Let's Read the Horus Heresy 20: Fear to Tread

The war that came to Melchior was fought by gods and angels; it cracked sky and earth, burned mountains and turned oceans to ash, but in the end it was all about a single objective.

 - The Horus Heresy: Fear to Tread, James Swallow

It's time for a full-length Horus Heresy novel again. This is a James Swallow joint - he of Nemesis and the Eisenstein - so I have some expectations. Fear to Tread stars Emps' super special vampire boys, the Blood Angels, who we last met waaay back in Horus Rising. Back when I got into Warhammer in the early nineties, I feel like the Blood Angels were one of the most prominent chapters, so it'll be nice to hear from them.

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It's lovely that I just complained about how banal some authors make the primarchs, and then Fear to Tread starts with excellent scenes between Horus and Sanguinius. This is how primarchs should be written. In other well-written scenes, you really have to hand it to Erbs, because he manages to show up in Fabulous Bill's lab, of all the places in the galaxy, and be by far the creepiest, most unpleasant person there.

The plot kicks off when Horus contacts Sanguinius via the services of a weird naked astropath, and sends the entire Blood Angels legion to the Signus cluster. Earlier, Horus and Sanguinius led their legions against a xenos species called the Nephilim, who sound an awful lot like Enslavers, and Horus tells Sanguinius that the Nephilim have taken over the Signus cluster.

This, we learn, is actually a cunning plan by Erbs to make Sanguinius and his legion fall to Chaos, but Horus's even more cunning plan is to have Sanguinius killed so he doesn't become a rival to Horus. So instead of Nephilim, the Signus cluster is actually the site of a massive warp incursion by daemons of Slaanesh and Khorne.

As with his previous novels, Swallow writes well, and what he does particularly well here is play on the fact that the Blood Angels don't understand what they're facing, but a reader even somewhat familiar with Warhammer immediately does, and he makes it work.

If I have a criticism, it's that the Blood Angel characters aren't particularly great, and the couple of Word Bearers and Space Wolves along for the ride are all fairly unoriginal stereotypes of their legions. We've had so many sneering Word Bearers doing the Dr. Evil pinky finger, and so many Space Woofs drinking mead and telling us about how they took an arrow to the knee. I know I'm biased, but it's especially galling with the Word Bearers, who got such a great treatment in First Heretic, only to regress to cartoon villainy since.

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That said, Fear to Tread is an excellent Horus Heresy story, and I very much enjoyed it. It's also an annoying story, because I now want to build some traitor Blood Angels, but maybe I'll make that into a 28mm project.