- The Horus Heresy: The Primarchs: Lorgar: Bearer of the Word, Gav Thorpe
Greetings from Kor Phaeron! The Lord Phaeron! The Bearer of the Word! The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!
- Castora, herald-slave of the Covenant of Vharadesh, probably
I decided it would be a good idea to follow up The First Heretic with Lorgar, to stay on a Word Bearers kick. This one's by Gav Thorpe, who was something of a controversial figure back in the day in the Warhammer hobby. I read a short story of his in Tales of Heresy, and it wasn't great. In this Primarchs novel - they don't seem to be numbered - he's taking us to the Word Bearers' homeworld of Colchis.
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The book starts with a bunch of impoverished nomads on a desert planet, who come across Kor Phaeron's Mad Max caravan. Because I mean of course the religious fanatics are a desert people. There actually hasn't been a whole lot of orientalism in the Horus Heresy series so far, but Lorgar goes a long way toward fixing that. I half expected Kor Phaeron to have a harem.
Anyway the nomads have discovered a remarkable child in the desert. It's Lorgar, obviously, and Kor Phaeron takes him into the caravan and starts teaching him the faith. Even though there's an actual sandworm, it's a lot more Mad Max than Dune, because the religious content is really just thinly veiled Chaos worship. No human sacrifices, daemon-summoning or that kind of thing (yet), but it's very obvious that the Powers who rule Colchis are the Chaos gods.
Lorgar is instructed in their worship, but when he starts having visions of the Emperor and C. Magnus the Red, he replaces Lorgar as the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla and starts preaching the faith of the One, who will soon descend to them from the sky. Lorgar goes on to take over the biggest religious organization on Colchis, the Covenant, and unify the planet into a theocracy, while Kor Phaeron is an evil bureaucrat.
The problem is that this is all incredibly boring. It's not a bad story, but Thorpe's prose is so lackluster that nothing feels like it matters. Again, Lorgar is a sympathetic character, and so are several of the others, while even Kor Phaeron gets some good moments. But there's nothing exciting, interesting or memorable here, not even any really interesting fluff for wargaming. Given that the Primarchs ebooks currently cost twice as much as the main series, I would strongly recommend avoiding this even if you're a Word Bearers fan.
