Descent of Angels by Mitchel Scanlon

The sixth Horus Heresy novels fails to do what the others all managed. The overall story does not move here, at all. The novel is entirely set in the ‘past’ as far as other events in the series. In truth this does not read like the sixth book in a series, but as the first book in a linked pair.

Descent of Angels is poorly named. Readers hoping for a novel focusing on the Dark Angels rather than the larger events of the Heresy will be disappointed. Descent of Angels is mainly concerned with ‘the order’ a group of knights who eventually become the Dark Angels.

The knights wear armour that is not quite power armour, and fight with pistols and grenades, yet are overly concerned with quests and the slaying of beasts. As backstory it would be interesting, but as two-thirds of the novel it is really quite boring. It fails as backstory as the order is not sufficiently detailed to seem like a real body, rather than a group of warriors waiting to be turned into space marines. This makes reading two-thirds of the novel a waste of time.

When the order finally merge with real space marines to become the Dark Angels, there is no real change to the tempo. After a brief meeting with another chapter, the White Scars, they settle down to police a recalcitrant world. After putting down a rebellion, the Dark Angels immediately leave with no logic or explanation to their actions. Also without explanation their grand master turned Primarch divides the legion in two, with half the legion retuning back to their homeworld. There is no ‘descent’ in the novel at all.

That is the end of the novel. The schism that will eventually split the Dark Angels is not depicted, unless a brief moment of jealously on the part of Luther was supposed to count. On finishing this novel, the reader is left with a sense of “..what?” The book achieves nothing, and can be easily skipped by anyone interested in following the series, or by anyone interested in reading about the Dark Angels. Presumably Mitchel Scanlon will write a second Heresy book that will satisfy both.

Storm of Iron by Graham McNeill

Storm of Iron is not the best Black Library book. That honour has to go to Gordon Rennie’s Execution Hour. Storm of Iron is probably the next best though.

It’s about a siege on a fairly inhospitable planet, with the traitor space marines of the Iron Warriors legion attempting to take a fortress from the Imperial Guard.

The siege itself is fairly methodical and takes places as a series of short battles, which could all be represented using the tabletop game of Warhammer 40,000. This actually helps the book along, since frankly, if you’re not already familiar with the game and setting, you’re not reading Storm of Iron.

As armoured superhumans, the Iron Warriors are having a fairly easy time of taking the fortress piece by piece, but they are on a tight timetable, and none of the Iron Warriors captains know why. The rivalry between the three captains in entertaining. Honsou, the main point of view character for the Iron Warriors, is someone the reader can identify with, as he struggles to gain recognition in spite of his low status in the legion.

On the good side, various Imperial Guard officers step to the fore and are cut down one by one by the Iron Warriors. Imperial Guardsman Hawke, the lucky, isolated survivor of the initial attack, provides some light relief as he lugs himself around the hills that surround the fortress, becoming an improbable hero in the process.

I read this in one night, the story takes you from one point to another is a seamless fashion which is all to the good. This is pure pulp fiction, but as long as your are prepared to enjoy it for what it is, you’ll be fine.

Fulgrim by Graham McNeill

Okay, now my guilty secret is revealed. It’s not all The Art of War and The Diamond Age with me. I read terrible pulp fiction too, sometimes. This is my weakness, the Black Library books. Only their sci-fi, which I find suitable enough, the fantasy tends to be awful. I mean unreadably so.

Fulgrim is the fifth book in an opened ended series about a rebellion that occurred ten thousand years before the game’s current setting. Basically what happened was that just as the galaxy was about to be conquered by these twenty legions of super warriors, half the super warriors rebelled and turned on the other half, and anyone else they could find.

Long story short, the rebellion is defeated and the traitors sent into an unstable region of space called the Eye of Terror, where they still live today (that’s today in the game, ten thousand years later) emerging periodically for raids that can represented in a tabletop battle game.

Stirring stuff. Which is why the Black Library has decided to make a series on this event, called the Horus Heresy, after years of saying they never would.

It’s hard to talk about Fulgrim without mentioning something about the previous four books. The Warmaster of the crusade, Horus has turned traitor along with a bunch of the other Primarchs. The twenty Primarchs each lead one of the twenty legions of super warriors, and are pretty supper themselves. By the end of the fourth book, four of the traitor legions have purged their ranks of any loyalists and are ready to strike. A few survivors of this massacre have made their way to earth to carry a warning, but become lost in a bureaucratic maze. You know what that’s like.

Fulgrim is entirely about one of the Primarchs – Fulgrim, hence the title. The story begins before the events we have experienced so far, but thankfully ends after them. The story of Fulgrim’s fall from grace into heresy is interesting, yet unfulfilling. If Fulgrim must essentially be tricked into turning traitor, what of the other Primarchs? So far, they seem willing enough.

That is the main problem with this series, the authors are so concerned with ‘filling in the gaps’ in the story, that they forget to move the story forward. So it is with Fulgrim. Luckily the last few pages of the book detail the infamous drop-pod massacre that starts the rebellion off properly. Let’s hope the next couple of books launch the story forward. The last thing we need is another dozen books, all variants of the Fulgrim story, but starring one after another of the Primarchs.

See? It’s not like these books are even particularly good, but they’ve managed to make me care about the story and their approach to it. I’m hooked, but I’m not happy about it.