- The Reflection Crack'd, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: The Primarchs
Due to Black Library charging 1€ more for the whole volume than for just the Alpha Legion short story I wanted to read, I got the entire twentieth Horus Heresy book.
**
The volume starts with Graham McNeill at the Emperor's Children again. Even though Fulgrim was almost unbearably turgid, McNeill's improved since, and I found I quite liked being with Fulgrim and his captains again. There's some good bits here, but the ending is a massively disappointing cop-out and Fulgrim's fulminations are just plain boring.
One thing McNeill definitely deserves credit for, and it's Lucius. He is unbearably arrogant, and I think so far the absolute best villain of the Horus Heresy. He was a bright spot all through Fulgrim, and I especially enjoyed his antics in Galaxy In Flames. He's great here as well, and genuinely turning into one of my favorite characters.
The next story is about the Iron Hands, who are boring, and it's by Nick Kyme. I've read one short story of his earlier and it wasn't very good. Neither is this one. The Iron Hands are waging war by marching around on foot and in formation in a desert, as if this was Napoléon in Egypt or something, and Ferrus Manus is a complete buffoon. I didn't finish the story. Gav Thorpe's The Lion is another one of his Dark Angels stories, just as soulless and forgettable as the others.
The greatest sin of the mediocre-to-bad Horus Heresy stories is that they make the primarchs boring. The first novels, from Horus Rising on, had a simple formula: we saw the space marines through the eyes of the human remembrancers, which let us properly appreciate how superhuman the Astartes are. The primarchs were one step above space marines and inscrutable, transcendent characters compared to them.
This all just absolutely falls apart when authors like Thorpe and Kyme make us listen to the primarchs' boring and mundane internal monologues. After Deliverance Lost, I can't think of Corvus Corax as anything other than incredibly boring. The same goes for Guilliman, El'Jonson and Ferrus Manus, to name just a few. They've gone from demigods to just, like, bigger space marines with funnier names. It's a great loss to the series.
Finally, then, The Serpent Beneath, by Rob Sanders. I love that so far, an Alpha Legion story means that the writers seem to get permission to do the silliest spy thriller and video game stories, because as with Legion, this also feels like the author is having fun with it. The story also stars a Primarch, but because it's an Alpha Legion story, any statement of fact about it can always be followed by "or does it". I enjoyed it, and I'm developing a real love for XX Legion.
**
I think that was my third short story anthology, and they're still very hit-and-miss. For every good short story, there's at least one distinctly mediocre one, and usually one that's just plain not worth reading. Again, I might still pick some up for pricing reasons if there's a story I think I want to read, but if I'm honest, on their own merits these aren't worth it.
