Purple Heresy looks at 2016, part 2 of 2

So… non novel releases. There were a LOT of things like this to write about in 2016. And I’m a bit more positive about this side of the Black Library line.

The HH Primarchs: Roboute Guilliman, Lord of Ultramar: 

Like a lot of the HH developments of this year, I’m conflicted about the announcement of the ‘Horus Heresy: Primarchs’ series. If these all end up being Crusade-era with frequent foreboding reference to post-Heresy events, then that’s kind of boring. I don’t love Ultramarines stories, and Annandale is thus far a slightly uneven writer (can end up a little too grimdark). However, this ended up being one of the most enjoyable Heresy stories of the year – maybe, as with ‘Angels of Caliban’, because my expectations were low. Trust David Annandale to show us a dark side of the XIII Legion, of all things (if not a dark side of their Primarch, who still, despite everything, is one of the most likeable Loyalists). It helped that central to the plot were the mysterious Nemesis chapter, the Ultramarines Destroyer cadre I’d been dying to find out more about since I read about them in ‘Tempest’. And hell, in the year of ‘The Beast Arises’ when at times I prayed I’d never have to read another orks v space marines battle, David made that scenario pretty fucking tolerable, even great at times. Kind of brilliant!

The HH Primarchs: Leman Russ, The Great Wolf: 

I need to restate here how much I fucking love Chris Wraight as a writer and as a cool guy who’s nice to fans, since it sort of feels like I’m kicking him around a bit in this entry… but I’m sort of done with Chris writing about Heresy-era Space Wolves. I mean, I liked Russ’ role in ‘Scars’ (and he sure as hell can write about ‘modern’ Space Wolves – I loved ‘Blood of Asaheim’) but I found ‘Wolf King’ overall pretty dull. Chris has picked up the baton from Dan Abnett about as well as you could reasonably expect, and I’m not sure if there are any writers on the bench right now who could do a better job. That doesn’t stop ‘The Great Wolf’ from being a bit of a missed opportunity.

This story weaves together a few different strands: the Wolves’ attitude and warmaking style in the Great Crusade, the 13^th Company’s struggle with the Canis Helix/'curse of the Wulfen', the rivalry between the Lion and Leman Russ, and (similar to in the Roboute story) the post-Scouring dourness of Russ and the Space Wolves, now forced into the restrictive box of being a ‘Chapter’. It’s an interesting group of concepts, but it at once seems too short and too languid: the first two-thirds are a bit of a slog, the pieces slowly being manoeuvred into place, while the last reel seems incredibly rushed. 

If I had my way, I would have liked to have seen this book be a little longer and to have solely focused on the Russ/Lion plot; the Lion sadly isn’t developed much being a nasty/posh foil to Russ’ likeable barbarity, but flashes of an interesting character can be seen beneath it all. (There’s also a scene here that completely contradicts what I’d always understood as the post-Siege timeline for the First Legion, but, well, fuck it.) Chris is a gifted writer and I think he’d definitely smash an in-depth character study of Lion ‘El Johnson, but… not this time.

Short Fiction: 

This year, short stories are one area that I can unreservedly say was a success for Horus Heresy fiction. Perhaps that’s because so few were published? Part of me hopes they don’t do many more HH short stories because focusing on novels seems smarter – but there are some really good short story writers in BL and the economy of form here suits them down to the ground. I’ll skip over my least favourite story, ADB’s ‘Into Exile’ – a ‘Memento’-style backwards story about Arkhan Land’s escape from Mars that seemed pretty dang unnecessary – and instead talk about my most favourite, ‘Blackshield’, written by Chris Wraight. The Blackshields (a catch-all term for Heresy-era Marines who have allegiance neither to the Imperium or Horus) of course make an appearance, as does Crysos Morturg, the improbably named Loyalist Death Guard Isstvan III survivor who has featured heavily in the Forge World material. Chris was absolutely the right choice to integrate this FW material into the ‘mainline’ series, and I hope he gets the chance to pick up this story as part of a longer work. On top of this, Chris is carrying on his quest of retroactively making Graham’s hit-or-miss Mortarion scenes in ‘Vengeful Spirit’ look way better by giving them more context and emotional weight. What a nice guy to help out Graham like this! Chris Wraight also wrote the quickie ‘Last Son of Prospero’, which potentially closes down the most irritating things about the Arvida storyline, and opens the door for that character to potentially do some interesting (unique??) stuff going forward.

‘Myriad’ was another awesome ‘fight for Mars’ story, but at this point I’m already convinced that Rob Sanders is the guy to tackle the climactic Martian Civil War book – any further stories like this will seem like throat-clearing. And ‘The Painted Count’ sees Guy Haley get back to doing (arguably) what he does best: writing really good ‘Prince of Crows’ fanfic. Once upon a time, a story like this would make me say Guy should be doing ‘Nightfall’ rather than ADB, but after ‘Pharos’… well, maybe a third option is the best choice.

Jim Swallow’s ‘Exocytosis’, a follow-up to the epilogue of ‘Angels of Caliban’, left me conflicted. On the one hand, it feels like Jim completely wasted the cool setup of Fallen Angels and Traitor Death Guard teaming up, instead making both factions mistrust each other and barely interacting. He also reused the ‘zombie Nurgle cultists’ antagonists from ‘Garro: Legion of One’, and I felt like his Dark Angel characters were a little one-dimensional. Despite all these complaints, I loved Jim’s portrayal of Typhon here and how it dealt with his supercharged slide into corruption without seeming rushed. If he is the one who has to write a Fall of Mortarion novel, then on this evidence I am good with it (though of course Wraight would be my first choice).

Audio: 

It was less of a marquee year for audio stuff, though maybe ‘Thirteenth Wolf’ will change my mind when I get to listening to it. Lowlight for sure was ‘Red-Marked’, an overlong trudge that saw Nick Kyme burning the last remaining goodwill I had from ‘Censure’ – I really don’t care about Aeonid Thiel anymore, that’s for sure. This was also structured very poorly; opening with a flashback that you re-tell in full over the course of the story is maybe OK in print, but in a ‘time is precious’ format like audio? Fuck that. Lastly, I think it’s fucked up that this was a full-price MP3 in January and within a few months it was available in print as part of ‘Eye of Terra’. If I’d known I wouldn’t have fucking bothered!

Laurie Goulding’s ‘The Dark Between the Stars’ (AKA ‘The Heart of the Pharos’) was certainly better; Laurie has the Guy Haley-like ability to imbue his stories with a really winning enthusiasm for the material, but this storyline isn’t done much justice in its tie-in novel, ‘Pharos’. Hovering midway between disappointment and reassurance is ‘Valerius’, a short audio picking up the badly botched Therion Cohort story after ‘Corax’ / ‘Weregeld’; Beta-Garmon will hopefully get a full novel soon, but this isn’t a great appetiser. Marcus Valerius’ story continuing is at least a positive; Marcus Valerius’ story continuing thanks to a literal deus ex machina is something I’m much less keen on.

Recent surprise ‘Children of Sicarus’ feels like it should have been my favourite this year, with so many parts falling into place (the return of Anthony Reynolds to the Heresy! A follow-up to Dan Abnett’s ‘Macragge’s Honour’ letting us know what Kor Phaeron did next! A Traitor Legion adapting to a daemon world! A cool ‘female’ daemon antagonist!) but I can’t 100 percent back it, because I think Anthony Reynolds can do much better. This will hopefully be the foundation for a really cool Scouring-era Kor Phaeron novel, I guess. Slightly more cogent to the HH narrative as a whole was the Eidolon drama ‘The Soul, Severed’, which did skip over the Mortarion/Eidolon shipping I had hoped to get more of after ‘Path of Heaven’ (but my guess is we’ll see Morty and Eido’s sweet goodbye at the beginning of the next Death Guard book). If there’s a criticism I can make of ‘The Soul, Severed’ it’s that it felt like a re-tread of a few of the year’s ‘best bits’ done better elsewhere: Eidolon being a shit, lethal Legion infighting, the moment of “And so, onward to Terra” that it feels like we’ve had five or six times now, the portrayal of the last slide from ‘real bad traitors’ to ‘actual Chaos Space Marines’. Still, Wraight owns this character: Abnett sketched him, McNeill painted over that first in broad strokes, then slightly more subtly, but Wraight has put the finishing touches on Eidolon.

I think in the end my favourite audio in 2016 has been ‘Perpetual’. It was a short Abnett-penned sequel to ‘Unmarked’, which I’ve been anticipating for a while. It feels like it needs at least one more short story before it ‘gets anywhere’, but I’m really hoping that (as rumoured) there’s at least one more Abnett novel in the Heresy series before it dies. The Alpha Legion apparently now working with warp-entities is a plot point that annoyed me a bit, but unlike with the other Alpha Legion bullshit this year, I near-instantly went from annoyance to thinking “Hmm, I want to know more about how we get to this point and where we go from here.”

I want to give a special not-quite-Horus-Heresy ‘participation award’ to The Beast Arises series. The series was seriously, seriously flawed in a lot of ways. Whole storylines were dropped or (worse) had their resolutions botched. The midsection of the series was extremely flabby (three assaults on the enemy stronghold using pretty much the same approach?). Gav Thorpe ruined my hopes for the #GavThorpeWinning2016 hashtag by contributing one of the worst, most boring pieces of 40K fiction I’ve ever read (‘The Beast Must Die’). The concluding volume was two or three novels’ worth of plot resolution jammed into one novella; it made a valiant effort, but it was doomed to miss a lot of its swings. I have to put this in the positives, though. The sheer balls-out insanity/improbability of Black Library saying they would do a novel-a-month full series in the space of one year and actually hitting that target is an achievement in itself. But the fact that a good amount of the series ended up being really solid – maybe I’d even say fantastic - makes TBA something I have to applaud. 

In particular, David Guymer and Rob Sanders made a potentially goofy/dumb ‘Imperial Fists descendants team up with Iron Warriors’ storyline something haunting and elegant. And, hey, it’s cool that we got a little snapshot of the post-Scouring Imperium. I’m hoping this means we’ll get some more miniseries in the time between 30K and 40K.

Lastly, let’s look at what’s allegedly coming out in 2017. (Shout out to ‘Track of Words’ for the info on what they said about this at the recent Weekender; you can read their rundown here. https://trackofwords.wordpress.com/2016/11/24/black-library-live-coming-soon-the-horus-heresy/ ) I am saving my ‘Garro’ ebook as a treat, and I haven’t cracked open my Forge Word ‘Inferno’ book yet, but I’m looking forward to getting to grips with both of them. 

As for new novel material, at last, ‘The Crimson King’ looks like it’s finally coming out; sure, I remain one of the few who doesn’t love Graham’s ‘A Thousand Sons’, but I’m certainly interested in reading another (final?) Heresy book from the man who gave us ‘Angel Exterminatus’ and ‘Vengeful Spirit’. David Annandale has ‘Ruinstorm’ in the pipeline, which should finally put the capper on the Imperium Secundus storyline; I’m not sure that’s a scenario that will allow Annandale to put his best skills to use, but I have faith that will be a strong novel. I’m less excited about ‘Old Earth’, Nick Kyme’s final chapter in his Vulkan series. There was a time when I thought maybe Nick wasn’t as bad as the more negative fans insisted… but honestly, I can’t really say a single nice thing about anything he’s done over the last few years. Unfortunately, this is apparently also going to finish off the Meduson / Marr storyline… Fuck, I really had hoped Graham or Dan would wrap that up.

The HH Primarchs stories will continue, with Perturabo (Guy Haley), Lorgar (Gav Thorpe) and Fulgrim (Josh Reynolds) up next. I'm certainly interested in reading more about all those guys - no complaints here... though I am worried about that Lorgar book. He's a character that can all too easily fall into one-note 'evil priest' pantomime, and Gav's characterisations don't really tend towards the subtle...

Word is on the street that the mainline Horus Heresy series may stretch beyond 50 books after all. We still have some information to come to us about the last few books leading up to the siege, but Dan Abnett is rumoured to be penciled in for the last book. That makes me oddly optimistic. And there are some other interesting projects on the horizon; Chris Wraight and John French have Inquisition-centred series starting this year (could this mean BL may acknowledge that a certain long-dormant Inquisitor-themed novel series might be worth finishing?). Aaron’s new Black Legion book will doubtless be a self indulgent mess but at the same time, I’m sure it’ll be worth reading. And perhaps most intriguingly, after a looooooooong hiatus the Gaunt’s Ghosts series is getting another installment courtesy of Dan Abnett aka The Man Who Wasn’t There. 

It's not 2015. There are things to be excited about in the Black Library upcoming release schedule again. I just don’t know if I have it in me anymore to be excited enough. I don't have the commitment and energy to read and re-read those books, scribbling notes down on the bus, turning them into long messy reviews and posting them.

I’m not sure PurpleHeresy has a future. If not…. Well, it was fun while it lasted. If it does have one... I'll see you for that 'Damnation of Pythos' review one day!

Love and kisses

IndieFaceKillah

PS: Formatting is fucked up on this post! I'm sorry, I'm trying to remove i

Purple Heresy Looks At 2016! Part 1 of 2

So. This entry is a real bummer to write. But I’m formalising what’s probably very apparent to anyone who’s been checking PurpleHeresy in 2016. I am considering mothballing the site for now (to use a gross/anachronistic phrase). I didn’t think that a year could end up rougher than 2015, which had one deeply mediocre novel to tide us through… but I think my feelings as 2016 closes are more profoundly negative as a HH fan than they were for 2015. At least with 2015 I could say “Sure, it’s bad, but think of all the marquee titles that await us!” 2016 was when those books came out and were… mostly bad, in my opinion.

So why not just write about that? Why not continue the day-to-day operation of PurpleHeresy but fill it with poison pen reviews? Well… that goes back to the whole reason I started this blog. I would always look at the response to Horus Heresy (even just general Black Library) books on forums and be disheartened by how negative and dismissive people were. I always wanted PurpleHeresy to be… not that. (Of course, I was originally going to somehow combine my love of hip-hop mixtapes with my love of Horus Heresy on one review site, so the original concept seems pretty far away now, but still.)

This entry is going to be 2 things: 1) way too fucking long 2) a valedictory ‘overview’ of what happened in 2016. Before I get underway with my complaining, I’ll just note what I haven’t checked out yet and therefore won’t be commenting on: I haven’t listened to ‘The Thirteenth Wolf’. I haven’t finished ‘Sons of the Forge’; my Kindle tells me I’m not quite halfway through it, though I’ve been slogging through for – literally – months. Also, I haven’t read ‘Fabius Bile: Primogenitor’ which feels like it could have quite a bit of relevance to the Heresy series. Still, I think I’ve absorbed like 95% of Horus Heresy material published in 2016.

So here we go. 2016 Horus Heresy novels.

Pharos: 

It seems a little like cheating to put Pharos on here, since it dropped as an e-book in very late 2015, but I only really count them from when the ‘dead tree’ format drops. That’s not very modern of me, I guess.

This novel felt like it should be a lock: it was a follow-up in the ‘Unremembered Empire’ strand, which began as one of the most entrancing and strange plots in the whole Heresy series. Furthermore, it was being written by Guy Haley, someone who’d showed he was excellent at picking up characters and plots other authors had discarded – as a follow-up to his Night Lords story ‘A Safe and Shadowed Place’ alone, I was looking forward to it.

As it turned out, Guy’s ambition to continue ‘Unremembered Empire’ didn’t produce great results: he can’t write Primarchs as well as Dan (well, few can, but this story leaned on them a lot), and his heroic ‘blue team’ space marines tend towards the dull - a dangerous situation when you’re dealing with a lot of VII Legion and XIII Legion characters, which in my (admittedly biased) viewpoint are dull by default. Most disappointing was the way the Night Lords story went – I ended up feeling like most of what happened was pretty pointless.

Upon finishing ‘Pharos’, I got a feeling of: is that it? Is that how far the story has progressed after this quite-long novel? Not that I am desperate for the end of the HH series, but I was expecting both the Imperium Secundus and Night Lords plot threads to be much closer to the endgame when I reached the last page. As it turned out, so many things just seemed functionally the same as they were when the story started. It wasn’t the last time I would feel that about 2016 HH material, and looking back on it in the context of 2016 as a whole, 'Pharos' is at least not actively *bad*.

Eye of Terra / The Silent War: 

Not going to spend long talking about these, mostly because I haven’t read them as collections, but I am already familiar with all the material. It’s great that BL are catering to all the people who don’t want to consume their work as mp3s or ebooks, and they could potentially be some of the best compilation books in the whole series, but I’m not going to count these towards what’s good or bad about 2016: they belong to the past.

Path of Heaven: 

Amongst the HH novels of 2016, to my mind ‘Path of Heaven’ is by far the best-written, and the only one I’d consider comparing favourably with some of the past highlights of the series. The timeskip felt clumsy, I was disappointed by some of Wraight’s III Legion characters, and perhaps at times it felt like it was more ‘Scars Part II’ than the fresh, individual story it ideally should have been, but I ended up satisfied with how it pushed this plot line forwards and the way the characters evolved. 

But considering how joyous and positive ‘Scars’ felt, and how energised and enthusiastic I felt about the series as a whole when I finished it, I have to say, boy, was ‘Path of Heaven’ not like that. Can I fault it for being, by necessity, a bit of a downer? Hardly, but… boy, was ‘Scars’ a breath of fresh air; I just hope we get another book with that energy from Black Library sometime.

Angels of Caliban: 

While I said ‘Path of Heaven’ is the best HH book of 2016, it was a little disappointing by virtue of just how high my expectations were, and I’d say ‘Angels of Caliban’ is the one I most enjoyed this year (although, yep, it was a little disappointing as well). I came to this thinking it would be average at best, since Gav Thorpe is not near my personal ‘top tier’ of BL authors, but in particular the Caliban story strand was an enjoyable (if somewhat derivative) high-tension, high-intrigue romp that I’m enthusiastic to see continued. 

The Lion El’Johnson/’Unremembered Empire’ strand was a lot more hit-and-miss (the Dreadwing are lame as shit, and Gav can’t write Primarch interactions anywhere near as well as Dan Abnett) but ‘AoC’ comfortably takes second place for 2016 and is easily the best First Legion long-form story we’ve seen for the Heresy. Good work, Gav! On this book, at least...

Praetorian of Dorn: 

Hhhhhhhh...

Dan Abnett’s ‘Legion’ made me care about the Alpha Legion in ways I’d not thought possible. Subsequent XX Legion-focused fiction like ‘The Serpent Beneath’ and ‘The Seventh Serpent’ didn’t always measure up, but it felt like the authors at least got why so many people loved Dan’s creative take on these mysterious psychopaths; I really didn’t get why they seemed so hell-bent on moving the focus away from the Cabal and the labyrinthine schemes of the AL's human operatives, but they had some interesting ideas. 

So how would the next Alpha Legion-focused novel ‘sequelise’ ‘Legion’? Well… essentially, by ignoring it and ignoring all AL plotlines in the series, and ending with a big punch in the dick to all the ‘twin serpent’ fanboys out there.

While initially sold as an Alpha Legion novel, actually ‘Praetorian of Dorn’ pushes the Imperial Fists to the fore (as the title implies). John French clearly loves the Fists, which is a good thing in theory, but the way he portrays them is incredibly boring to me. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted to smack an emo anime character as much as I want to smack French-written ‘oh so deep and tortured’ Sigismund, but at least he’s barely featured; still, the ‘jaded wise old guy / young idealistic rookie’ dual protagonists of this book are equally predictable and non-engaging.

It’s made more frustrating by the fact John is obviously a capable, gifted writer – some combat sections, particularly early in the book, are gritty and cold masterworks of ‘hard SF’ writing, and this guy can build dramatic tension like a motherfucker. But how the plot ended up, the character motivations, and the way that the ‘good guys’ in particular lean so hard on well-worn character tropes… all of that made it difficult to enjoy.

Maybe I’m too close to this to be as objective as I’ve prided myself on being for most of my reviews, since it is the first book in 8 years dealing with my favourite Legion. Am I just a weeping AL fanboy saying “this book is bad because it makes my home team look bad”? Am I taking this as the ending of an early-HH arc when in fact it’s just a late-HH arc beginning? Maybe I’ll look back in 5 years and say hey man, ‘Praetorian of Dorn’ is GOOD NOW. It’s not impossible.

I don't think that's going to happen. Ultimately, this book kills a character and storyline that, in my view, was potentially one of the most interesting and satisfying in the whole HH series, and… to what end? Why? Seriously, WHAT WAS ALPHARIUS THINKING WITH HIS ACTIONS THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK BUT PARTICULARLY AT THE END?

‘Praetorian of Dorn’ annoyed me so much that it made me question what I even liked about Black Library fiction. If 2016 really has led to ‘the end of PurpleHeresy’, it began here. And I'm sure as shit going to think twice about buying a John French book again.

Corax: 

On the plus side, ‘Corax’ gave me another opportunity to read ‘Ravenlord’ which I think is a really solid concept for a novella and perfectly-executed by Gav. But that was published in 2014, so we can’t really count that in its favour here. And the flaccid, uninteresting 'Soulforge' is one of the dullest pieces of writing in the whole Heresy, but, again, was first published some years ago, so that's kind of a wash. 

On the minus side, ‘Corax’ wraps up the titular Primarch’s story with ‘Weregeld’, which is… unfinished. It’s like a videogame which ships ending on a cliffhanger and then tries to sell you the ‘real ending’ as DLC. Except instead of the end of ‘Weregeld’ missing, there are huge chunks simply gone from the middle of the story (Corax! There's no time to explain these crazy circumstances! We have to fight the huge army, though you won't see the fight!) and instead of a £5 DLC add-on, it runs the risk of being filled out in a near-£100 Forge World supplement. I’ve seen Laurie Goulding’s assertion that it’s all going to make sense when we’ve read the follow-up book that’s about the Wolf Cull and Beta-Garmon and Yarant and what have you. I'm not entirely convinced. As with ‘Praetorian of Dorn’, perhaps when more books are released, I’ll look back and think "Yeah, this was a good starting point, setting up what was to come." But for now, I have to judge 'Corax' on its present merit. What is written in ‘Weregeld’ is uneven. There are some great moments, and there’s some really fucking lame bullshit as well. Even leaving the botched plotting around Yarant aside, and there are still awful character beats, which end up making Corax an extremely unsympathetic character.

Gav guided Corax’s post-Isstvan story through peaks and valleys for years. The idea that he could wrap it up in such a haphazard way and walk away saying “alright, peace, I’m happy with what I did here” is so fucking depressing.

The Master of Mankind:

Probably one of the longest-anticipated Horus Heresy novels that will ever exist, ‘The Master of Mankind’ was set up to be an anti-climax. Considering ‘Betrayer’ was the last work by ADB I really enjoyed, I adjusted my expectations waaaaay down, but ‘Master of Mankind’ was still surprisingly disappointing, which seems a fitting capper to the year.

Like John French, Aaron seems to have become a staunch advocate of portraying Astartes as Cumberbatch’s Sherlock: hyperintelligent, abrasive, arrogant, unfeeling, with no regard for social niceties. Fluff-wise, that’s perfectly sound and in fact probably the ‘truest’ way to show these characters, though a lot of other authors have basically showed Astartes as regular humans in cool armour with superpowers, and I think that’s just as acceptable. The problem with Aaron’s approach is that often it leads to characters it is difficult to empathise with or relate to on any level – and actually, a lot of them are downright detestable.

Aaron's approach has certainly worked in the past. Argel Tal, First Claw, hell, even Squad Castian are some of my favourite Space Marine characters. They are decidedly non-human in many ways, but they also have real/relateable emotional reactions to stuff – or at least their non-emotional responses are framed in a way that makes them relatable. Here… Here it feels like Aaron thinks it’s a virtue to create characters that want to push us away (they are quite literally repellent – it took a LOT of sittings for me to finish this book). To be fair, there are barely any Astartes in this book – but before you think ‘whew, bullet dodged’, most of the time when Aaron writes Mechanicum and Custodes characters they fall into the exact same trap. I almost want to applaud him for how awful these Custodes are. I mean, even at their most villainous, the Custodes so far in HH haven’t been *this* psychotic. The cantankerous Mechanicum egomaniac Arkhan Land is a halfway-great character, but seems like he’s been dropped in from another, better book (namely: some kind of 40k retelling of ‘Gormenghast’).

If a book with about a hundred Sherlocks and not a John Watson in sight sounds appealing to you then ‘The Master of Mankind’ might end up a good time. That ain’t me tho. 

As someone who is very concerned with how the existing storyline of HH is going, particularly the dearth of momentum from the Traitor side of things, and as someone who maybe isn’t desperate to learn what the Emperor is up to right now (especially when we already had a Terra-centric book this year), I might’ve never been the intended audience for ‘TMoM’. Luckily, it looks like a lot of HH fans do really like this book! And that’s good for them. But it doesn’t really ever get close to winning me over. By the time the book gets to its big tentpole revelation, it’s too little, too late. Perhaps a few years ago this twist on the Big E’s motivations would have shocked or disturbed me – by now, I just don’t fucking care. (You know what? Writing this a few months after I finished ‘TMoM’, I can’t even fucking remember what the twist was.)

And, of course, wow, we have The Emperor himself, not the ‘main character’ as such but certainly pushed to the centre as he never has been before in a Heresy novel. As Aaron states in his afterword, everyone sees a different aspect of the Emperor so there’s no ‘canon’ interpretation of him, but since every character here is basically a huge, unwiped asshole, the Emperor behaves in kind. This will certainly fuel both sides in the ‘Emperor is infallible god hero’ / ‘Horus was always right’ debate. I don’t think I care enough anymore to engage with that (but *Horus was right*, at least at first, and the Emperor is a piece of shit).

The bow to wrap all this up in? Aaron’s writing style has become unbearably pompous (I think ‘Talon of Horus’ was when he started writing like a frustrated student poet). You know, authorial style changes over time and as fans we gotta respect that, but I can't help but wish we had the old sardonic, clipped style of Aaron back. This book's ornate passages led to more eyerolls than any other this year and I can’t help but hope whoever replaces Laurie Goulding is a little less in love with Aaron’s prose and cuts it back a little.

Yep. Those last three HH novels of 2016 really fucking... sucked. Just my opinion.

In my next entry, I'll talk about the Horus Heresy releases that weren't 'mainline' this year, and what awaits us in 2016 and beyond. Yay?

"The Outcast Dead" by Graham McNeill

From the fairly limited time I spent on forums discussing (or yelling about) Horus Heresy books, I got the impression that much of the fandom considers ‘The Outcast Dead’ to be the point where the HH series took a nosedive in quality (well, either that or ‘Nemesis’). In fact, I think I only ever saw it brought up as an example of how Graham McNeill can’t plot worth shit and knows nothing about the setting, due to a fairly large/problematic plot contrivance we’ll get to later.

I actually like this book a lot – big surprise, right? So I wrote a long ass review, maybe even rivaling my 'Fulgrim' writeup. Apologies in advance for how long and rambling it ended up...

Sadly, the sick-ass 80s goggles worn by purple boy are not canonical to the book...

Before reading this book, you need a passing knowledge of the Crusade Host, because that won’t be explained too promptly or clearly in the novel. Lemme give you the Cliff notes. Essentially, each Legion left between one and three warriors on Terra, really just to act as a symbolic guardian or ambassador on the Homeworld. (The Ultramarines left five – always gotta be the best, don’t they?) These warriors were referred to as the Crusade Host. At the outbreak of the Heresy, the host numbers thirty warriors. Obviously, some of the Legions represented here have since turned traitor – but these warriors have been on Terra fifty years, so they’re unlikely to be part of the secret Lodge-fostered revolutionary plot, right? Unfortunately, Dorn, Malcador et al are not really the type to give a down-on-his-luck Astartes the benefit of the doubt. Y’all just can’t let the Space Marine man thrive! In a not-exactly-clear sequence, the Crusade Host are betrayed by one of their own number, a Thousand Sons marine who helps the Imperium's agents to capture and imprison them (though not without a fight).

John French’s ‘Riven’ and Anthony Reynolds’ ‘The Purge’ tell the stories of the X Legion and XVIII Legion Crusade Host warriors, respectively, and for the curious you can find the exact rundown of which Legion left which amount of warriors and what their names were (it was ‘bonus material’ in the limited edition of ‘The Purge’). For ‘The Outcast Dead’, though, we’ll only be meeting a small amount of the Crusade Host.

But that all comes later.

First of all, we have to set up our storyline and lead characters, some of which are established pretty quickly. First, we have disgraced astropath Kai Zulane, recently involved in a huge catastrophe which resulted in the loss of the XIII Legion vessel Argo, leaving him with PTSSD (post traumatic space-stress disorder) (yep, I guess that’s the quality of joke I’m making now). The other central character – kind of – is Yasu Nagasena, who we meet while he’s preparing to storm a fortress housing the Crusade Host, at the head of an army of three thousand human troopers. I say ‘kind of’ because he barely features in the beginning of the book. We also have a supplicant in the Petitioner’s City called Roxanne, who seems important at the beginning but is missing for most of the middle of the narrative. Yep. Graham’s naming convention continues to take the occasional wobble (Snowdog, anyone?) but she’s a pretty damn good character. I might even say she’s the best female character Graham’s written in the Heresy series. (Not that there’s much competition in his lineup of whores and matriarchs.) She’s like a much less irritating version of Dalia from ‘Mechanicum’.

Kai Zulane is bound to be divisive. He whines, he complains, he throws tantrums, he cries, he never asked to be born, and it’s good to know that if he ever needs attention all he has to do is die. For all intents and purposes, he’s a sullen teenager who hasn’t been allowed to stay out all night. Graham has created a truly obnoxious character – but Zulane is supposed to be obnoxious. I would rather read about Zulane and his selfish crying than the boring Remembrancers Graham wrote for his earlier books – and I find Zulane’s dialogue and motivations to be pretty believable, instead of the weird colourless mind of, say, his Sindermann (articulate if didactic intellectual when written by Dan, charisma-free dullard when written by Graham).

Nagasena is a little more problematic. Sure – Graham put this guy in there because he loves samurai, and why not? Who doesn’t? And what is 40K if you can’t just shove an archetype from a totally archaic culture in amongst all the spaceships and laser cannons? But the deployment of age-old Japanese warrior tropes is clumsy at best, kind of a lazy ethnic stereotype at worst (Nagasena loves gardening and painting, because, well, Japan, right?). When Chris Wraight had to justify why a technologically advanced Imperium in the 31^st Millennium would employ a Legion of Mongolian warriors who were not a million miles from the host of a 2^nd Millennium leader, he gave it his best shot (and I think he was successful). Compared to, say, Shiban in ‘Scars’, Nagasena is a blatant caricature. It's a shame, because his story arc is generally pretty damn interesting.

To begin with, our heroes are all on different parts of Terra, but news of the disaster at Isstvan V is starting to seep back to the Homeworld, and all the main characters are witness to the creeping dread and denial of an Imperium starting to realise just how fucked it is. And there’s a lot of fun in seeing Kai (ostensibly the major character of the book’s beginning) struggle through the ‘cold war’ political climate of Terra, just trying to get by, but getting caught up in events of galactic import (of course). It’s a little light on action, though. Then, just under halfway through, the representatives of Traitor Legions in the Crusade Host stage a daring escape from their super-super-hyper-max prison, Kai is caught up in the madness, and the action kicks into overload.

Hey, boy: ‘The Outcast Dead’ really fucking moves. Even in its opening chapters, where the game pieces are being set up on the board but there’s not much of what you’d call ‘action’, I’m engaged and entertained. When I consider how boring I’ve found quite a few ‘classics’ by Graham – ‘False Gods’, ‘A Thousand Sons’, the 40K Ultramarines books he wrote – I’m sometimes surprised how many of his books I think are paced superbly; this, ‘Iron Warrior’, ‘The Seventh Serpent’ and ‘Angel Exterminatus’ all spring to mind.

Our ‘second lead antagonist’, Babu Dhakal, is an out-and-out villain if Nagasena is a reluctant anti-hero. I like the idea that even at the centre of ‘the greatest galactic civilisation’ truly evil, dangerous bastards are allowed to thrive – and, well, it makes sense considering the Emperor is the boss here (evil maybe, dangerous certainly, bastard without question). But… the more we find out about Babu and his henchman Ghota, the more I think he has a legitimate grievance, even if the things he does to settle the score are pretty unjustified. I honestly hope we see more of this storyline, and with both characters alive and well and their grudge against the Emperor intact at the end of the book, it seems far from impossible they’ll show up to twist the knife again during the Siege of Terra.

What I really love about ‘The Outcast Dead’ is the glimpse it gives us of Terra as its pre-Heresy (and at times, pre-Crusade) culture struggles to adapt to the new system. Disillusionment with Unity is now allowed to come to the surface now that the Emperor and his goons have other things to worry about. With the growing paranoia caused by the Heresy, and the fragile state-enforced ‘materialist/atheist’ philosophy coming apart as the Imperial Cult continues to grow, it’s a rich seam to mine, and Graham sure mines it. Continuing my suspicion that Graham is at his best when riffing on Dan Abnett’s ideas, it feels like he re-read ‘The Lightning Tower’ and ‘Blood Games’ and was impressed by Dan’s not-actually-that-grimdark spin on a world caught between hard SF and 40K mysticism, and decided to use that as a foundation for the book. And it really worked. I think that apart from some of the Forge World background, this is the best Terra-set stuff in the Heresy.

I’m making ‘TOD’ sound like it’s some chin-stroking, lore-deep slow-burner going for a ‘literary sci-fi’ spin on the Heresy. It’s really not like that – it’s an action-packed ‘popcorn’ book. The situation here – a small group of disparate personalities with trust issues have to work together when the whole world’s against them – seems an obvious throwback to the violent yet cheesy 80s action movies Graham seems to love so dearly. In fact, the second half of ‘The Outast Dead’ seems like a vaguely Warhammerfied adaptation of some lost 80s blockbuster. I can see the lineup now: Chuck Norris as mystical Atharva (fuck it, it’s the 80s, so give him an incredibly tasteless ‘Native American’ headband), Arnold Schwarzenegger as brooding Severian, Sylvester Stallone as tough guy Tagore, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as twin World Eaters Subha and Asubha, Patrick Swayze as pretty-boy Kiron, a quick cameo from David Hasselhoff as Gythua… and Charlie Sheen (or maybe a young Leonardo DiCaprio) as Kai Zulane. You could even pull in golden-boy everyman Hulk Hogan to play Rogal Dorn. Fuck, now I want to see that movie.

the outsiders dead lol

The thing is, while they’re nowhere near as shallow as in ‘Battle for the Abyss’, the characters here rarely move beyond Legion tropes. You’ve got an arrogant perfectionist Emperor’s Children marksman, a hulking, stoic Death Guard ‘big guy’, a smug yet conflicted Thousand Son psyker, an abrasive and prideful Luna Wolf scout. And of course, the World Eaters are angry berserkers thirsty for blood. However, it’s nice that some efforts are made to subvert the Legion characteristics. The gradually mounting tension between the three World Eaters is nice, an unexpected trait I’d like to have seen built on further. Having the Emperor’s Children and Death Guard warriors’ only real character traits being their strong friendship is kind of great. It’s a fun group of personalities bouncing off each other. I’d even argue that the ‘Legion trope squad’ dynamics here work better than in a later Graham book, ‘Vengeful Spirit’.

Of course, there is one character who I’d say eventually transcends the bold comic-book outlines of the rest of the titular Outcast Dead – and that’s Atharva, the Thousand Sons warrior. His role is so prominent that he has to be viewed as a main character, unlike most of the other Astartes tough guys here. Much like Mhotep in ‘Battle for the Abyss’, Atharva is an extremely powerful mage, to the point that the accusation could be made that he’s a broken character who can do whatever the author wants because magic. While he’s an Athenaean, he also seems to have a good grasp of most other Thousand Sons disciplines when it suits the narrative, and there also seems to be precious little limit to what he can achieve. While flawed, he also has a quick wit and powerful insight so frequently lacking in Ahriman and friends. Perhaps it’s my bitterness over how well-regarded ‘A Thousand Sons’ is as a book, since I always felt it was fairly mediocre, but I really believe Atharva is the best XV Legion character Graham has written. And hey, he’s part of one of the best ‘what the fuck?!’ moments in the book, when he voluntarily cuts off his psychic ability permanently to stop himself from being affected by a pariah. Weird, very weird - and I'm sure it's not a canonical 'possibility' in 40K lore, but who cares? It’s a kind of rad moment.

So what are the problems with ‘The Outcast Dead’? The slow-burn drama of the book’s first half is something I can understand fans disliking; generally HH readers seem to want their books to be a bit more visceral and action-packed than this. I think it’s an invaluable study of Terra in the early years of the Heresy – but I recognise not everyone agrees. It’s when the Crusade Host jailbreak occurs that Graham really gets to the meat – and that meat is pretty damn rare, with the escape sequence itself being some of his best tense combat writing, even though its resolution is somewhat fuzzy.

Another sticking point for a lot of fans is the way ‘The Outcast Dead’ deals with Magnus’ projection to Terra. At the book’s outset, we are in the prelude to Isstvan V (possibly the Massacre has already happened, considering that unreliable lines of astropathic communication are kind of a cornerstone of the narrative). Yet people are talking about how there hasn’t been any word from Prospero for months – but Magnus’ message to Terra was dispatched following his inability to sway Horus on Davin, which was, what, two full years before Isstvan V? Prospero surely was turned into a cinder more than a few months ago. And then – as news reaches Terra of four more Legions’ betrayal – a terrible psychic shockwave blasts the planet, emerging from the Palace, caused by the psychic ‘visit’ to Terra of the Crimson King – something that happened before the Heresy really got underway, but here presented as a present event (even going so far as to intercut Kai’s story with a scene featuring Magnus and Ahriman doing spell prep for the projection, and a scene with the Emperor seeing the g-g-g-g-g-ghostly visitation).

Now, in ‘Wolf Hunt’, Graham’s audio drama sequel to ‘The Outcast Dead’, this apparent timeline snafu is ‘clarified’ with exposition from Malcador himself: of course the Emperor received the message from Magnus before Isstvan III, but that projection caused a terrible calamity with the Webway portal the Emperor was working on, so he needed to nearly-single handedly hold back the ‘shockwave’ for nearly two years before, whoops, some fucker told him a really funny joke and he lost his grip and BLAM, Terra becomes shockwave city. This is also reinforced in ‘The Sigillite’, where it’s implied the Emperor has been fighting to control the Webway portal fallout caused by Magnus for a very long time.

Yet, if this were really the case, and it was the plan for the Imperial leadership to stifle the Webway disaster’s truth all along, it could have been dealt with MUCH more clearly. It really doesn’t seem to add up – sure the psychic shockwave is devastating, but you could argue that having the incredibly significant figurehead of the Emperor absent for so long has caused greater problems. I mean… come on Graham. You can treat us like idiots sometimes, just not all the time. Have some scenes where people belabour the point that the Emperor has been absent too long and with no explanation. Have Malcador drop some dark hints. Have Dorn, or maybe THE EMPEROR HIMSELF – who makes a cameo here, in ‘psychic apparition’ form – allude to this terrible tragedy. Instead, in the words of one powerful psyker, “It’s happening now! It’s happening right now!” 

There are also just too many scenes where people talk about ominous predictions and foretellings regarding SOMETHING THAT ACTUALLY FUCKING HAPPENED TWO YEARS AGO. Why weren’t those Magnus scenes framed as flashbacks? It would only make sense if the big shocking payoff was ‘Surprise, it actually happened years ago!’… but ‘it actually happened years ago’ was a WELL ESTABLISHED ELEMENT THAT EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW FROM THE ORIGINAL TIMELINE!

the outKast dead lol

On my third reading of this book, it feels like Graham either forgot how the timeline went (which is what the message board assbutts would have you believe) or he’s trying to allude to these rather strange changes to the ‘original’ timeline in a very subtle, coquettish way. And frankly – don’t take this as a criticism, because as I’ve said, I love this book – Graham doesn’t do subtlety. At best, this is sloppily written; at worst, the internet assholes were right for once. It feels like something a halfway competent editorial team could have picked up on right away. Maybe it’s unfair to say that; it’s rumoured Graham isn’t the most cooperative with the BL editors, so perhaps their hands were tied.

With all that said, I DON’T CARE THAT MUCH ABOUT THIS EVEN IF IT IS A MISTAKE. Sure, Graham possibly fucked up, and if he tried to clumsily do a stealth retcon and not own his mistake, that’s kind of shitty – but a) we can’t 100% prove that’s the case and b) does it totally ruin the book? I don’t think so at all. It’s background stuff; the real meat of the book is the development of Heresy-era Terra as a place, and the dumb action movie Dirty Dozen shit that works so well.

And what’s the last problem with this fairly great book? Well... it falls apart a little at the end. It seems Graham ends quite a lot of his books with a giant overblown fight scene where all the different plot lines tie up in a conflagration of violent fucking death. If the characters have been enjoyable to spend time with, I get quite invested in these fights – ie ‘Angel Exterminatus’. If I haven’t liked the characters, it just serves to underline how hollow the reading experience has been for me – see ‘Dead Sky Black Sun’ or ‘A Thousand Sons’. ‘The Outcast Dead’ is… kind of in the middle. ‘Big hero death’ moments for Gythua and Kiron seem like the prelude to a big, heartrending ‘kill everyone, let the reader suffer’ ending. And then we get a big hero death for Tagore. It’s brutal, pretty sad, and well handled – he’s a monstrous psychopath, but we’ve spent enough time with him that we’re kind of rooting for him. And then there’s a similar moment for Subha. And Asubha. And Saturnalia, kind of... By now it’s starting to feel like the same death is being repeated again and again in the hopes we have an equally powerful reaction each time. And then we get one for Atharva (well, in a way we get two). And Kai himself, of course. These moments are sometimes separated by only a few pages, and one after the other, they slowly start to lose their power.

And the messy wrap-up of the story that’s going on all around these deaths – that doesn’t help much. A daemon taking on the aspect of the Angel of Death manifests just because. I was aware of the foreshadowing leading up to this in the book, but the payoff seemed confused and utterly gratuitous, and amongst the fucking ocean of murder that’s happening around him, Palladis’ theoretically-maybe-a-bit-cathartic death loses any impact. Who was this character and why did he do the things he did? Graham helpfully has him die sobbing that he’ll finally be with his dead family again, and hopefully that means we won’t think about how one dimensional Palladis turned out to be. But why was the daemon there, and what was its aim? With Graham reducing his BL workload since he works for Riot Games now, it seems possible we’ll never see that storyline given a satisfying ending.

The last bloody payoff for Kai – realising his vision is in fact a foretelling of the Horus/Emperor duel – is a great moment. And Graham gets to write about one of the most important scenes in the 40K fiction – though this is a vision, so BL could still fuck around and change the way things play out when the books actually deal with this. I’m not sure how I feel about the Emperor knowing and apparently embracing his ‘death’ as an unchangeable inevitable fact at this point in the Heresy, since it doesn’t really sit comfortably with how I’ve come to view the Emperor – but I guess maybe we’ll see how ‘Master of Mankind’ deals with this.

He may neglect to service the fans in quite the way they want, but Graham is still giving us some great moments. TOD feels like Graham looked at ‘Blood Games’, ‘Battle for the Abyss’ and ‘Nemesis’, gauged exactly what was cool about them and what was a drag, and put the cool stuff together in one gloriously illogical package. It’s a heck of a read. Vital to the ‘macro-view’ of the Horus Heresy? Not at all; the key mainline plot points can be summarised in a paragraph. But it’s one of my ‘secret favourite’ Heresy books, and one I feel is wildly underrated. 8/10

New to PurpleHeresy? Head on over to the index page to see a more chronological list of the Horus Heresy reviews on this blog.