Roomsky

100% agree that Zenobi's portion should have been a novella. If she was a proper traitor parallel to Katsuhiro (and if Katsuhiro's presence ever actually went somewhere,) would have been even better! Being fully honest though, my one re-read had it as my favourite part of the book, mostly because I hate Nirvana-Keeler (admittedly a personal bugbear,) and I consider the actual Lion's Gate portions to be a failure on basically every level. This was the Iron Warriors focus book, and it's taken up by Perturabo sending his least competent commander to lead in his stead. The mental contest between Perturabo and Dorn basically never happens, and this book is the biggest offender. What's worse is that the marine action has no structure, flow, or momentum, so when the Port is taken it feels entirely arbitrary. Complete disaster, at least when it comes to the advertised point of the book. The only thing I can give Thorpe regarding those sections is he didn't forget Dorn's still pissed at Sigismund (looking at you, Abnett and Wraight,) and he doesn't forget what makes Rann a fun character (looking at you again, Abnett.)

Pleased to hear my prompt created such a dilemma Is Lemartes worth checking out for someone mostly unfamiliar with the character?

I haven't even read Above and Beyond yet, and I know it should be on the list. But these results are always pretty wild, to be honest.

Roomsky's Beast Arises Re-Read - Part 4 The Hunt for Vulkan It's an odd feeling, recognizing that this is where the rot starts to set in properly, but also enjoying this book more than I did the first time. The rot, in this case, being poor structural planning. It still doesn't really feel like they're writing by the seat of their pants (there are a few contradictions, but they're minor,) but Annandale fails to make this anything approaching an "even," well-paced read. A disappointing step down from his work in The Last Wall. So what happens in The Hunt for Vulkan? Civil war with Mars is averted, Kubik is properly leashed by Koorland, Veritus reveals Vulkan is on Caldera, a big fleet goes and helps Vulkan save Caldera (and in the process discovers the means by which Attack Moons are built,) then they bring Vulkan back to Terra. Now, these are pretty seismic events, and as a reader I'd like them to continue the balance of Terra politics and ork action that made the series so interesting. Instead, we get 2 chapters of averting a civil war with Mars, and then far too much uninterrupted ork battle, then a page-and-a-half long epilogue of Vulkan showing up in the Senatorum. This structure is cracked, and it gives neither the events on Mars, nor Vulkan's significance outside a battlefield, due attention. A stronger denouement or alternating chapters between the crisis with Mars and the fighting on Caldera would have gone a long way to make this book as strong as its predecessors. So why was it better than I remembered? Well, I remembered a book of so much ork killing on the ground that my eyes glazed over, and I was surprised to find that wasn't the case. First of all, while far too quick, the opening chapters are still very good. This kind of schism is teased all the time and it's fun to see the Imperium actually throw its weight around and bully Mars into staying loyal. And while I think Kubik has a change of heart a bit too quickly (I would have preferred he'd just feigned agreement instead of actually admitting his fault,) genuinely convincing him to cooperate does provide some set-up for the eventual result of the war being "the only thing holding the Imperium back was itself." Caldera, while it takes up too much of the book, is actually quite varied. There are several passages devoted to the void battle which were properly engaging and a welcome break from the fighting on the surface. The book also briefly cuts to Dark Angels, Ultramarines, Blood Angels, and Space Wolves receiving Koorland's call to come and defend the Throneworld. Zerberyn even gets a brief POV. There's still way too much green tide, but Annandale handled it more adeptly than I gave him credit for. All that said, it's still hard to see this as anything but a disappointment. Annandale is perfectly competent with introspection, and yet we get almost none from Vulkan. A loyalist primarch lamenting the state of the Imperium is half the reason anyone likes Dark Imperium! We needed more here; as it is, Vulkan is treated more like a superweapon than a man, and that's lame. Characterization in general is almost completely sapped from the book after the actual Hunt for Vulkan begins. I'm anticipating that by the end of this re-read, my biggest complaint isn't going to be that the war's resolution is an asspull, it's going to be that the authors failed to keep Terra relevant in the fighting to come. Surely we could have checked in on Vangorich in the middle of all this battle? At the very least, have some assassins or proper Imperial functionaries tag along. While this is still my least favourite entry so far, I bumped it up in my estimation to a 5/10, a passing grade, from my previous 4/10. It's functional. The Beast Must Die! Holy cow, Gav Thorpe wrote a grand-scale war book that didn't suck. What's more, it's good! Despite how mid The Hunt for Vulkan was, this didn't feel at all haphazard. The climax of this series is famously messy, but for now? A return to form. This book has more war in it than the last book, but it is done so much better. Vulkan's ruminations open each chapter, so we get a proper idea of just how fatalistic he's become, and why he continues to tell the Imperium and his pseudo-subordinates "sink or swim." There's dissent regarding exactly how the war should be fought, which advances several characters. Krule's presence helps the Terran plotlines feel relevant without having to actually cut back to Terra. The ground war involves meaningful Mechanicus and Guard POVs in addition to marine ones. No set piece lasts too long. It's basically everything I want from a dedicated 40k war book. But wait, there's more! We get a proper look at the Beast's new Orkish culture, with religion, dedicated rest areas, leisure activities beyond hitting each other, and functional supply chains. The Imperium's attack, though desperate and facing some wild tech, forces the Beast's hand by cutting off said supply chains (the Ork army is already resorting to cannibalism by the end,) which feels way more earned than the usual "we outdid their superior warfare through sheer force of will." Vulkan's death is thematically resonant for the setting at large in a way I love, putting the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the heroes of the Great Crusade will save the day in the Imperium's darkest hour (at least, until 8th ed. happened grumble grumble.) Daddy's not coming to save them anymore, and the sins of the father are many. Critiques? The ending is abrupt - by design, but still. Vulkan refuses to meet with any Salamanders, which is a colossal waste. Why not give it a chapter? It's the sort of thing you bring a primarch back for! Bohemond has a brief arc that only seems to materialize when he's around Koorland; Vulkan puts him in his place at one point and he doesn't seem to give it any thought after the fact. I do think everything we've seen so far has effectively characterized the Beast by association, but this is really the only time the Orkish leadership is forced into a 1v1 in this series, and I would have liked to hear it talk a bit more. The Orks' lacking direct characterization remains a major weakness in these books. Overall though, surprisingly good? I can't wait for the narrative to shake itself apart in the next entry. Re-read observations: This series was written well before the Siege of Terra was properly itemized, and it released a year before Old Earth. As such, I was surprised about how explicitly The Beast Must Die! alluded Vulkan's presence on Terra, holding back the Webway's flood of daemons. At the time of release it struck me much more as vague Heresy stuff, but it's really quite specific. Neat!

Haley is very committed to the "primarchs are humanity magnified, which means their emotions are always magnified" approach, which I find turns out poorly across the board if he isn't given enough time with the primarch he's writing. As you mentioned, he delivers a good short novel focused on Perturabo, but he comes across as a parody of himself when he's one of many. While I always advocate for daemon primarchs being daemons foremost, I'm also an advocate for them still at least wearing the metaphorical skins of their past selves, and for characters to not be the same character at the end of the Heresy that they are in 40k. Fulgrim titters and chuckles at proceedings like any Slaaneshi daermon. Angron yells "I shall kill them! Grrr I am infuriated I don't get to land first!" like any other Khorne daemon, and in a weirdly bombastic way that matches none of his previous daemonic appearances. Mortarion shows up completely confident in his new plague skin as if he's not only wielded Nurgle's power for ages, but is now totally confident in it instead of the conflicted man we know him to still be. Perturabo, meanwhile, is an easily-flattered man-baby, ignoring all the development French gave him in his last 3 appearances. They're all cartoons and not in a tragic way; it's just shallow. Dorn, Sangy, and Jaghatai are better, but are harmed by Haley's apparent decision to write this book as an introduction to new readers, and his generally uninspired primarch dialogue. They all talk about things they already know about and flatly explain their personality traits instead of just demonstrating them. Sang comes across the best thanks to his visiting the front lines and having other things on his mind than "I don't die today" (though Haley is the one guilty of bringing that to comical levels in Titandeath.) Really, I think it comes down to all of them failing to say anything interesting and being incapable of having a normal conversation. It's all pseudo-Shakespearian slop of "Brother, I shall do this thing, and you shan't stop me!" "Brother! I must insist upon stopping you, for the thing is bad!" This bleeds into a few other characters as well. My first read left me asking "holy crap, what happened to Layak?" I really wish the primarchs and other big figures had been more distant, because the Katsuhiro stuff is great. A proper on the ground book with the characters occasionally brushing against the primarchs would have been way more effective than seeing them as much as we did. There are times when less is more.

The only point I'd truly disagree with. Almost every primarch is flattened into their most basic traits, and often stray into "you can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!" territory. Considering they're the big movers and shakers here, I take pretty big issue with their being so hollowed-out.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for them making crappy product. I'm saying that if they insist on making crappy product, it shouldn't be 85 bloody dollars.

See, if they put out these cheaper LEs at a reasonable price, let's call it $35, I would snap up plenty of them. Get a fun hardback that looks pseudo-vintage on your shelf! I'm sold on that alone. What they're actually selling is a scam, basically, and a simple price and marketing adjustment would make it totally fine and infinitely more desirable, IMO.

So the POVs show up on Prax, which was held by the Iron Warriors before the war started. The world has been converted into a farm and larder for the orks instead of just being abandoned after conquest, presumably there are many similar worlds keeping The Beast's forces fed and supplied. They enter an unlit building that smells so bad it penetrates their armour. It's full of tightly packed human cattle, so close together they're forced to stand. They're morbidly obese and have no teeth, nails, or hair. They act like animals, possibly lobotomized, and defecate where they stand onto a grated floor for drainage, but in several places it's clogged with feces. They're fed by similarly modified human slaves with big buckets of growth-hormone infused jelly. On the horizon, they see several factories used for "rendering" the human cattle; the smoke coming from them is aerosolized blood and all the attendant orks are wearing clothes made of human leather. The POVs later enter a sewer system full of, among other things, human fingers. It's a vividly painted picture of what The Beast has planned for humanity.

Roomsky's Beast Arises Re-Read, Part 3 Where did this series start to fizzle out? Was it book 2? Was it book 11? Somewhere in between? You could ask 10 people and get 11 different answers. I certainly can't answer that yet, but I will say this stage is a step down from books 3 and 4, if not a huge one. More than anything, it feels like a return to the more confused quality of books 1 and 2. Throneworld I'm kind of shocked I enjoyed this so much considering it's got 2 major elements I think are nonsense. Eldrad sending such valuable Eldar lives to break into the Throneroom and say something everyone already knows is wild, to say the least (Zerberyn fulfills this prophecy in book 6 but he seems too small an element to be worth all this, narratively.) But at the same time, we see that more than the Imperium has noticed what's going on, we get some fun Eldar-centric action, and it facilitates some great interplay between Vangorich, Veritus, and Weinand. The scenes are good, the "why" of them is just naff. Meanwhile, Black Templars team up with Iron Warriors out of necessity. Sorry, don't buy it, don't care if each commander liked the other during the Great Crusade. You could have made this any other successor chapter and it would have been fine, but Black Templars? Worse, I don't find these chapters particularly interesting, it's just the book's ork fight quota. Kalkator and Megneric needed more begrudging conversation for this to be worth the silly set-up. And yet, the stuff at Terra is as good as ever, and progresses several ongoing plot points well. The raid on the attack moon is quick and to the point, and features some Black Templars being as brutal as you'd actually expect them to be. Udo surprisingly makes decent points when reining in Koorland despite being framed as obstructive bureaucracy incarnate, and I'm appreciating the politics surrounding The Last Wall a lot more than the lore newbie I was when I first read the series. This reads well! I was just annoyed by some of the plotting decisions. Things I noticed on the re-read: HALEY YOU ALSO WROTE THANE AS CLEARLY NOT BEING A HERESY VETERAN IN THIS BOOK HOW DID YOU FORGET? Echoes of the Long War Guymer's dense prose is a cold splash of water to the face right after Haley's invisible prose. That's not entirely a bad thing though; this is the first book where I feel like I actually got to know the Fists Exemplar as a chapter; Guymer doesn't skimp on the details. Unfortunately, this also reads like the first book where the balance of POVs that made the series so fun is starting to skew too far towards Space Marines; we really needed a Guard or Guard-adjacent group to follow as the action ramps up. As it is, I think this book is good, but there's frankly too much astartes vs orks. I might feel differently if the orks had actual characters, but the ongoing discoveries of how their culture at large works can only take them so far. Zerberyn is a bastard basically from the get-go, but a believable one. He embodies the ego of a chapter that's so proud of being forward-thinking, and his throwing in with Kalkator seems like a natural evolution of his character, unlike the Templar team-up from the previous book. The scenes dedicated to world building on Prax are also superb, the human-cattle pens especially being an image that's never left my mind since I first read this series. The plotline culminates into something suitably grim as well, I just wish there wasn't so much bloody shooting between the good stuff. Also, an ork ship has a weapon that can increase a star's mass such that it immediately collapses into a black hole with a significantly larger orbit than when it was a star. I feel like with such technology they should be literally invincible, but whatever. The Terra stuff is good because it's always good, but I could have used more, and not just because it's my preferred setting in this series. The book ends with Koorland announcing himself as Lord Commander and the High Twelve rally behind him, at least in part because they realize Udo's failure in the role. While Udo has certainly been a poor wrangler, I don't think his lack of direction was given proportional attention; most of the High Lords' failings have until now been pinned on individual members rather than their single guiding hand. Also, Astartes walking into the Senatorum and declaring themselves in charge should be ringing massive alarm bells for literally everyone present who didn't encourage them to do so, I feel we needed to see more meaningful resistance than Udo's sputtering. Still, a solid enough entry. Things I noticed on the re-read: While there've been a few hiccups in focus up until now, I do have to commend how well-thought-out the series has been up until this point. Each book has been a drip-feed of information about The Beast's empire, and not content to just say "they're hyper-competent" and move on, we've now been comprehensively introduced to their improved linguistics, specializations on and off the battlefield, how they disrupt communications, how they establish and maintain supply lines, and why they want humanity as a slave race. We know they're on Ullanor before the end of the book spells it out for us, and we know from last book that blowing up Weirdboyz is going to be the key to victory. The same sort of thing is happening elsewhere, and not just obvious stuff like Vangorich's increasing frustration with his peers. It's honestly quite impressive and much better than many would have you believe about the series' cohesion.

He's not really my favourite, but in the spirit of the thread I'll post what I like about his writing: I think his pacing and plot structure are usually very strong. His books move at a good pace, proper time is given to big moments, and he recognizes when a sizeable B-Plot needs to make up for a thin A-Plot. He generally doesn't participate in character shilling, which is especially impressive considering his output a few years ago. He understands that a character's flaws are as important as their virtues when it comes to being interesting. His work with Mechanicus characters is usually stellar. He portrays the byzantine nature of the organization without pushing them over the edge into being so needlessly complex you can't appreciate their human qualities. I'd hazard that his writing is the only reason anyone has come to accept Cawl as a character. I think his crowning jewels are Skarsnik, Flesh and Steel, his entries into The Beast Arises, Prince Maesa, and the last 3rd of Hammer of Olympia.

Having not read this, is it possible this isn't just Parker leaning into the brutality that is the 40k military? I'd say that if a broken tooth causes long-term medical or performance issues for a fighter then the Imperium would dismiss the recipient as weak and expendable anyway, even if it would be impractical in a real-world scenario. Men have been shot for putting down their lasrifles to help injured troops to the lander during a full retreat.

@Nagashnee And I think that despite all that we can still compare it favourably to Black Library (from a certain point of view) is telling, with comprehensive series, reliable print runs, their cancellations being properly communicated (how many sequels to Black Library books have been quietly cancelled, leaving us all hanging?) and writers generally not being at war with each other over their interpretation of the setting (helps that Denning and Traviss did not survive the shift from old canon.) EDIT: And minimal price gouging, and consistent paperback-first releases for all but the biggest titles, and consistent reprinting of old material that's no longer canon.

I do love a spot of the old "horrific death, agony, and mutilation is fine but natural functions of the human body are taboo" line these companies continue to tow. Outside of Titandeath, you'd think babies are brought by the Imperial Stork going by Black Library. Re: Star Wars - hey, as long as I can follow a complete story in one format, I'm all for Black Library embracing a similar plan of releasing material in ways that make sense to anyone.

Re: ADB, I'm personally curious about the gun they're holding to his head the amount they must be paying him to be the story director for an edition so heavily marketed on returning primarchs. Hopefully he'll be injecting some right proper 40k back into things to combat the rise of herohammer 40k (even if G-Man and the Lion are here to stay.) The Scions book looks interesting. I quite enjoy these Guard stories as the proving ground for new authors, they're usually at minimum decent.