Nigel Cawthorne has an undeniably impressive catalogue of military publications to his name. Over the years he has written on everything from famous commanders and elite military units to special forces, military technology, and the Second World War itself. Few popular military historians can match the sheer breadth of his output. I was therefore looking forward to this volume, although I came away feeling that the subject chosen was simply too large to be comfortably contained within a book of just over two hundred pages.
The ambition of the project is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Cawthorne focuses exclusively on the Second World War, selecting a wide range of campaigns and battles from across the global conflict. Even with that narrower focus, the task remains enormous. The war stretched across six years and several continents, encompassing hundreds of major operations. Attempting to cover the most significant of these in a relatively short book inevitably means that every battle receives only a concise treatment.
The selection of battles is also likely to generate debate. Any book claiming to present the greatest battles of the Second World War becomes almost as well known for its omissions as for its inclusions. Every reader will have their own candidates that deserved a place but failed to make the final cut. Some will question the absence of particular campaigns, while others may disagree with the importance attached to those that were included. There is no definitive list of the “greatest” battles, so every author is forced to make difficult choices. Even so, the omissions are impossible to ignore and are almost certain to spark as much discussion as the chapters themselves.
That is not really a criticism of the author’s research so much as of the concept itself. The Second World War is simply too vast a subject to compress into a single volume of this size without sacrificing detail. Every campaign was shaped by geography, logistics, intelligence, command decisions, industrial capacity, morale, and often a fair amount of luck. Entire libraries have been written about battles such as Stalingrad, El Alamein, Midway, Normandy, and the Bulge. Reducing each to a handful of pages means the reader gains an understanding of what happened, but rarely enough space to appreciate why events unfolded as they did or how the commanders reached the decisions that determined the outcome.
Cawthorne writes in a clear and accessible style that keeps the narrative moving. He avoids unnecessary technical language and presents the major events in a way that is easy to follow. Readers who are relatively new to the Second World War will find this an approachable introduction, and the book provides a useful overview of many of the conflict’s defining engagements. It is the sort of volume that may well encourage readers to seek out more specialised studies on the battles that capture their interest.
For readers with a substantial military history library, however, the limitations quickly become apparent. There is little opportunity to examine the operational planning, intelligence failures, logistical problems, or tactical innovations that often made these battles significant. The narrative moves rapidly from one campaign to the next, leaving little room for discussion of competing historical interpretations or the wider strategic context. None of this is unexpected. It is simply the unavoidable consequence of trying to fit so much history into so few pages.
Personally, I would have preferred a different approach. Rather than covering such a large number of battles, I think the book would have been stronger had it examined fewer campaigns in greater depth. Doubling the space devoted to each battle would have allowed the personalities, planning, battlefield decisions, and consequences to emerge more clearly. As it stands, the book succeeds more as a survey than as an analytical history.
That does not diminish its value. It simply defines its audience. If you are looking for a readable introduction to some of the major battles of the Second World War, this book fulfils that role well. It provides a broad overview and serves as a useful starting point for further reading. If, on the other hand, you are seeking detailed campaign analysis or fresh historical interpretation, you will probably find yourself reaching for the more specialised works that occupy several shelves in most military history collections.
Overall, I enjoyed the book for what it is rather than what it could never realistically be. Nigel Cawthorne’s enthusiasm for the subject comes through clearly, and his experience as a popular military writer shows in the book’s readability. The problem is not the writing but the scale of the task. The Second World War is simply too immense to be adequately covered in just over two hundred pages, and that reality inevitably limits the depth that any author can achieve. Like many broad survey histories, it succeeds as an introduction, but it also leaves the reader thinking as much about the battles that were left out as those that made the final selection.
A solid and accessible introduction to the major battles of the Second World War, but one whose breadth inevitably comes at the expense of depth.
There are books that tell us how wars are fought, and there are books that ask whether those wars should be fought in the way they are. Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield firmly belongs in the second category. This is not a campaign history, nor is it a study of tactics or military organisation. Instead, it is an investigation into the increasingly secret world of modern counterterrorism, where special operations forces, intelligence agencies, drones, and targeted killings operate far from public scrutiny.
Scahill argues that following the attacks of September 2001, the United States steadily expanded its use of covert military force beyond recognised battlefields. Afghanistan and Iraq were only part of the story. Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and other countries became theatres of conflict without formal declarations of war. According to Scahill, this transformation created a situation where governments claimed the authority to strike individuals almost anywhere in the world, often with little public oversight or judicial review.
What separates Dirty Wars from many books on the War on Terror is the amount of fieldwork behind it. Scahill does not simply analyse policy papers or interview officials in Washington. He travels to villages where raids occurred, speaks with survivors and local witnesses, and attempts to reconstruct events that were often reported very differently by military authorities. His investigation into the raid at Gardez in Afghanistan is particularly effective because it demonstrates how difficult it can be to establish the truth once governments classify operations and control the initial flow of information. Whether every conclusion is accepted or not, the reporting itself is impressive.
For military historians, the book offers something rather different from the operational histories that usually fill our bookshelves. It is less concerned with how special operations are planned and executed than with what happens after the operation is over. How are targets selected? Who is held accountable when intelligence proves flawed? What happens when civilians are killed? These are questions that deserve serious consideration because they increasingly shape modern warfare every bit as much as weapons, doctrine, or battlefield tactics.
That said, readers should approach the book with an awareness of the author’s perspective. Scahill writes as an investigative journalist rather than as a detached historian, and his opposition to many aspects of American counterterrorism policy is evident throughout. At times the narrative can feel one sided, giving relatively little attention to the difficult strategic problems faced by governments attempting to disrupt terrorist networks that deliberately avoid conventional battlefields. There is certainly another side to the debate, and readers interested in a balanced understanding should seek out works representing differing viewpoints.
None of that diminishes the importance of what Scahill has produced. Good investigative journalism exists to ask uncomfortable questions, particularly where governments prefer silence. Dirty Wars does exactly that. It reminds us that secrecy, while sometimes operationally necessary, also limits democratic accountability. Historians have long understood that governments rarely reveal the full story during wartime, and Scahill’s work provides another example of how difficult it can be to separate official narratives from the realities experienced by those on the ground.
I found Dirty Wars both engaging and thought provoking. It is not the final word on modern counterterrorism, nor does it claim to be. Instead, it serves as an invitation to examine an aspect of twenty first century warfare that remains largely hidden from public view. Even readers who disagree with Scahill’s conclusions will likely finish the book with a better appreciation of how modern special operations have evolved and why transparency remains such an important issue in democratic societies.
If your interest lies in operational military history, this may not be your first choice. If, however, you want to understand the shadowy environment in which much of modern conflict now unfolds, Dirty Wars is well worth your time. Read it critically, compare it with other perspectives, and draw your own conclusions. That is, after all, what good history and good journalism encourage us to do.
Military history has an unfortunate habit of gravitating towards the battlefield. We know the names of generals, remember the famous battles and endlessly debate tactical decisions, yet the politicians and administrators who created the institutions that made those battles possible are often left in the background. John Connor’s Anzac and Empire is a welcome corrective to that tendency.
At its heart, this is a political biography of George Foster Pearce, Australia’s longest serving Minister for Defence. That description, however, undersells the book. Connor has really written a history of Australian defence policy during the formative years of Federation, using Pearce as the thread that ties together questions of military organisation, imperial strategy, political compromise and national identity.
For many readers, Pearce will be an unfamiliar figure. That says more about Australian historical memory than it does about Pearce’s importance. While generals became national heroes, the politicians who built the machinery of defence largely disappeared from public consciousness. Connor makes a convincing case that Pearce deserves to stand alongside the better known architects of modern Australia.
One of the book’s greatest achievements is demonstrating that Australia’s military success in 1914 did not begin with mobilisation. It began years earlier in cabinet rooms, parliamentary debates, defence legislation and budget negotiations. Armies do not simply appear because governments declare war. They require organisation, training, planning and political will. Connor never loses sight of that larger picture.
His treatment of compulsory military training and the expansion of Australian naval and military capability before the First World War is particularly strong. These chapters quietly dismantle the comforting myth that Australia somehow stumbled into military competence through national enthusiasm alone. Instead, Connor shows that success rested upon years of often tedious administrative work carried out by people whose names rarely appear in popular histories.
That emphasis is refreshing because Australian military publishing still tends to favour campaign narratives over institutional history. There is certainly nothing wrong with another book on Gallipoli or the Western Front, but without understanding how Australia created the force that fought those campaigns, those histories are incomplete. Connor fills an important gap.
The research is exactly what readers should expect from a historian of Connor’s calibre. Parliamentary records, cabinet papers, official correspondence and contemporary newspapers are woven together without overwhelming the narrative. The scholarship is thorough but rarely intrusive, allowing the story to flow naturally.
Where I think the book is at its strongest is in its refusal to reduce Pearce to either hero or villain. Modern readers often expect historical biographies to reach a moral verdict. Connor wisely resists that temptation. Pearce appears as a capable, pragmatic politician navigating an exceptionally complex political landscape rather than an infallible statesman or a convenient target for hindsight.
The discussion of the conscription crisis illustrates this well. Rather than judging decisions through twenty first century values, Connor explains the competing pressures facing both Pearce and the Labor movement. Whether readers agree with Pearce’s choices or not, they are given the context necessary to understand why those choices were made.
That said, the book is not entirely without weaknesses.
Connor is perhaps a little too sympathetic towards his subject. While Pearce’s administrative achievements are undeniable, there are occasions where a more sustained critique of his shortcomings would have strengthened the biography. Pearce was an accomplished minister, but like every long serving politician he also made mistakes, misjudged situations and became entangled in bureaucratic rivalries. These episodes are acknowledged but rarely explored with the same depth as his successes.
Similarly, the book occasionally assumes a degree of familiarity with early Commonwealth politics that not every reader will possess. Those already comfortable with Federation politics will have no difficulty following the various personalities and party manoeuvres. General readers may find some chapters heavy going as governments rise and fall, alliances shift and cabinet reshuffles become central to the narrative.
Readers looking for battlefield action should also understand what this book is and what it is not. Gallipoli, the Western Front and the operational history of the AIF remain largely in the background. Connor’s focus is policy rather than combat. Personally, I regard that as one of the book’s greatest strengths, but anyone expecting a campaign history will be disappointed.
The book also raises a broader question about Australian military historiography. We have produced shelves of books celebrating battlefield achievement, yet comparatively few examining the institutions that supported those achievements. Connor demonstrates just how much remains to be written about the machinery of government, procurement, logistics and defence administration. In many ways, Anzac and Empire points towards an area of Australian military history that deserves much greater scholarly attention.
For me, one of the enduring lessons of the book is that military effectiveness begins long before soldiers enter combat. It begins with legislation, budgets, organisation and political leadership. These are rarely glamorous subjects, but they determine whether armies succeed or fail once the shooting starts.
Anzac and Empire is an important contribution to Australian military history because it shifts attention away from the battlefield and onto the institutions that made Australia’s wartime achievements possible. It restores George Foster Pearce to his rightful place as one of the principal architects of Australia’s defence system and demonstrates that politics and military history cannot be separated.
It is not a perfect book. At times Connor’s admiration for Pearce edges close to advocacy, and readers unfamiliar with early Commonwealth politics may occasionally struggle with the level of political detail. Yet these are relatively minor criticisms in what is otherwise an outstanding work of scholarship.
For anyone interested in how Australia prepared for war rather than simply how Australians fought it, this is essential reading. More importantly, it serves as a reminder that military history is about far more than battles. It is about the decisions, institutions and personalities that shape armies long before the first shot is fired.
Not because the scholarship is lacking, but because I finished the book wanting Connor to be even more critical of Pearce and more willing to explore the limitations of both the man and the defence system he helped create. That, however, is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a historian. The book leaves you wanting the conversation to continue.
One of the pleasures of researching the Australian Frontier Wars is discovering books that were never intended to be about conflict but nevertheless contain some of the best evidence for understanding it. Travellers in a Landscape: Visitors’ Impressions of the Darling Downs is one such work.
At first glance the book appears to be exactly what the title suggests: a collection of observations made by travellers passing through the Darling Downs during the nineteenth century. They describe the scenery, the towns, the stations, the roads and the people they encountered. Read simply as travel writing, it is an engaging account of one of Australia’s most important pastoral districts.
Read through the lens of frontier history, however, it becomes something much more valuable.
The earliest accounts capture the Darling Downs during the decades when European occupation was still being established. Rather than presenting the region as a settled agricultural landscape, the travellers reveal a frontier in transition. Stations were widely separated, roads were little more than tracks, communication was slow and much of the country remained under the control of Aboriginal people. The confidence that later generations associated with the Queensland pastoral industry had yet to develop.
This is where the book becomes particularly useful.
Many of the writers mention violence only in passing. A traveller notes that a station has recently been attacked. Another remarks that a district has become safer after the arrival of the Native Police. Someone else comments on the habit of carrying firearms while travelling or the construction of buildings that could be defended. None of these observations forms the centrepiece of the narrative, yet together they build a remarkably clear picture of life on a contested frontier.
Because these comments are incidental, they possess a credibility that historians often value highly. The authors were generally recording what they saw or what local residents regarded as ordinary conversation rather than attempting to justify government policy or write military history. Their casual references remind us that conflict was woven into everyday life across much of the Darling Downs during the expansion of pastoral settlement.
The book is equally valuable for what it records about Aboriginal people. Although every account reflects the assumptions and prejudices of nineteenth century colonial society, many preserve observations that would otherwise have been lost. Travellers describe camps, hunting parties, ceremonial gatherings and meetings with local communities. These descriptions are inevitably filtered through European eyes, but they remain contemporary evidence from a period when Aboriginal society was undergoing immense disruption.
One of the strengths of the collection is that it spans several decades. Readers can watch the landscape change as successive travellers revisit the district. Small stations become prosperous pastoral runs. Rough tracks become roads. Temporary huts give way to permanent homesteads. Townships emerge where only scattered buildings had stood before. At the same time, Aboriginal people appear less frequently in the narratives, reflecting the steady dispossession that accompanied colonial expansion.
For historians of the Frontier Wars, this progression is particularly revealing. The violence that marked the early years gradually disappears from the travellers’ immediate experience, not because conflict never occurred, but because the balance of power had shifted decisively in favour of the colonial authorities. The silence itself becomes part of the historical story.
Like every primary source, the book must be read critically. These are overwhelmingly European voices, shaped by the cultural assumptions of their time. Their descriptions cannot simply be accepted at face value and should always be compared with official records, archaeological evidence, Aboriginal oral histories and other contemporary accounts. Used in that way, however, they become exceptionally valuable evidence.
For anyone researching the Darling Downs, pastoral expansion or the Australian Frontier Wars, Travellers in a Landscape deserves a place on the shelf. It is not a military history and it does not set out to explain frontier conflict, yet it repeatedly illuminates both. Sometimes the most revealing evidence comes from people who never realised they were recording history at all.
Historical travel accounts are often overlooked because they seem descriptive rather than analytical. That would be a mistake here. This volume provides a series of contemporary snapshots of the Darling Downs at the very moment European settlement was transforming the region. For those interested in the realities of early pastoral occupation and the conflict that accompanied it, these travellers left behind far more than impressions of the scenery. They recorded, often without intending to, the lived experience of a frontier at war.
I would thoroughly recommend the book to Historians of colonial Queensland, researchers of the Australian Frontier Wars, local historians, genealogists and anyone interested in nineteenth-century travel writing as a historical source. I also think this is the sort of book that rewards a second reading. The first time through you notice the descriptions of the landscape. The second time you begin noticing the throwaway comments about armed travel, abandoned stations, Native Police patrols and Aboriginal resistance. Those brief observations are often where the richest historical evidence lies.
Until recently, I had never read any of H. P. Lovecraft’s work. I knew the name, naturally, and had a passing familiarity with Cthulhu, ancient cults, forbidden books and a variety of unpleasant creatures equipped with more tentacles than any respectable animal should require. Like many people, I knew Lovecraft largely through the things that had been built from his ideas rather than through the stories themselves.
Strangely enough, it was the Dracula’s America series of wargaming rules books that finally sent me back towards the original source material. Those books mix Gothic horror, supernatural creatures and nineteenth century adventure into a setting designed for the tabletop, and they reminded me how much modern gaming owes to older horror fiction. Lovecraft is not the direct source for everything found in Dracula’s America, of course, but the books encouraged me to investigate the writers whose monsters, cults and supernatural conspiracies have become such a familiar part of gaming.
I read the Kindl3 Unlimited version available on Amazon.
I therefore approached The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft as someone who knew the scenery but had never visited the original location. I recognised the ancient ruins, sinister villages, suspicious locals and unfortunate scholars, but I had not previously encountered them as Lovecraft first presented them.
Reading the complete works was both more interesting and more difficult than I expected.
Lovecraft is also one of those writers who seems to leave very little room for a middle position. There are readers who absolutely love his work and regard every swollen sentence as part of the atmosphere, while others find his writing almost unbearable. His prose, ideas and prejudices make him a deeply polarising figure, and after reading the complete collection I can understand both reactions. At his best, he is original, unsettling and enormously influential. At his worst, he is repetitive, overwritten and difficult to defend.
At his best, Lovecraft is capable of creating an atmosphere that remains genuinely disturbing. His horror does not usually depend upon a monster jumping from behind a curtain and eating somebody. It develops slowly, often through letters, journals, newspaper reports, local rumours and the discoveries of narrators who would have been much happier had they remained at home and taken up gardening.
H. P. Lovecraft
The characters gradually discover that humanity is neither important nor secure. The universe is ancient, enormous and entirely indifferent to whether people survive in it. The creatures are not necessarily evil in the conventional sense because they barely recognise humanity as something worth hating. People are simply in the way, much as insects might be in the way of a road being built.
This remains Lovecraft’s strongest idea. The horror comes from knowledge rather than violence. His characters discover something about the universe, history or their own ancestry and immediately wish they had not. Survival is rarely the same thing as victory. At best, the narrator escapes with enough sanity remaining to write a warning that nobody else will believe.
Stories such as The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness make it easy to understand why Lovecraft’s reputation has endured. They have memorable settings, powerful ideas and a steadily increasing sense that something is very wrong. The reader is given fragments of information and invited to assemble them, although the finished picture is rarely one that improves anybody’s day.
For anyone who does not feel the need to read every surviving piece, the stories most worth the effort are:
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Dunwich Horror
At the Mountains of Madness
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Shadow Out of Time
The Rats in the Walls
The Music of Erich Zann
That selection contains most of Lovecraft’s strongest ideas and enough ancient horror, suspicious ancestry and doomed scholarship to satisfy anyone without requiring them to read the entire collection.
Unfortunately, reading the complete works also makes Lovecraft’s weaknesses impossible to ignore.
Lovecraft was not consistently brilliant, and a complete collection naturally includes stories, fragments and experiments that would probably receive far less attention had they been written by somebody without his reputation. Some pieces are excellent, several are interesting, and others feel like preliminary attempts at ideas that were handled much better elsewhere.
The plots can also become repetitive. Another educated narrator discovers another ancient document before travelling to another isolated location where the locals are plainly behaving suspiciously. There are hidden tunnels, unpleasant family histories and warnings that are ignored because no character in horror fiction has ever benefited from listening to the person who tells them not to open the locked door.
After reading enough Lovecraft, it becomes advisable to avoid old houses, remote fishing villages, archaeological expeditions and relatives who refuse to discuss the family tree.
His prose can be equally exhausting. Lovecraft was clearly a man who distrusted the idea that one adjective might be sufficient. Buildings are not merely old. They are ancient, decaying, unnatural, oppressive and architecturally offensive to the entire structure of reality.
He also spends a great deal of time describing things as impossible to describe, usually immediately before describing them at considerable length. After several hundred pages, this begins to lose some of its impact. If everything is beyond human understanding, the reader might reasonably wonder how the narrator managed to fill three pages explaining its shape, colour, smell and probable ancestry.
This overwriting does sometimes work. In the strongest stories, the language contributes to a feverish and dreamlike atmosphere. The narrators sound like men struggling to explain something they barely understand, and the excessive descriptions help create a sense of panic and instability.
In the weaker stories, however, it feels as though Lovecraft is standing behind the reader repeatedly announcing that everything is extremely horrible in case the point has been missed.
There are also stories that can be safely avoided unless the reader is determined to see everything Lovecraft wrote. Among the least rewarding are:
The Street
The Horror at Red Hook
The Moon Bog
The Beast in the Cave
The Alchemist
The Tomb
The Transition of Juan Romero
The Very Old Folk
The Festival
He
Some of these contain interesting ideas or flashes of atmosphere, but most are weakened by repetition, crude characterisation, excessive prose or attitudes that have aged very badly. They are more useful for watching Lovecraft develop as a writer than for providing much pleasure on their own.
There is also no sensible way to discuss Lovecraft without addressing his racism. It is not limited to one unfortunate passage that can be quietly stepped around. Fear of foreigners, immigration, racial mixing and supposed human degeneration appears repeatedly in his work. These attitudes sometimes form part of the basic structure of the horror rather than merely appearing in the background.
His cultists, outsiders and supposedly corrupted communities are often described through prejudices that were Lovecraft’s own. These passages are uncomfortable, and they should be. Literary influence does not require us to pretend that offensive material is harmless simply because the author has been dead for a long time.
Lovecraft was undoubtedly a product of his period, but he was also extreme even by the standards of that period. Recognising the importance of his work does not require excusing everything within it. A reader can admire the imagination behind the stories while remaining critical of the fears and prejudices that helped shape them.
In some respects, reading the complete collection is probably the worst possible introduction to Lovecraft. A carefully selected anthology would provide the strongest stories while avoiding much of the repetition and many of the weaker pieces. The complete works provide everything, including material that demonstrates why editors normally select.
On the other hand, the collection allows the reader to watch Lovecraft’s ideas develop. The recurring themes become clearer, as do the connections between ancient civilisations, forbidden knowledge, inherited corruption and humanity’s insignificance. It also shows that the modern version of the Cthulhu Mythos is often more organised than Lovecraft’s original fiction.
Games and later writers have turned the Mythos into something resembling a catalogue. Creatures are given names, categories, powers and relationships. In wargaming terms, they acquire movement rates, combat values and points costs.
Lovecraft’s own stories are far less tidy. His universe is vague, contradictory and only partly explained. This uncertainty is one of its strengths. The reader is never given a reliable field guide explaining which creature belongs to which faction and what weapon is required to defeat it.
This creates a problem when adapting Lovecraft to the tabletop. Games require rules, measurements and outcomes. A creature that is supposed to exist beyond human understanding must eventually be given a profile and placed on a table. Once an ancient cosmic horror has a points value and a clearly defined saving throw, some of the mystery has inevitably wandered away.
Even so, Lovecraft provides excellent material for gaming. Isolated towns, secret cults, archaeological expeditions, ruined cities, nervous academics and sailors who have seen too much all offer possibilities for scenarios. The most successful games would not necessarily involve defeating the monster. They might instead require players to discover what is happening, prevent a ritual, recover a document or escape before the entire expedition becomes a footnote in somebody else’s investigation.
This is where the influence of games such as Dracula’s America becomes particularly interesting. The rules translate Gothic and supernatural horror into something that can be played, fought over and resolved on the tabletop. Returning to Lovecraft demonstrates how difficult that process can be. The game requires answers, while the fiction works best when the reader is denied them.
Having completed the collection, I cannot claim to have become a devoted Lovecraft enthusiast. There is too much repetition, too much inflated prose and too much objectionable material for me to accept the whole body of work without criticism.
I can, however, understand why the best stories have survived. Lovecraft created images and ideas that have escaped their original setting and spread across fiction, film, roleplaying and wargaming. Most people now encounter his influence long before they encounter his writing.
That was certainly true in my case. The Dracula’s America books encouraged me to go back to the older horror traditions that helped shape modern supernatural gaming. Lovecraft was only part of that tradition, but he was an important part, and reading the original stories has made me look differently at the games that borrowed from them.
The complete works contain moments of genuine brilliance, stretches of frustrating repetition and enough adjectives to supply several ordinary writers for life. It is an uneven, difficult and frequently uncomfortable collection, but it is also the foundation for a remarkable amount of modern horror.
If you’ve been wondering why there haven’t been many book reviews appearing lately, the answer is quite simple. I have been far better at buying and reading books than I have been at actually writing about them. The “to be reviewed” pile has now reached the point where it is beginning to look less like a stack of books and more like a minor geological feature that has toppled over quite a few times already! If left much longer, I suspect it will require its own contour map.
So, over the next few weeks, the blog is going to have quite a few book reviews while I attempt to regain control of the situation. There will be military history, Australian history, frontier conflict, wargaming, memoirs, and probably a few books that have been sitting patiently on the review shelf wondering if I had forgotten they existed. I haven’t. I’ve simply been distracted by reading the next one before finishing the review of the previous one.
As always, these won’t be just star ratings or “I liked it” summaries. I’ll be looking at the quality of the research, the arguments the authors make, how well they support their conclusions, and, of course, whether the books are worth your time and money. With any luck I’ll reduce the backlog before I buy another armful of books… although history suggests that’s about as likely as leaving a bookshop empty handed.
As always thanks to ChatGPT for help with the image.
With the Dagon cult well underway, my attention has turned to the second gang for my growing Dracula’s America collection, the Dark Confederacy. Nothing has reached the painting table yet, but the planning is in full swing, and this is often where the character of a force really begins to emerge.
Rather than building the gang from a single range, I am planning to combine figures from several collections to create something that feels unique. The core will come from the official Dark Confederacy miniatures, but they will be joined by Quantrill’s Raiders from North star Miniatures. The mix should produce a force that looks less like a uniform military unit and more like a band of cursed veterans, outlaws, and restless dead who have gathered beneath the same tattered banner.
Among the characters waiting to join the gang are a sinister Stitch Doctor, whose gruesome talents ensure that even death is not always permanent, and a grim Gravedigger, a figure who seems perfectly suited to a world where the dead rarely stay buried. Both add plenty of narrative flavour and reinforce the Gothic horror that sits at the heart of the Dark Confederacy.
There are also two more additional blister packs providing me with heaps of option/
Visually, I am aiming for faded Confederate greys, worn leather, rusted weapons, and equipment that has seen decades of hard use. The basing will contrast with my Dagon cult, replacing swamp mud with dry earth, dead grass, broken fencing, scattered gravestones, and abandoned homesteads. I want the gang to look as though it has marched straight out of forgotten battlefields and neglected churchyards, carrying the bitterness of the Civil War into the supernatural frontier.
One of the great strengths of Dracula’s America is that every faction tells a different story. The Dagon cult represents ancient cosmic horror lurking beneath the swamps, while the Dark Confederacy embodies a nation haunted by its own past, where old loyalties, old hatreds, and old ghosts refuse to die.
For now the project remains firmly in the planning stage. The figures are assembled, ideas are coming together, and the gang is beginning to take shape on paper. Before long, these undead veterans and their macabre companions will be riding out across the Weird West, where every lonely crossroads and abandoned cemetery offers another opportunity for darkness to rise once more.
The real centrepiece, however, will be the Pale Rider. Cloaked in dark, weathered clothing and mounted on a ghostly horse, he is the very image of death riding the frontier. Whether viewed as a supernatural gunslinger, an immortal Confederate officer, or one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Pale Rider radiates quiet menace rather than theatrical horror. He does not need to shout or threaten. His presence alone suggests that someone’s final reckoning has arrived. I am looking forward to painting him in muted tones, with an emphasis on cold greys, faded black leather, and a spectral mount that will stand apart from the rest of the gang while still tying into the army’s sombre palette.
Ever thought about writing your own tabletop wargame rules?
I’ll be at Victorious 2026 this year, and one of the books I’ll have available in the Indie Games Hall is A Wargamer’s Guide to Writing Rules.
At 378 pages, it is a practical handbook written for gamers who have ideas but are not always sure how to turn them into a playable and enjoyable set of rules. Rather than focusing on a single period or scale, the book explores the principles that underpin good game design and shows how to apply them to your own projects.
The guide covers everything from identifying what you want your rules to achieve, through movement, combat, morale, command systems, scenario design, campaign systems, probability, playtesting, balancing mechanics, writing clearly, and presenting a finished set of rules that other people will actually enjoy reading and playing. Whether you are creating your first rule set or refining one you have been working on for years, there is something here to help.
To celebrate Victorious, the book will be available for:
RRP: AU$32.94 Victorious Price:AU$20.00
That’s a saving of almost 40%. Email me at guru@gurupig.com to reserve your copies now.
If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I’ve got an idea for a set of rules,” this book was written for you.
Progress continues on my Dagon posse, and this session saw the Priest of Dagon completed alongside three pistol armed cultists and a rifle armed cultist. I also finished the basing, giving the whole group the appearance of emerging from a forgotten swamp rather than standing on gaming bases. Mud, stagnant pools, reeds, and patches of decaying vegetation have brought the warband together into a force that already has plenty of character, although there is still more to come.
There are places where the marsh never truly sleeps. The locals avoid them after dark, speaking only in whispers of strange lights over the water and voices carried across the reeds on nights when the mist hangs low. Fishermen who stray too close sometimes vanish without a trace, while those fortunate enough to return refuse to speak of what they found beneath the black water.
At the centre of the growing cult stands the Priest of Dagon. He is not simply a leader but a preacher of ancient truths, proclaiming that mankind’s dominion over the land is only temporary. His followers believe that the sea remembers everything, and that beneath the quiet surface an ancient power waits patiently for the faithful to prepare the way.
The three pistol armed cultists form the priest’s closest followers, fanatics who protect him with unquestioning devotion. The rifleman provides a watchful eye from the edge of the swamp, his silhouette barely visible through the reeds as he guards the approaches to whatever forgotten shrine lies hidden beyond the marsh.
The swamp basing has probably been my favourite part of the project so far because it helps tell the story before a single die is rolled. The dark earth, wet ground, reeds, and murky pools suggest a landscape that is slowly surrendering itself to the sea. It feels like the sort of place where every ripple on the water deserves a second look, and where every patch of mist might conceal something that should never have left the depths.
The posse is not quite complete. Still to join the cult are the mysterious Emissary of Dagon, a scaly hybrid whose humanity has almost disappeared beneath the marks of the Deep Ones, and a tentacled hybrid whose very appearance hints that the transformation is far more advanced than anyone would willingly imagine. Together they should give the force an even stronger sense of creeping corruption and cosmic horror.
With those final three figures still on the painting bench, the congregation is steadily growing. Soon the Priest of Dagon will no longer be preaching to a handful of devoted followers but to a gathering that marks the beginning of something far older and far more dangerous than the unsuspecting world above the swamp could ever understand.
The swamp bases
Also Crooked dice have some excellent figures to fit in.
3 Sets of Townsfolk, cultists, Deep Ones, a priest, and Dagon himself! I am sorely tempted! I am still hunting for a figure that might suit Robert Olmstead, the narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It is remarked that his eyes have the same strange quality seen in all descendants of Obed Marsh. In the story’s final pages, he learns he himself is the great-great-grandson of Obed Marsh and a Deep One, and in time will become one of the amphibious monsters he witnessed in Innsmouth.
