Rate what you Read, or the fight against Necromancy

[Brother Scorpirus]

Late to Spear of the Emperor. It's extremely good.

Now if only a certain gold-armored chapter weren't just plot-driving punching bags... I really love their chapter culture and the characters.

[StrangerOrders]

For my part, I still await the day when ADB does not associate a chapter's competence in direct balance to their curtness, rudeness and edgyness.

 

I enjoyed the book but the uncle in me had the impulse to ground the Spears every two sentences.

 

Although I contest that the Spears are unknowingly more UM successors than the Mentors. It just happens the Guilliman's frequent episodes of unlimited rage seem omitted from hsitroy often.

[Lord_Caerolion]

You mean the Spears that are absolutely, definitely losing against the Exilarchy? They're not exactly going great, even in the events directly shown in Spear of the Emperor. They have a few victories, sure, but they're losing the wider war,

and by the time of the "author" setting this all to paper they're basically about to get wiped out.

[bluntblade]

And now to The Hollow Mountain, which I enjoyed a great deal even if the end came rather suddenly.

Expanding on this, I feel like The Hollow Mountain is Wraight really cutting loose. It's not indulgent, but he seems to be writing in a more playful manner here than elsewhere. What I suspected was a Terry Pratchett influence on the prequel is just as evident here (if I've diagnosed it correctly) and still very enjoyable, demonstrating how Terra as of 40K is just absurd - terrifyingly so.

 

The references to the opening of the Great Rift also make me want to start a whole thread about Black Library and comic book storytelling, which will happen just as soon as I get bored enough.

[Tarvek Val]

Just read Old Earth for the first time. I believe I've seen it mentioned in this thread already, so I'll keep this brief. I liked this book more than Nick Kyme's other 30k Salamanders novels / novellas. After reading it a few thousand times in the first Salamanders Heresy books, the phrase "Vulkan Lives" swiftly became one of my least favorite slogans in the GW canon...  

 

Old Earth, in my opinion, did an adequate job of moving the plot forward, although I was a bit thrown off by

the storyline element concerning the Cabal and Perpetuals.

It had been so long since I had considered that particular faction that it took me awhile to remember what they were trying to achieve and what they needed

Perpetuals and John Grammaticus

around for. I didn't mind the Shattered Legions plotline and even thought that the power dynamic established between Meduson and the Iron Fathers vying for control of the reunited Iron Hands forged one of the more interesting and engaging segments of the work. All in all, I would absolutely recommend this book more highly than Kyme's previous Heresy-era Salamander works — though they set the basis for Old Earth, this novel exceeds them in most every way.

 

Final Rating: 6/10 (To Sample / For Die-Hard Salamanders fans)

[Red_Shift]

I've just finished the anthology Shield of the Emperor.

 

Death World was an enjoyable read. Towards the end I got the feeling that I had read it before many years ago. It's difficult to say much without ruining it but it's as much about the death world itself as the catachans and I enjoyed it. If they ever re-release Stracken I will have to pick that up although I'm fairly sure it's a different author.

 

Rebel Winter was also good, although more of a straight up war story. It was well told, but I tend to prefer the exposition to the action so it wasn't completely my cup of tea. I did enjoy the portrayal of the commissar though, a very different character from a different culture who was used as a lens to view the vostroyans through without having to compromise on their Russians in space vibe.

 

What struck me with all three books in the anthology is how readily sequelisable they are. I wonder if the IG series didn't do as well as BL hoped and they were never taken forward? They clearly went to the effort to produce a novel for each classic regiment but once they were done it wasn't followed up further which is a shame.

Edited March 9, 2020 by Red_Shift

[Gongsun Zan]

The Night Lords Trilogy - ADB

 

Simply one of the best portrayals of a traitor warband in the 41st millennium. While we always hear about the Imperial Pyrrhic victory at Terra, its easy to forget that the traitor legions were just as broken by the end of the Siege (or Thramas in the case of the Night Lords). One of the annoying things about 40k is how little fallout and consequences there are from supposedly major narrative events, so books like these really do so much to sell the importance of the Siege (more so than some of the books about the Siege itself). My only complaint is that I wish all of the other legions could be given the same treatment as the Night Lords have. 

 

10/10 Must Read. 

[byrd9999]

Damnation of Pythos - David Annandale

 

I admit I wasn't looking forward to this one because of the generally negative feeling towards it, but it turned out to be much better than I was expecting.

 

Firstly, Annandale has a very readable prose style and it is clear what is happening, which isn't something that can always be said of BL fiction. Secondly, this was the best depiction of the Iron Hands I have read so far. Annandale gave us two Iron Hands characters, Atticus and Galba, poles apart in terms of their machine-augmetics and their priorities, but both dealing with the fall-out of Isstvan V, the death of their primarch, the start of the heresy and what it now means to be an Iron Hand. He got inside their heads well and showed just how conflicted they could be, with realistic behaviours and rationales.

 

Of course they wouldn't be the Iron Hands if they didn't rush bone-headedly into a situation only to make things worse, but how they came to these decisions was very well played out in the book.

 

The use of human serfs also was well done, showing how they coped with the horror of Pythos and the inability of even the Iron Hands or praise of the Emperor to save them. It's nice to see the good guys lose so completely in the Heresy, and the flipside to the burgeoning cult of the Emperor showing that in the end He was powerless to protect anyone.

 

With a couple of tweaks, this would have made a great entry into the Horror series, something at which Annandale excels. The ending where Kanshell the serf, who had given himself over to worship of the Emperor, was horrific, being taken alive by the daemons to witness the Chaotic-resurrection of the Veritas Ferrum. The book left it at this, but I imagined that Kanshell would be incorporated, still-living, into the ship somehow, to bear witness to an eternity of horror.

 

The downsides for me were that the final 75-100 or so pages devolved into tedious bolter-porn, and so the great reveal of the daemon Madail was downplayed and overshadowed by Stuff Happening that it all turned into a blur.

 

7/10

[Fedor]

Wasn't it more the compassion of the Raven Guard and Salamanders that really doomed them? I've probably forgot a lot of litle plot specifics, but if i remember rightly the Hands were just going to let all the not-cultists fend for themselves and get slaughtered until convinced otherwise.

 

Underrated book with some very good characters. My main complaint would be that i would have liked Madail incorporated somehow as a corrupting presence throughout the book before his reveal.

[byrd9999]

Wasn't it more the compassion of the Raven Guard and Salamanders that really doomed them? I've probably forgot a lot of litle plot specifics, but if i remember rightly the Hands were just going to let all the not-cultists fend for themselves and get slaughtered until convinced otherwise.

 

Underrated book with some very good characters. My main complaint would be that i would have liked Madail incorporated somehow as a corrupting presence throughout the book before his reveal.

True, the Salamander, Khi'dem, did disobey Iron Hands orders to go help the humans who turned out to be Davinite cultists, but it was framed as a debate on whether, in a post-Heresy era, the legions risk their lives to help individual humans or do they protect the Imperium in general from xenos/chaos threats while humans fend for themselves. Khi'dem's reasoning was that it turned out to be a mistake, but for the right reasons.

 

Meanwhile, Atticus the Iron Hand ignores Galba's advice that the big anomaly is a machine (because he's an Iron Hand and Iron Hands know all about machines), the marines go charging in with bolters blasting, it turns out to be a machine (and wonder why they didn't spot that the machine was actually a machine because they are Iron Hands and know all about machines), and several of them die in the retreat.

 

I think it was Atticus' decision to fire on the anomaly from space (screw the humans, i'm firing my space laser) that was the tipping point in their defeat. The anomaly soaked up the energy and used it for its own ends, and the Veritas Ferrum crashed and gave the daemons a big spaceship to fly in.

 

But having said all this and made it sound a bit silly, it was well played out in the novel :) 

[Noserenda]

Just finished Plague War by Guy Haley, it kinda lost me in the middle a bit but that ending... Top stuff :) 

Just the IMage of Guiliman kneeling with the dead saint holding her hand whilst fire rains down from above, beautiful :) 
 
Though the post trial scene is also rather fabulous.

[bluntblade]

The Palatine Phoenix lived up to its reputation. Not quite what I expected, but exactly what I want from this series.

[b1soul]

I find that in the Primarch series, the non-Imperial human foes are much more interesting than the xenos foes

[Sothalor]

Mephiston: Blood of Sanguinius – Darius Hinks

 

 

The first volume of Darius Hink’s trilogy featuring the Blood Angels’ Chief Librarian, Blood of Sanguinius follows Mephiston and a small supporting cast as they blunder around a lost shrine world searching for a macguffin and dealing with various sorts of Warp shenanigans. It’s not one of Black Library’s classics or standouts, but is for the most part competently written, albeit let down by several issues that keep this from reaching the potential teased.

 

Despite the titular series, Blood of Sanguinius only partially showcases Mephiston as a point-of-view character. Most of the narrative POV is through Antros, a neophyte Librarian whose destiny seems bound to Mephiston’s. We also bounce around between several other characters with their own agendas and goals as they all inevitably head towards the final confrontation. Mephiston is really only a POV character during some of the action scenes, and we really don’t get inside his head, so to speak, nor learn much about him as a person. This book is a plot-driven action-adventure more than a character study.

 

The prose is fine – competently bland, as I like to say. It doesn’t stand out in any particular way either positive or negative. IT gets the job done, and honestly that’s pretty much good enough for something like this.

 

One thing that does distinguish Blood of Sanguinius from much contemporary 40k is how hard it goes in on the fantasy aspects of the setting. In many ways the trappings and aesthetics make this much more of a fantasy novel than science fiction – or even science fantasy, for that matter. The characters, settings, and situations are like something from a high fantasy: Librarians versus Sorcerers, a world mirrored in its sky, legendary artifacts kept guarded in bygone saint’s tombs, magic rites and incantations in volumes of grimoires.

 

This is what I enjoyed the most about the novel – the weird, fantastic, almost surreal mind trip of it all. A particular highlight is the worldbuilding on display. From the immense bone art structures and inverted sky mirror glamour of Divinus Prime to the fantastical chambers of the Blood Angels Librarius, there’s a madcap creativity and imagination on display here. The environments themselves are practically characters in their own right – indeed they get more description and focus than many of the actual characters. The sheer scale and otherworldliness lends to the grandeur of it all, a sort of subtle naysmith reminding us that individuals in the 41^st millennium, no matter how exceptional, are very small in the grand scheme.

 

If anything, some of the environments are so fantastical that they beg questions about the very

setting itself. The Blood Angels Librarius, for example, is far larger inside than its external dimensions should allow. There’s a literal captured star inside, miniaturized for light and power. What? How? Did the Blood Angels do this? When? Does this happen elsewhere in the Imperium? This is some Time Lord level capability on display, far beyond the bounds of what we see the Imperium able to do. Where did they get this capability from? Why is it not more widespread?

 

This is reflective of one of my main issues with Blood of Sanguinius. The main characters – protagonists and antagonists alike – are all wizards. Everything they do is flamboyantly supernatural from summoning wings to sword beam attacks to tearing open warp rifts. There’s certainly a great deal of spectacle, but the problem is that from a narrative perspective their capabilities and limitations are ill-defined. Mephiston constantly pulls new tricks out of his hat (or perhaps more fittingly, grimoire). He gets new powers as required by the plot. It’s lazy, and undercuts the tension and stakes. It also opens up questions of consistency when the magic is so subject to the whims of the plot. If a character can summon a firestorm to incinerate an immense flock of enemies in the opening of the book, why can’t he do the same two-thirds through? Why go through an elaborate effort to flood an amphitheater with oil and shoot it with a plasma pistol? Why is it that stabbing the sentient swarm of bugs with a force sword doesn’t work this time but does that time?

 

Yes, “the Warp did it”, but when all of the major plot points get resolved through magic (and there’s few enough plot points that actually get resolved in this one, more on that later), that kind of resolution smacks of deus ex machina – cheap and unearned.

 

This gets further compounded by the lack of character development, which would have really offset the issues with the mechanics of plot resolution. As I mentioned earlier, for a series bearing his name Mephiston doesn’t get much focus as a character in this book. What development he does get all happens ‘off-screen’ in a sense, as he just tells Antros things at the end of the novel. Why not make the focus of the book Mephiston grappling through these issues and we the readers experiencing that journey with him? The only things we’re shown are that whatever happened to reforge Calistarius into Mephiston on Armageddon increased his power and made him broodily sinister, which the existing literature has already established. His struggles and doubts about what to do, the decisions he makes, all get summed up in a lump of expository dialogue in the last three pages of the book, and that’s a real missed opportunity there.

 

Similarly, the other Blood Angel Librarians get little development. Gaius Rhacelus, Mephiston’s oldest (and arguably only) friend, is an old grumpy :cuss. That is pretty much the extent of his characterization. This book does little to delve into the relationship between them, though to its credit here the book does show rather than tell in their interactions and the way Rhacelus checks and questions Mephiston when everyone else around is clearly too intimidated by the superhuman vampire wizard killing machine to suggest he might not have thought things entirely through.

 

Meanwhile, Antros is the Nick to Mephiston’s Gatsby: he’s young and elated at the prospect of getting to prove himself in the eyes of the Big Cheese. He doesn’t really have an arc here though (certainly nothing like Nick’s in The Great Gatsby). He starts fascinated but wary of Mephiston and ends… still fascinated and still wary of Mephiston. The predominant character dynamic involving Antros is actually with Rhacelus, who dislikes the young whippersnapper because he thinks Antros is too ambitious and inexperienced. Antros does things like try to get involved in missions beyond his remit and study books above his ranking in the Librarius. Now, this has solid potential for drama as well, but it’s undercut by the fact that Rhacelus is the one who trained and taught Antros. So all the while Rhacelus is going about harrumphing on how Antros isn’t ready for this, he doesn’t have the temperament or experience, he’s unsuited, etc. Yeah, that’s on you, Gaius. You put him there! It just comes off as strange to me that this is the source of most interpersonal drama here – it feels like manufactured conflict, rather than something arising inevitably from the goals and values that drive different people.

 

Those are my main issues with Blood of Sanguinius. I will say that aside from the narrative issues caused by the way magic is written, their spectacle makes for some different action scenes. We’re a long way from the lines of Space Marines with Roaring Bolters and Growling Chainswords. Much of the action here veers towards high fantasy, with characters flying around and levitating, dueling in midair, hurling spells and incantations at each other and the like. It feels like something out of a stereotypical shonen anime series, frankly. Subjective preference is definitely going to be a major factor in whether this works for you or not.

 

The other thing is that Blood of Sanguinius doesn’t hold up very well as a work of its own. There’s the aforementioned dearth of character arcs and development. There’s not much resolution of plot threads and it ends on a cliffhanger. It’s obviously intended to be part of a series, but doesn’t quite reach the same standalone heights that Eisenhorn or the Night Lord series do, where each individual entry also told a satisfying, self-contained story.

 

So all-in-all not a masterpiece (even by BL’s occasionally lax standards). The poor character work and magical plot resolution mechanics are offset by some trippy creative images and environments. And while it doesn’t fulfil its potential as a character exploration of Mephiston, neither does it dig itself into the fecal-lined trenches some other BL works find themselves in. You won’t miss anything if you give this one a pass, but if you enjoy the more fantasy-based elements of 40K I think you might enjoy the esoteric themes and fantastic imagery.

 

 

To Taste

ANR: 5.7/10

 

[Xisor]

V. neat review AM Sanguinity.

I'd quibble a few pieces, but not in a "you're wrong" sort of fashion. Rather, like the prose (inoffensively bland - I can see what you mean!), I found Darius' writing here to be a lot more evocative and intriguing than many writers. Not visually (though there was that!), but sort of conceptually intriguing. Maybe that tight "blandness" that you see is what I found much more compelling. Disciplined, perhaps? Especially given how the novel seems to be very explicitly spending a lot of time exploring very great flights of fancy.

Similarly, those flights of fancy were, I think, earnt by the necessarily tame take on characters. (Doubly so because it's a loyalist Marine book: by their nature, they can't really develop as characters. [i find that agreeable, but a necessary risk/cost to a "good Marine book", myself, and one that for me was a worthy cost - but obviously mileage will vary!]).

But otherwise, I think you captured it neatly. It's a book doing something a lot different than "tell a characterful story in a pacy, crowd-pleasingly emotional way" - so I suppose I don't even forgive it it's sins, so much as I don't view them as sins?

But that's no bad thing either.

For one last thing, I'm especially pleased that Darius didn't go to Mephiston for the protagonist.

Even (especially!) in stories likes this, I massively appreciate a less special, more sidelined character watching inexplicable, ridiculous events unfold.

Not completely agency-less, but it makes it more a disaster story, or almost like travel writing?

That said, for the dramatic investment of most readers, that definitely has a very serious cost.

Edited April 3, 2020 by Xisor

[Kelborn]

Just found some copies of Storm of Iron and Siege of Caatellax.

 

Though Valdor was highly recommended (and thanks for that), I'll go with these classics first. Eager to see the different takes on my beloved Iron Warriors. ;)

[bluntblade]

Be interested to see what you make of Siege of Castellax. I thought the overall story worked, but the repeated dog-kickings felt lazy and counter-productive to me. I feel like French and Bligh's take on the utterly uncaring IW is more interesting than "and now, to remind you I'm evil, I will murder this perfectly competent officer for not being as good at tactics as me!"

[Kelborn]

That's why I got Slaves to Darkness and Perturabo at hand to get the feeling grounded again. ;)

 

Siege could be a hit or muss, I believe but Storm is where my interest and hopes are lying upon.

[aa.logan]

Just found some copies of Storm of Iron and Siege of Caatellax.

Though Valdor was highly recommended (and thanks for that), I'll go with these classics first. Eager to see the different takes on my beloved Iron Warriors. ;)

Re-read Siege of Castellax recently. Thought I’d posted a review here, but apparently not.

 

It’s still good. There should be more traitor-protagonist novels, the scarcity of which perhaps skews my enjoyment of it. I posted the following on Goodreads, and still stand by it.

 

It still stands up really well, and is one of the all-too-rare novels from a non-Imperial PoV. Werner has a great grasp on the not-quite-Chaos Marines of the Iron Warriors, a bunch of glorious back-stabbing self-serving monsters who make good company. The ‘Flesh’ are also well presented, and life on Castellax under the IV Legion is suitably grim and suitably dark.

 

Sadly, the subplot around their rebellion is perhaps the only thing that lets the book down- the revelation of the processing plant might be an unpalatable shock in many settings, but to me seems bland and everyday for 40k- had it been revealed to be a facility predating the Iron Warriors, and we saw the true nature of the Imperium break the rebels a second time, and this would have been amongst the very best BL books, as it is, it is just(!) outstanding.

 

[bluntblade]

Agreed. I would say that otherwise the fundamentals work, except that there are points where Werner skips a beat or two in a battle, by my thinking. Especially the Witch Wall:

I feel like we need to see the Witch Wall hold for a good few hours and the Ork dead pile up in front of it, whereas we seem to just whiplash from "this thing is really tough!" to "oh there's a gaping hole in it!"

Edited April 5, 2020 by bluntblade

[Roomsky]

Hated them both, personally. Curious as to what you'll make of them when finished, Kelborn.

[bluntblade]

Hated them both, personally. Curious as to what you'll make of them when finished, Kelborn.

Hated? How come?

[Fedor]

I've never read any of Werner's 40k. His Warhammer books were usually very good at channeling at making different older school 30s-70s fantasy and horror vibes/influences very much fit into Warhammer, but he seemed back then as a frequent poster on the old official BL forums to be very much a fantasy guy. Hard to imagine how his style would translate easily to 40k.

 

Palace of the Plague Lord and Blood for the Blood God were Chaos classics.

Edited April 5, 2020 by Fedor

[Roomsky]

 

Hated them both, personally. Curious as to what you'll make of them when finished, Kelborn.

Hated? How come?

 

 

Never liked Werner's writing style. On top of that I didn't find any of the characters interesting and at a point stopped with the feeling of "I'm not sure why I should care about this."

 

As for Storm of Iron:

 

"Though the pain was intense, he felt a powerful yearning for such power. What must it be like to command the power of the empyrean, to have its unimaginable power pump through your veins like blood itself?"

 

Mcneill's come far since that book.

[1ncarnadine]

As for Storm of Iron:

 

"Though the pain was intense, he felt a powerful yearning for such power. What must it be like to command the power of the empyrean, to have its unimaginable power pump through your veins like blood itself?"

 

Mcneill's come far since that book.

 

I read Storm of Iron around when it first came out. I was a teenager struggling with English classes, and it helped kindle an enduring passion for reading. I love my memory of it. And that's why I'm never, ever going to re-read it.

 

edit: please know that I'm not trying to diss the book. I'm just convinced there's no way a re-read would hold up to that first, magical reading. I'm sure I would still find a lot to enjoy, but I'm certain I would also have much harsher criticisms.

Edited April 6, 2020 by LetsYouDown