Dropsite Massacre - John French

[Tolmeus]

I got my copy today and dug myself through the first 100 pages (of 391 total). So far, so good.
For those who want to spoil themselves for a bit, here a short overview what happens within the first quarter of the book:
 

Spoiler

First, we witness a council meeting between Dorn, Malcador, Valdor and Jentia Krole about Mersadie Oliton's records and the measures to be taken: 
Since there is really only one course of action, Malcador decides to strike Horus and his allies with the full might of the Imperium. This message is sent back through the Silent Mountain/Astronomicon by Armina Fell and finally reaches the Raven Guard Legion. Here we get a glimpse of Corvus Corax's reaction to Horus' betrayal.

 

On Isstavn V, the traitorous Primarchs hold a similar council meeting and prepare for the impending massacre. But Angron is not happy about the ‘stab in the back’ aspect, as this is rather dishonourable. He leaves the council dissatisfied. Maloghurst and Horus see the urgent need to start the battle soon, as their allies are already beginning to fight for their own goals, as Angron's action shows. Horus therefore orders Alpharius to gather information about who and what the Imperial countermeasure looks like.

An agent of the Alpha Legion causes chaos at a star station in order to disperse the astropaths and board a Salamanders warship.

Corax and Manus discuss Horus' rebellion via messages.

 

Maloghurst recognises the disadvantages of disunity and sends Abbadon to Khârn to reach Angron. Khârn has not felt comfortable in his own skin since his supposed death on Isstvan III and argues with Abbadon, who recognises Khârn's weakness. An Emperor's Children lacks the strength to counteract his need for stimulation and asks Fabius Bile for help. Fabius, in support of Sota-Nul, helps him in his own way and wants to present the modified legionary to Horus as a gift on behalf of Fulgrim.

 

[DarkChaplain]

It's also up on Audible already, so I suppose the Saturday releases really are a thing of the past for digital.

 

Gotta say, though, that I am sincerely disappointed that the book does not have the common Heresy novel chapter headings. It's just numbered chapters, no three key terms below that to set the mood.

Edited Friday at 05:28 PM by DarkChaplain

[Scribe]

I dont know, read the spoilers, this really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Not in a 'GW stop, you are doing it wrong' like with the Dark Imperium stuff, but in a 'GW stop, you had your shot already.' kind of way.

 

I dont know, bad mojo, probably just scarred from TEATD.

[wecanhaveallthree]

Quote

Gotta say, though, that I am sincerely disappointed that the book does not have the common Heresy novel chapter headings.

 

It was the end and the death (of common Heresy novel chapter headings).

 

Quote

my favourite part was when Horus said IT'S DROPSITE MASSACRE TIME and massacred all over the dropsite

 

I'm waiting for reviews and general commentary before I commit my thirty pieces of silver, but the excerpts I've seen so far e.g. Mortarion going full ISN'T BETTY A GIRL'S NAME??? very much aligns with what Scribe said: this feels like 'and we'll do it properly this time', and it is very much too late to go back and 'do it properly'. Like reducing the battle of Beta-Garmon to a book (because they forgot about it ah ha ha), attempting to condense the Massacre down to a novel (when what we had - scattered, frantic images and experiences - worked perfectly fine), we're squashing a bunch of stuff together to relitigate something that was already fine. It doesn't look like it's saying anything new or interesting. The very definition of 'this meeting could have been an e-mail'. 

[DarkChaplain]

Surprisingly, I disagree that the Dropsite Massacre was "fine" before this. It was "good enough", but always a pain, particularly for people who didn't have the benefit of having been there from the beginning of the series, or extensive flowchart-esque knowledge.

 

A lot about why the Dropsite Massacre works now is due to backfilling already.

It took years before we got an audio drama dealing with Corax at the Massacre, and that only went into print in Shadows of Treachery, book 22, multiple novels after Deliverance Lost, book 18, built on it.

 

Vulkan and the Salamanders got shafted til the Scorched Earth limited edition novella, which didn't drop until 2013 - we had Betrayer and Mark of Calth (books 24 & 25) by that point, and since it was a limited edition, there was, what, a 2 year window where it wasn't widely available? Even the limited edition didn't even make it to people in time before Vulkan Lives, book 26, if I remember the Warseer days properly. Scorched Earth wasn't collected until Born of Flame, book 50.

 

A good bit of the aftermath of the Dropsite Massacre, namely the council of the traitor primarchs where Fulgrim gets found out to be daemonically possessed, happened in Aurelian - another limited edition novella, which didn't get a wide release for years and years, and was only collected for the common folk in book 35, Eye of Terra.

 

The Iron Hands' trauma didn't get picked up til The Damnation of Pythos, book 30, and then the limited edition anthology Meduson, which got a second edition with another story added and then finally collected as Shattered Legions, book 43.

 

Even if we look at when it originally got tackled in Fulgrim, book 5, there was a lengthy gap before it was told from other perspectives. Fallen Angels, book 11, ends with Perturabo being handed the big artillery by the Lion - that was it. The First Heretic, book 14, finally gave another good look at it, but that, too, was a limited view. From Fulgrim to the Raven's Flight audio drama, there was a 3-year gap, too.

 

It's "good enough" now, that we have all the material on the table and available in anthologies. But even then, you're jumping around a lot, and those stories are part of other story arcs more than anything. It's "good enough" now that you can read about it in the Black Books, should you so choose (I don't).

 

....and we never even got an actual Sons of Horus view of the war.

 

For the longest time, the way the Dropsite Massacre was handled has been of the major criticisms of the Heresy series, along with the lack of Sons of Horus representation (though you could make the same arguments there, with how Horus and some characters like the late-introduction Argonis show up here and there in other books, like Deliverance Lost, Fear to Tread and so forth).

 

It being so fragmented, along with being boiled down to the Emperor's Children legion story in its major novel outing, which only late in the book even gets to Isstvan V, makes one of the biggest events in the HH background feel like an afterthought. You could accept and deal with that, but it was a major let-down back in the day, and it's still something new readers will likely be tripped up on on the regular. It's the first event in the series that I'd argue you need to flowchart out to really appreciate the impact of it all on the course of the war.

[DarkChaplain]

Alright, I've now read the first part of the book, which spans the first five chapters and just under 20% of the book.

 

I'm very happy that this exists, now.

It absolutely nails the level of gravitas of having to send word of Horus' betrayal from Terra out into the galaxy. The disbelief, the urgency, the sudden movement of the war effort in a different direction. But also harkens back to when the Traitor Legions and their Primarchs weren't yet utterly broken.

 

 

Angron kind of steals the show for a bit there, raging at the unworthiness of the Dropsite Massacre plans - which elevates his early series portrayal a great deal, and brings him more in line with what we've seen in Betrayer, rather than the brutal force of nature that we saw in the opening trilogy, through Loken's eyes. But Fulgrim, too, is handled very well in that early chapter appearance. And Horus? Horus is, at least in that chapter, making me super nostalgic for the opening trilogy.

 

 

It also clicks very nicely with the Warmaster audio drama, which French wrote so long ago now, alluding to his plans for Signus and Calth.

 

 

Khârn is also getting some much-needed spotlighting in this, since we've never actually had much about him between Betrayer's opening scenes of him being found stuck to a tank, and being back in action in the same book, a good time later. Seeing him here hurts.

 

Maloghurst has Abaddon go after Khârn to hopefully keep Angron in line - and while their conversation is brief, it feels right, with hints at Abaddon's later disillusionment with the way the war is being fought. Mal then has a further conversation with Horus, alone, and expresses his fear that things are already falling apart. Horus wants to keep the momentum going, refuses a less risky turn of dispersing the Traitor forces and razing the Imperium to the ground - at this point in time, he wants it all. He's still convinced that things will go his way, that he can control his brothers, that he can make a mad dash for Terra and win.

This, again, has a clear line to the chronologically later Warmaster audio drama, in which he laments his plans failing one after the other, before eventually committing to a war of devastation, making the Loyalists anticipate his eventual assault but no longer rushing for Terra, instead engulfing the entire galaxy in his war.

 And then there's Alpharius/Omegon - we see Horus using Davinite sorcery to contact "him", like we've seen in much later stories like Fear to Tread iirc. This is presumably the first time he's calling in that stuff (judging by his reactions and questions), and it's suitably grim.... and then the Twin Primarchs steal the show with their very-Alpha Legion demeanor. It's working very well. You get the impression that, as was set up by Legion way back when, Alpharius & Omegon aren't playing it straight with Horus Lupercal - they support his cause on the surface, but spin their own nets below it.

 Horus is still naive, not anticipating just what he bargained with, not truly. He accepts that the astropath given to the Davinites will die in the process of contacting Alpharius, despite being fond of the guy and having him in his service for a long time, but he's not truly aware of the corrupting influence of the warp, I don't think. It's great.
 

 

 

But damn, that fifth chapter was fantastic in particular. I don't even want to spoil it, but damn, it had impact.

 

I hope the novel continues in this way, because right now, it is bringing back a lot of the fondness I have and had for the early Heresy, when the scope seemed so big, the drama and tragedy was very human rather than utterly warped, and you can find yourself thinking "damn, if only this bloke hadn't taken a turn to the right instead of the left, in this situation, things might have been so grand". There's a sense of nobility to the way the Traitor Primarchs conduct themselves, even as they're contemplating absolute betrayal - they're still sane, and I didn't realize how much I missed that.

 

But so far, I'd absolutely recommend reading this as part of the first 10ish books in the series, as if it was a mainline entry, because it does a lot to lift up and fill in the aspects that were sorely missing in the way Isstvan V was originally handled. I hope it holds up.

I'm not that far in, mind you. All of this could go very rapidly south. But in these first few chapters, it's done a lot of work to make this feel right, and earned.

Edited yesterday at 08:23 AM by DarkChaplain
The way spoiler tags format things is bad, and has been bad for years. Always gotta fix that after the fact...

[Marshal Loss]

I'm about 2/3 through and thoroughly enjoying this, it's great. Top tier Frenchian Heresy so far

[grailkeeper]

Does it have a lot of dreamlike mystical scenes? John French has a few of those in his books. 

[Tolmeus]

3 hours ago, grailkeeper said:

Does it have a lot of dreamlike mystical scenes? John French has a few of those in his books. 

 

As far as I can tell not one bit. You have got sections of messages being transmitted between certain characters. That would be the most abstract part I can think of (which isn't really abstract since these are just the way long form communication is built in Warhammer).

[Tolmeus]

12 hours ago, DarkChaplain said:

The disbelief, the urgency, the sudden movement of the war effort in a different direction.

 

I have to strongly agree with @DarkChaplain here. I think French portrays the shock and need for sudden action from the now "loyalists" greatly. 

Also, we now see that the seemingly ad-hoc attack-plan of the retribution fleet with Ferrus Manus as its figure head was not only an act of pure fury fueled by Manus. We can now experience that this is rather an complex operation that was also discussed intensively by the primarchs. 

Sure, we already know at this point that any plan would be doomed because of the wider betrayal, but Manus and his follow loyalists really thought of an drastic but realistic option to stop Horus rebellion right at its start.

130 pages in and starting to feel a little goosebumps again 

Edited 15 hours ago by Tolmeus
+++ errors detected +++ I recognize my failure and will make sure it doesn't happen again

[DarkChaplain]

There's also another element that led to events at Isstvan V:

 

Vulkan urged caution. He wanted to convene at Beta-Garmon (which is a nice way to bring that system into the early Heresy, since it was such a latecomer to the lore that it never even got namedropped for like 40 books), but his astropathic message got literally hamstrung by the Alpha Legion activating their operative to take down a space port with astropathic relay station, which was close to Nocturne.

So Horus and Alpharius are actively shown manipulating the odds and effectively silencing cautionary voices at this stage.

 

It's no longer just a matter of headstrong Ferrus Manus taking charge and losing his head figuratively as well as literally, but an actual part of the scheme to make the Loyalist response more predictable and manageable. It being shown this way is great, because it makes everyone look just a tad more competent, working with what information and tools they had in a much more reasonable way than it was shown in Fulgrim. Mind you, Ferrus is still utterly convinced that he is right in his actions, his outrage, as is seen in his text conversation with Corax - he's seen Fulgrim turn on him, and it's set him off, and he is reluctant to take his foot off the gas pedal, but he's still being rational enough. Had Vulkan's message reached him at this early stage of making plans for the Loyalist response, things might well have gone very differently.

 

5 hours ago, Tolmeus said:

130 pages in and starting feel a little goosebumps again 

 

That's very much my sentiment so far as well. I feel nothing of the frustration from the Siege of Terra reading this - just excitement at them doing it properly.

[cheywood]

Only a few chapters in, but this is the good stuff. This is what we’ve been missing all year and most of last year. This is John French giving life to a part of the Heresy that was criminally mistreated, and doing so in a way that will be essential reading for Heresy fans (unless I hate the rest of the book of course).

Edited 10 hours ago by cheywood

[Marshal Loss]

Finished and happy to say it's my favourite heresy novel in many years and a worthy addition to the setting. If it were part of the actual heresy series I'd consider it up there with the best of them as it really does the Dropsite Massacre justice; if you enjoyed French's Slaves to Darkness/Praetorian of Dorn/Solar War style affairs, or the OG FW black books, you'll enjoy this. It gives Isstvan V some serious weight, scale and tragedy - which it badly needed. 

 

Definitely a little bit of a "for the boys" novel at times with a dizzying array of Primarchs and other named characters getting at least a little attention but everybody generally comes off well and French has clearly taken pains to plot out a take that doesn't unnecessarily duplicate what we see of Isstvan V from other novels (e.g. Fulgrim and The First Heretic). Was great seeing some of the FW HH characters appear because they were all really memorable. 

 

If I had to take marks off for anything, it would be the Alpha Legion being Alpha Legion because reading about one 17 dimensional pre-positioned plot after another drags on a bit, but I feel like any serious heresy fan is basically inured to their shenanigans at this point. 

 

I only purchased this on a whim after TEATD/the Siege of Terra series in general obliterated my will to read heresy fiction, but I'm very glad I did. There's life in the old girl yet and I hope we see more like this over the coming years.

[DarkChaplain]

What impresses me the most so far is that it actually manages to make Isstvan V much less of a sure thing for Horus. Like, it introduces elements and not least of all arguments as to how this really was the knife-edge moment we were told, but never actually felt like it was in the series. It was always an event that took place and devastated the Loyalists, always a bit on the nose with the backstabbing of the hidden Traitor Legions.

 

But here? It's all super fragile. Horus and his forces are prepared. Assets are in place. Odds are stacked. But it's still unstable. Everything is, including Horus's allies. They all have their own views on what is unfolding, their own complaints. Horus needs Ferrus Manus to rush for him, because his brothers are growing increasingly hard to control. There's mistrust between the Traitor ranks, growing to a boiling point that only immediate action can cool back down for the moment.

 

 

Angron hates the cowardly nature of the strategy employed. Fulgrim makes his plans and despises Angron for potentially mucking them up, while being arrogant enough to think he is actually the real guy in charge. Mortarion loathes Horus's early use of the Davinites and their dark rituals, and basically threatens rebellion or worse, should they not be gotten rid off as soon as they were no longer vital to their strategy.
 

 

 

They're all depicted in a way that is fully in line with what we know of them, and they didn't leave their grievances behind with their Loyalty to the Throne. They're a risk to each other just as much as to the Loyalists, and inaction chafes, it makes them contemplate. They need the Loyalist response to arrive, and soon.

 

But on the flipside, we have Ferrus Manus - who is being improved on a lot here.

 

 

He's strategizing, recognizing potential risks - and he's so close to realizing what is going to happen, in speculating what Horus is trying to do. He's not taking victory for granted, he's not rushing in heedlessly. He might not even have been the de-facto leader of the imperial forces, had Vulkan linked up.

He's communicating with the hidden Traitors, trying to make use of their assets, including potential Alpha Legion assets among the Traitors (which Alpharius denies still being around, if they ever had been). Even potential Exterminatus action was being contemplated, but discarded due to the Traitors being so well dug-in.
 

 

 

This is no longer a situation of Ferrus Manus being made to look silly, ignoring potential traps or pitfalls - it's him trying to account for too much, on the outset, and being blindsided by the further betrayal at a point when sheer disbelief of how any one Primarch, any one Legion can turn at all - while faced with the shock that four did so, fortifying right in front of them, was still raw, still something for everyone trying to come to terms with. This is a moment in time where none but the Traitors have even experienced actual Astartes vs Astartes war on a Legion scale. They're trying to cope. They're even trying to avoid calling Horus by his name. They're stunned by what is unfolding, but pressed for time and control of the situation.

 

"Control" is the keyword here, I think. Isstvan V is the loss of control for the Imperium, for the Loyalists. But it's also the Traitors proving themselves uncontrollable in the long run. It's the tender moment in any revolution, any civil war, where the uprising could fall back into itself in disunity. It gives a lot of weight to Horus's lamentations in the Warmaster audio drama.

Edited 4 hours ago by DarkChaplain

[DukeLeto69]

@DarkChaplain am intrigued with you saying you would (retrofit) this back into the main HH series. Where would you place it?

 

And I agree. The dropsite massacre was one of THE key story beats for the HH and in the original series they blew it!

[Tolmeus]

4 minutes ago, DukeLeto69 said:

(retrofit) this back into the main HH series. Where would you place it?

 

I am not DarkChaplain, but my pic for this would be after HH book 5 "Fulgrim":

• book 1 - 3 are still needed to establish Horus cause for the Heresy as well as the Isstvan III purge 
• book 4 is needed to let Dorn and the Imperial council (Malcador, Valdor and Dorn) know of Horus rebellion and actions upon Isstvan III
• book 5 shows the reason for Manus need to redeem himself in the eyes of the Imperium and his brother-primarchs

I guess you could read "Dropsite Massacre" during "Fulgrim", right at the moment when the Isstvan III atrocity has ended and Fulgrim prepares Isstvan V for the oncoming Massacre.

 

[DarkChaplain]

Pretty much my view, too.

There's a case to be made for it to be read after Legion, though I'd discount that one easily enough. But it should be read pretty much right after Fulgrim, if not squeezed in-between, after Fulgrim and Ferrus have their spat and part on bad terms.

I might say it'd be very much worth reading After Desh'ea from Tales of Heresy before it, though, for an added bit of context to Angron and Khârn.

 

The more I read of it, the more it feels like a pretty vital narrative piece that we should have had 15 years ago already. It's pointing towards so many things, backfilling some connections, introducing some later series characters by name, if not much in the way of content, like Artellus Numeon appearing for a little bit as Vulkan's equerry. You know, the guy from Vulkan Lives & Deathfire, whose sacrifice brings Vulkan back. Or a namedrop for an Iron Hand that appeared briefly in the Sisypheum arc. Characters we know were involved in some capacity from being told so, but never had the benefit of seeing them actually there. It's just glimpses, but they feel appropriate.

 

There's some pointers at the simultaneously happening gathering at Calth, or Signus Prime, or the White Scars being scattered and unreachable, which you can jump off of to Know No Fear, Fear to Tread and Brotherhood of the Storm/Scars. And it's doing it in a way that makes sense, subtly, as part of the Warmaster's plans and the Loyalist strategizing and agonizing.

 

Like, had we gotten this book, as is, 15 years ago, I'd wager a lot of flowcharting and new reader guidework would have been heavily simplified, while there'd have been more attachment to some aspects, characters or themes in more Legion-specific books down the line. It's doing a great service to the early series, anchoring that phase of the war in a way you probably could only do in hindsight, but it makes the whole thing richer for it.