism that I might level at it, I enjoyed reading this novel, and perhaps that's ultimately all that matters.

All of this brings me to the big question - would I recommend this book? The answer is a cautious 'yes'. Plenty of people will be able to see past the novel's shortcomings and enjoy the elements that really do work; if you're a fan of Death stuff generally in Age of Sigmar, if you crave more context for the Cursed City board game, or if you love being immersed in a grimly evocative setting, then you're sure to get something out of it. If none of that applies though, you'll likely be left unsatisfied by the shallow characters, circular plotting and incomplete resolution. Ultimately I get the sense of a consummate novelist being hamstrung by the requirements of what was likely a highly prescriptive brief, but managing to work a little magic in spite of it all.

Like Ulfenkarn itself, the Cursed City novel is plagued by many and varied horrors, but is enthralling nonetheless.