Let's Read the Horus Heresy: Main series tier list and thoughts

So that's it! I've read or tried to read 35 out of the 54 main series Horus Heresy novels, plus five Primarch series novels. I've divided them into three categories here: the novels I feel you must read if you're into this stuff, the ones I suggest you do read if the subject is of any interest to you, and the ones I would say don't read.

Must read:

Horus Rising

Legion

The First Heretic

Betrayer

Do read:

Galaxy In Flames

Flight of the Eisenstein

Mechanicum

A Thousand Sons

Nemesis

Fear to Tread

Shadows of Treachery

Scars

Vengeful Spirit

Path of Heaven

Tallarn

Titandeath

Alpharius: Head of the Hydra

Sanguinius: the Great Angel

Don't Read:

Battle for the Abyss

Fallen Angels

Deliverance Lost

Know No Fear

Unremembered Empire

Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter

**

After I finished Sanguinius, I took a bit of a break to collect my thoughts.

First of all, the Horus Heresy books were better than I expected. As I said in my very first post in this series, on Horus Rising, great literature this ain't. But it was definitely entertaining, more so than I had thought, even at times a bit emotional. So again, if you're into Warhammer at all, I really do recommend giving these books a shot.

Way back when I read False Gods, I talked about the way the Imperium in Warhammer used to be a 2000AD-esque parody dystopia, but these days are very clearly the good guys. Reading the whole series only reinforces this point. Nothing about this is satire, and the Emperor and the Imperium are very clearly the good guys, and Horus and the traitors are the bad guys. Sometimes there's a little bit more nuance than that, but then we go right back to very black-and-white good guys-bad guys tropes.

At worst, the series veers into leering misogyny and actual fascism; at best, there's positive representation for minorities. So in this sense, these books are very much a Games Workshop product. As I've said before, the company very clearly can't decide if they want to throw the bigots out of the fandom or dogwhistle to them.

**

From a fluff standpoint, so to speak, the Horus Heresy novels do a great job filling in a lot of background for basically everything to do with Warhammer 40,000. I now kind of have opinions and feelings about all of the legions, when before this reading project, I couldn't even have named all of them.

To adapt one of my favorite pieces of reasoning ever, the Iron Hands are the most boring and forgettable legion, which is a distinction the Ultramarines lack, making them officially the most boring of all legions.

So did we learn why the Horus Heresy happened?

Not really.

I mean okay, due to a Word Bearers plot, Horus got stabbed by a demon and went on a weird vision quest? Which somehow made fully half of all space marines suddenly hate the Emperor? No, to be honest, this is like Fallout 3 and 4 in that the main plot really doesn't make a whole lot of sense at all, but it's not really why we're here.

Now, some falls are very understandable. In First Heretic, the Emperor spectacularly humiliates Lorgar and the Word Bearers, and they go off to find gods that want to be worshipped. In Shadows of Treachery, we learned that the Night Lords were basically starting their own Curze Heresy. Then there's Angron and his World Eaters, not to mention the Emperor keeping everyone in the dark about his big secret project, which leads to Nikaea and sending the Space Wolves to attack the Thousand Sons.

So yes, it's called the Horus Heresy, but by the looks of things, the Emperor had at least four legions fully ready to rebel or in fact attacked by his loyalists without Horus doing anything. This leads to what must be the biggest theme of the whole Horus Heresy: Emps is a Really Shitty Space Dad.

**

To very briefly recap, Emps is an angry New Atheist who hates magic and the Warp, so he uses magic and possibly some kind of pacts with warp entities to make twenty* super-supersoldiers, the Primarchs. Each has a personality of their own and there's at least some notion that each of them represents some aspect of humanity or whatever. The Primarchs are then snatched up by the Chaos gods or something and scattered all over the galaxy.

Some of them end up in fairly benign environments, at least for the Warhammer 40,000 universe; they're adopted by some kind of parent (I think invariably father) figure, and grow up to be more or less decent people. Others end up in pretty terrible circumstances, like a cyberpunk dystopia where they become the Crow, a Mad Max planet where they're adopted by the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah, or worst of all, Space Rome where they become a Spartacus who's bioengineered to be constantly angry.

Meanwhile, Emps sets out on the Great Crusade for Science and Rationalism, which slightly weirdly involves pretending that daemons and such don't exist, and he starts finding the Primarchs. Perhaps strangely for a New Atheist, Emps's method in dealing with his kids seems to be the Matthew Principle: the ones who had everything good are treated good, while the worse the world and situation they ended up in, the shittier Emps seems to treat them.

With some of the Primarchs, it's difficult to understand the whole thing at all. If you're an angry atheist who sets out to make up some guys, why do you then make one of them Theology Guy? And then when he goes and does theology, why is your solution to publicly humiliate him and his entire legion? Similarly, you hate magic, so you made up Magic Guy, and when you decide you now need to do a Super Secret Magic Project, you specifically refuse to tell Magic Guy, and then send your drunk furry enforcers to murder him. And all of that makes a lot more sense than the way Emps treats Angron. He even leaves Goth Guy on his own to sulk.

So yeah, the main overriding theme of the Horus Heresy is that Emps is a Shitty Space Dad, and if you want a single cause for the whole damn Horus Heresy, that's it. I suspect that this forms part of the appeal of the series: men can read and think about fatherhood and feelings if the dads and sons are wearing power armor in space.

**

I'm not done with this stuff yet, of course. There's the whole Siege of Terra series yet to come, and an entire sequel series to that called the Scouring is just getting started. And yes, I will be reading them. I bought the Siege of Terra books as they came out, and the first Scouring book is by Chris Wraight, whose work I've quite liked.

And I suppose that's my final word on the Horus Heresy novels: I've read 40 of them, and I'm going to read more. Part of the reason is that I've been reading about Space Marines and everything Warhammer since, I think, 1992, and I'm not going to stop now. The Warhammer 40,000 universe is such an impressive accretion of lore by now that it has a life of its own, entirely independent of what Games Workshop wants to do with it. And so far, the Horus Heresy novels have been a really good addition to that giant pile of lore.

Hell, they even gave Abaddon a personality.

*hail hydra

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 40: Sanguinius

Now he was running, properly sprinting down the corridors.

 - The Horus Heresy: Primarchs: Sanguinius: The Great Angel, Chris Wraight

I liked Chris Wraight's White Scars novels, and I've already started painting some traitor Blood Angels for Legions Imperialis because of Fear to Tread. So I chose Wraight's Sanguinius to be the last Horus Heresy novel I read before moving on to the Siege of Terra series.

It's funny that I just mentioned remembrancers when talking about Alpharius, and here we are starting Sanguinius with one. Disgraced remembrancer Avajis Kautenya is sent to meet Sanguinius and chronicle the deeds of his legion. He's gotten in trouble before for being too critical, and he's told to be as critical as he can be here. So he travels with the Blood Angels, watches them go to war, and just does the whole remembrancer thing as if this was Horus Rising all over again.

Other than starring the Blood Angels, Sanguinius is also like Fear to Tread in that you know what's coming, even though the protagonist doesn't, and it still works. I mean everyone at least a little bit familiar with the fluff knows what the terrible dark secret of the Blood Angels is, but it doesn't matter because the story's written so well. It's also a perfect volume to end this stage of my project on, as it starts with the Horus Rising vibes and ends on an epilogue set after the Heresy, when the Imperial cult is being set up. Very entertaining, highly recommended.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 39: Alpharius

I am Alpharius.

 - The Horus Heresy: Primarchs: Alpharius: Head of the Hydra, Mike Brooks

The Alpha Legion are still one of my favorite legions, but I haven't really formed a very solid picture of Alpharius yet. Mike Brooks is here to fix that.

**

Way back in Horus Rising, the remembrancers attached to the Luna Wolves played a prominent part in the story to highlight how superhuman the space marines were. Beyond them, the Primarchs were mystical, almost otherworldly.

Several years and a pile of novels later, the space marine point of view is the default, and Primarchs are too often just boring. I complained about this when I read the Primarchs anthology, although there are worse offenders. At first, Brooks's Alpharius comes off the same way: distant, impersonal and mundane.

In the first part of the book, which owes a lot to Dan Abnett's Blood Games and Praetorian of Dorn, young Alpharius tests the defenses of the Imperial Palace. It's not bad, but it's also not great. The story picks up when Alpharius is secretly united with his legion and goes crusading. Of course, because they're the Alpha Legion, they can't just be crusading, but have to have a secret sidequest, which leads them to join the Dark Angels in the Rangdan Xenocides and fight the Slaugth.

This second part of the book is much better, and makes the whole thing worth reading. There's good stuff here, including a welcome nod to the gambit roulette nature of the Alpha Legion's cunning plans when unrest they've fomented on a planet threatens to derail their super-secret mission. Also of note is an entirely positive portrait of a same-sex couple with a child, which is a welcome change from the quasi-fascism of some Black Library authors.

I already liked Alpharius and his legion; now I like them more. Alpharius goes on the Do Read list.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 38: Konrad Curze

Corpse-grey Tsagualsa turned under the light of a sickly star.

 - The Horus Heresy: Primarchs: Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Guy Haley

As I've said before, reading the Horus Heresy books has made me into something of a fan of the Night Lords and their incredibly goth primarch. So when I looked at the list of Primarchs novels, I had to get the Curze one.

Sadly, this was a mistake. Konrad Curze has the dubious distinction of being the only Horus Heresy novel I've read that has nothing of substance to add to the Warhammer canon whatsoever. It takes Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Night Lords trilogy, rehashes the things it said about Curze, and fills in a few bits that weren't explicitly spelled out by Dembski-Bowden, while adding nothing that would matter at all.

This book came out in 2019; the Dembski-Bowden novels were published 2010-12, and the omnibus came out in 2014. So barely five years after the omnibus, Black Library puts out this boring executive summary of what Curze was like in it. Why they did this I cannot conceive.

In general, I feel that a book shouldn't be critiqued for what it isn't. I mean this in the sense that this is the book the author chose to write, and criticism should assess that book, instead of saying they should have written something else. In this case, though, I'm breaking my rule, because of how bad this particular decision by the author is.

As I said, Curze sulking on Tsagualsa (which I keep thinking is Tsathoggua) has already been covered in the Night Lords trilogy. So far, the other Primarchs novels I've read were set before the great events of the Horus Heresy, but not this one. That's what I don't get at all. I mean yes, Curze's backstory as the Crow on planet Cyberpunk Gotham has already been told, but surely not all of it. We've barely had any glimpses into the Eighth Legion before the Heresy, or how Curze shaped them in his image. You'd think this would be significant, because by the time we properly meet Curze in Shadows of Treachery, he's already on the brink of starting his own personal Curze Heresy. So in this case, I do feel a strong sense of disappointment that the Primarchs novel on Curze chose to cover no new ground at all.

So yeah, not worth your time or money.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 37: Angron

Jochura woke, if the brief, shivering yield to his exhaustion could be called sleep.

 - The Horus Heresy: Primarchs: Ghost of Nuceria, Ian St. Martin

I've read all of the main series Horus Heresy novels that I'm going to, but before I move on to the Siege of Terra books, I want to read about some of my favorite Primarchs. Now, I did already read one of these, namely Gav Thorpe's Lorgar, and it wasn't good. But what with After Desh'ea, First Heretic and Betrayer and everything, I really do like Angron and the World Eaters. So I'm reading what Ian St. Martin did with them.

**

First up, I've got Ian St. Martin's short story Ghost of Nuceria. It's a brief look at Angron doing his best Conan the Barbarian on Nuceria, just before the climactic final battle of his ragtag gladiator army with their former overlords. Probably the most important point of the story is that the Emperor is a dick, but then we kind of knew that already.

From there we go on to the Primarchs novel, Angron: Slave of Nuceria. I think a content warning is in order, because the book starts with a slightly grisly surgery scene. It's set after Angron's been reunited with his legion, and they're trying to figure out how to implant copies of Angron's rage implants, the Butcher's Nails, in everyone. Angron has ordered this, but not everyone is very happy about it, especially centurion Mago of the 18th company, who's our main point-of-view character.

About half of the book is Mago, Khârn and the rest of the World Eaters trying to force a recalcitrant planet to return to compliance, while dealing with Angron's erratic and murderous behavior, and debating the wisdom of the Nails. When the legion fails to enforce compliance within Angron's arbitrary timeframe of 31 hours - a day on Nuceria - he goes berserk and starts murdering marines, until the legion's Librarians manage to shut him down. One of the Librarians falls into a coma and starts reliving Angron's memories of his time as a gladiator on Nuceria, which makes up the other half of the story.

Once again, those of us who know the fluff know how this all ends, but it's still a well-written and effective tragedy. Angron is just a really shitty, violent dad to his legion. He humiliates them and kills them when they don't live up to his impossible expectations, and is just generally an asshole to them even though they do their best to be good little legionnaires. The aggression, sulking and unpredictable violence are more than a little familiar to anyone who's survived abuse as a child or by a partner, which does give the story an extra dimension.

Having said that, it's also very easy to understand why Angron behaves the way he does. Not only does he still have the rage implants in his head, but the Emperor snatched him away from his comrades in the middle of their climactic battle, and forced him to take charge of a legion he never wanted. Combine that with Angron's insistence on the World Eaters also being implanted with the Nails, and I'm sorry to say that this instalment of power armor space opera is actually about transgenerational trauma.

In that trauma, Emps is the original shitty dad. The more Horus Heresy I read, the more obvious it becomes that the whole mess is really the story of the Emperor's complete mismanagement of the whole Primarch project. The way he treats Angron is just awful, but it's not like the World Eaters weren't a problem before he showed up. They were already rebelling on their own, and if we recall that Curze and the Night Lords were doing pretty much the same thing, and the senseless humiliation of the Word Bearers and the Thousand Sons, Emps had a pretty good civil war brewing without Horus doing a damn thing.

I've said before that the Horus Heresy is at its best when it's understood as a tragic space opera, and there are few more tragic characters in it than Angron and his legion. If I ever collected Horus Heresy loyalists, I think they'd definitely be World Eaters. Maybe I'll build a 28mm World Eaters Librarian and hope it satisfies this urge.

Anyway, Angron: Slave of Nuceria is a perfectly decent Horus Heresy book, and I'd recommend it to anyone with any interest in the World Eaters.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 36: Titandeath

The spires of the Phalanx formed a cityscape as glorious as any once boasted by Terra’s orbital plates, now all the more impressive for lack of suitable comparators.

 - The Horus Heresy: Titandeath, Guy Haley

As a diehard Adeptus Titanicus player, I'd actually been looking forward to this book. We already got some very good Titan action in Legacies of Betrayal and some glimpses of god-engines in Vengeful Spirit and Tallarn, so it's about time the Titan Legions get a novel of their own.

**

Luckily, Guy Haley doesn't disappoint, and Titandeath is a very competently written and entertaining Horus Heresy story. It follows Legio Solaria, a loyalist Titan Legion whose command crews are all-female, and their battles with the traitors of Legio Vulpa at Beta-Garmon. I liked the characters, and there's a good balance of battle and personal narratives.

Titanicus players take note, there are several named Titan classes that I think have never had models. There's a tiny Titan: "a Rapier class scout, a lighter, swifter machine than even a Warhound", and several medium ones:

The balance of their engines was of middling classes – Reavers, Nightgaunts and Carnivores – but the aggressive manner in which they deployed them made up for the relative paucity of heavier machines.

Lexicanum identifies a Nightgaunt as a sub-type of the Warlord, but it's clearly described as a Titan smaller than a Warlord in Titandeath. We want these in Titanicus and Legions!

I'm also entertained that they're fighting over Nyrcon City, which I invariably read as Nyrok City. I mean I suppose I can see Fulgrim having an Andy McCoy phase. Again, I have to be honest and say that I don't fully understand why the two sides are fighting over this particular star system, but then I rarely do, and real-world wars and battles don't always make sense either.

**

So I liked Titandeath, and shockingly, it's the last main series Horus Heresy novel I'm reading. It's kind of appropriate, too, as Horus and the gang are now ready to start their assault on the Sol system. I think I still want to read a couple of the Primarch novels, and then I'll do some kind of summing up before hitting the Siege of Terra books. It's been a journey.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 35: Slaves to Darkness

The cloaked figure walked across the plain that had been a mountain.

 - The Horus Heresy: Slaves to Darkness, John French

This is the last print book available in the Horus Heresy main series, so this part of the project is nearing an end. I just enjoyed John French's Tallarn, and his short story was one of the best bits of the otherwise boring Burden of Loyalty. So I was a little surprised to find that getting through Slaves to Darkness was a slog.

Seeing as how this is the thirty-fifth Horus Heresy book I've read, it may just be the case that I'm getting a little tired of them. But Slaves to Darkness felt like one of those middle volumes of trilogies, where everything is either setting up the finale, or some pointless fluff around it.

Slaves to Darkness follows several characters: the Iron Warrior Volk and Son of Horus Argonis, who are with Perturabo's fleet; Horus's equerry Maloghurst; and Zardu Layak, Dark Apostle of the Word Bearers. The bunch of them are trying to marshal the traitor Primarchs for the final assault on Terra, and get Horus to recover after he's been wounded by Russ. Lorgar and Layak go looking for Fulgrim through the Webway, and the Iron Warriors go find Angron.

The trouble is that none of these characters, or the quests they're on, are particularly interesting. The action sequences feel formulaic, repetitive and pointless, and nothing meaningful happens at any point. At the end of the story, the traitor Primarchs who are going to assault Terra are there, like we knew they would be, and the entire novel leading up to it has felt like a waste of time.

My thesis at this point is that a successful Horus Heresy novel has good battle scenes, interesting characters and an amount of power armor soap opera. For the battle scenes to feel meaningful, we have to care about the characters and what they're doing, and the power armor soap opera is there to make the action mean something. Slaves to Darkness is too much power armor soap opera, with very few interesting characters and battle scenes that aren't really tied in to the soap opera at all.

I don't know, maybe I'd feel different if I read this with fresher eyes, so to speak, but this was a very disappointing experience. Avoid.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 34: Burden of Loyalty

Gritty ochre dust clings to the dead warrior’s open eyes.

 - Into Exile, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, in The Horus Heresy: The Burden of Loyalty

It's an anthology! The last one, as it happens; the Horus Heresy series is drawing to a close. It starts with a Gav Thorpe story starring Space Woofs, and I can't think of many things I'd like to read less, so I skip it. Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Into Exile was all right, but I have to say that I was disappointed by how boring Rob Sanders's Cybernetica was. Yes, it's got piles of fluff on Mars, but you can't help thinking that McNeill did all of this so much better in Mechanicum.

Luckily David Annandale's Binary Succession in this volume is much better, and the John French psi-titan story is so good that it demonstrated once again that he's the Black Library author who's made me miss the most subway stops. This is followed by Chris Wraight, and no matter how well he did with the White Scars, the Space Woofs are just as boring when he writes them. Finally, it's Dan Abnett with a decent enough short story starring his Perpetuals.

I have to say that this was a very poor quality anthology. I think the problem is the same one that's been present through the entire series: the loyalists are just really boring.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 33: Tallarn

The last Titan left on Tallarn bore the world’s new master across the dust plains.

 - The Horus Heresy: Tallarn, John French

I don't think it's a coincidence that some of my favorite Horus Heresy novels are the ones with barely a Space Marine in sight. Nemesis is the most prominent example, and I'd say I enjoyed Tallarn just as much, if not more. Or I mean technically this is an anthology, I think, but all the stories are by the same guy.

Later on in the book, some marines do show up, but at least they're interacting with non-marines a lot, and the Alpha Legion is also there, which is always fun. Tallarn is still mostly the story of people in tanks, on a planet turned to a toxic hell by virus bombardment, and that's what makes it so good.

The star of the show is definitely Tallarn itself. The sheer claustrophobia of driving tanks around a totally poisoned planet, where one tear in your protective suit means immediate, gruesome death, is powerfully conveyed and sticks with you. At first it's a mystery why anyone could possibly be bothered to fight over a place like this, but that gets turned into a plot point, which is satisfying.

If I'm honest, the plot itself isn't that great, but I was certainly entertained, and Tallarn goes on my Do Read list.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 32: Master of Mankind

"Father."

 - The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind, Aaron Dembski-Bowden

We've encountered something of a rarity on our journey through the Horus Heresy: a decidedly mediocre Aaron Dembski-Bowden joint.

Master of Mankind takes us to the Webway, where the Custodians, Sisters of Silence and Machine Cult are fighting an endless horde of faceless daemons. Our protagonists are a pair of Custodians, who are very stoic and loyal, and make Imperial Fists and even Smurfs seem like incredibly diverse and fascinating characters. The only bright spot is Arkhan Land, who actually seems like a person.

On the other side we have Drach'nyen, who is, well, quite boring. Beyond that, the only named opponents at any point are a couple of traitor Titans. It's an interesting choice to tell an epic civil war narrative with absolutely no personality at all on the other side, and it's by far the biggest problem with the story.

We also get some space-operatic visions from Emps which one of the Custodians is experiencing. Sadly, they're also not very interesting, and I can't help thinking that Dembski-Bowden's abilities are being misused quite badly here.

Master of Mankind takes place in the Webway, and we're pretty definitively told that the Emperor's "Great Work" was securing access to the Webway, but then Magnus shows up and inadvertently lets the daemons in. Once again, it begs the question: why on earth did Emps not tell Magnus what he was doing? I'm starting to be pretty strongly on team Magnus Did Nothing Wrong, because so far, I don't understand why Emps didn't tell Magnus, or for that matter Horus, about the whole thing.

Overall, I have to say this is a very disappointing novel. If it was anyone else, I'd say it was all right, but when it's the guy who wrote First Heretic and Betrayer, and I just finished his Night Lords trilogy, I was definitely expecting more. Miss this and you won't miss anything.

Let's Read Warhammer: The Night Lords

The First Heretic inspired me to read more Dembski-Bowden, and more about the Night Lords' Primarch, Konrad Curze; then Shadows of Treachery made it worse. To be honest, I knew next to nothing about the Night Lords before this reading project, except that their colors are dark blue and red, and they like skulls. They also have a potentially hilarious legion trait in Legions Imperialis where if they kill an enemy HQ unit, everyone close enough takes damage.

I started with the short story The Abyssal Edge. A grievously wounded Imperial Navy officer is assigned to the Night Lords as an archivist, and comes across some disturbing information about a clash between the Night Lords and the Thousand Sons and their Primarchs. It's a good little story, written well and effectively. There were also good Night Lords short stories in Eye of Terra, and a whole ADB novella in Shadows of Treachery, as well as a Graham McNeill story where Curze kicks Rogal Dorn's ass. Curze was also just about the only good thing about Unremembered Empire. So suffice to say that at this point, I'm becoming a fan.

**

The obvious next step was to pick up the Night Lords omnibus, and read it while waiting for my copy of Master of Mankind. However, in the foreword to the omnibus, Dembski-Bowden waxes lyrical on Simon Spurrier's Night Lords novel Lord of the Night (2005), which, it turns out, is available as an ebook. So I started there.

Lord of the Night follows two characters: Captain Zho Sahaal of the Night Lords, and Interrogator Mita Ashyn, a sanctioned psyker of the Ordo Xenos. Zho Sahaal drops out of the warp and crashes on a hive world where Ashyn is rooting out xenos cults, and all sorts of hijinks ensue.

It's an unexpectedly excellent book! Both protagonists are great characters. Sahaal is as insufferably emo as his primarch, but also does an excellent Predator impression. Ashyn's travails in her Inquisitor's entourage sometimes feel a bit too hackneyed, but overall it's a good story, and I like how on some level, I at least kept rooting for the Night Lord. So in that respect, this isn't helping. But I definitely recommend Lord of the Night.

**

The omnibus itself collects Dembski-Bowden's Night Lords trilogy and a couple of short stories. They're all good, and the trilogy itself is superb. I think it's probably the best 40k fiction I've read.

The Night Lords omnibus follows former Apothecary Talos, who's inherited his Primarch's gift and has visions of the future, and is therefore known as the Night Lords' prophet. At the start of the first novel, he's the de facto squad leader of First Claw, Tenth Company of the Night Lords, aboard the strike cruiser Covenant of Blood. The company and cruiser are commanded by the Exalted, who used to be Tenth Company's commander, captain Vandred, but is now a daemon of some kind.

Talos is the main character, but we're equally here for his human slaves, especially his long-suffering pilot Septimus, and the marines of First Claw. As new slaves are captured and new marines join the squad, there's a sort of found family vibe that's one of the main attractions of the story. The other is Talos, who's an excellent character.

The first novel follows Tenth Company as they join Abaddon's current project and participate in an assault on forge world of Crythe, while dealing with schemes and plots both outside and inside the company. Abaddon is still basically the same guy he was in Horus Rising: someone you'd be quite happy to have leading an assault, but not necessarily planning one. The story is great, with some special highlights like the Night Lords fighting a Warhound Titan and the flashbacks to the legion after the Heresy and the death of their Primarch.

The second part of the trilogy has Tenth Company join Huron Blackheart and his Red Corsairs for an attack on a loyalist fortress-monastery, and it's good stuff, with Talos and the gang going fully Night Lords on the Imperials, and trying to steal back a Night Lords cruiser from the Corsairs and still scheming and struggling for power among themselves.

While both of the first two novels are threaded through with flashbacks to the Night Lords' past after the Heresy, in the third they return to Tsagualsa, where Curze died, and fight some elves. It's high drama, and an appropriately epic ending to the trilogy.

Dembski-Bowden deserves particular respect for making Talos and his gang genuinely sympathetic characters whose adventures you want to follow, while never letting you forget that they're Night Lords Chaos Marines, and therefore utterly horrible monsters. It all adds up to a surprisingly wide range of emotions to feel for a Warhammer 40,000 story. So, y'know, highly recommended.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 31: Praetorian of Dorn

The ghost image collapsed into smoke.

 - The Horus Heresy: Praetorian of Dorn, John French

This one's available in print, for some reason. Even though this project has taught me to appreciate ebooks, it's still nice to read an actual, physical book and not stare at a screen all the time.

We're back with the Alpha Legion, which is excellent, and with the Imperial Fists, which is not. The plot of Praetorian of Dorn is a ludicrously overcomplicated scheme by the Alpha Legion to attack Terra, but where Legion was 'Allo, 'Allo 40,000, this is a technothriller.

The book is not without its weaknesses. Clearly, in a story like this, the loyalists kinda do have to be Imperial Fists, but they and Dorn are just so, well, boring. Rogal Dorn doesn't come across as quite such a repulsive, violent bully as he's been in some of the previous installments, but he's just dull, as are all of his legionnaires. There's also a largely pointless interlude around the middle of the book that's more or less the battle of Helm's Deep, but with Imperial Fists.

For the most part, this is absolutely silly and quite enjoyable, and in that a worthy successor to Legion. It's actually better than Legion in that there's no sexism or other macho bullshit, apart from Dorn's buffoonery. But it's very badly let down by the ending, which feels rushed and unsatisfactory. I think I'm going to choose to believe that the events of the last three chapters are after-the-fact Imperial propaganda with only a tenuous relationship to reality.

Honestly, before the ending, I was going to recommend this, but it's actually so bad this doesn't make my "do read" list. So be advised.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 30: The Path of Heaven

A thousand years might pass and it would never lose its fascination.

 - The Horus Heresy: The Path of Heaven, Chris Wraight

It's the White Scars again! Cue up the Hu.

The Path of Heaven picks up where Scars left off, with the White Scars trying to evade Horus's legions and make it back to Terra. As they're surrounded and pursued by the Death Guard and the Emperor's Children, they go looking for an alternate path back to Terra, and things get interesting.

I think this is actually better than Scars, and goes firmly on my "do read" list. I still like the characters; despite the whole space Mongolian stereotype, Wraight makes the White Scars interesting and at least a little three-dimensional. They're the best loyalists out there by far. Jagathai Khan seems to have the unique distinction of being a loyalist Primarch who isn't a violent, stupid bully. When we've been brutalized with so many tedious and banal Primarch inner monologues, at least the Khagan stays a little aloof and superhuman.

I also like that the plot is proper space opera, with the Navigator houses thrown in for some proper Imperial plotting. I think this got to me because I read the novel while recovering from a slightly arduous trip abroad, but I really appreciate how Wraight conveys that the Horus Heresy is a massive, endless slog through a huge galaxy, and how incredibly tired everyone from Horus himself down is.

So here we are: the White Scars have been one of the great pleasant surprises of this reading project.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 29: Eye of Terra

‘I was there,’ he would say, right up until the day he died, after which he spoke only infrequently.

 - The Wolf of Ash and Fire, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: Eye of Terra

It's another anthology! One that starts with Graham McNeill echoing the beginning of Horus Rising, in a somewhat forgettable story about the actual Emperor himself. After what I said about anthologies previously, you may wonder why I'm reading this at all. It's because of Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Aurelian, which is worth the price of admission on its own. It's followed by another Dembski-Bowden story, Massacre, a Night Lords vignette I also liked, and later on he takes us along on another section of Sevatar's journey.

My main complaint with the Night Lords stuff is that I'm already collecting enough legions and don't need to start taking a liking to them as well. Speaking of which, Matthew Farrer's Vorax made me want to buy more Mechanicum robots. I also enjoyed John French's Eagle's Talon, and Iron Corpses by David Annandale.

So yeah, this was an anthology with some pretty good stories in it.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 28: War Without End

Slender tendrils of fragrant smoke drifted from fang-mouthed oil burners, filling the bed-chamber with a delicious mix of cinnamon and honeysuckle.

 - The Devine Adoratrice, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: War Without End

It's another anthology!

**

Graham McNeill kicks things off with The Devine Adoratrice, a prequel to Vengeful Spirit, about Knight House Devine. I didn't like it any more than I did the Devine plotline in that novel.

There are two Dembski-Bowden stories here, Howl of the Hearthworld and Lord of the Red Sands, and the latter is why I got this collection. Howl of the Hearthworld, though, is about Space Wolves, and while it's well written, it still confirms what every other Space Wolf portrayal I've read also tells me: that they're deeply unpleasant, arrogant bullies. Most of the story is about a squad of Space Wolves being assholes to someone who did nothing to deserve it. By contrast, Lord of the Red Sands stokes my growing love for Angron and the World Eaters.

Other standout stories include James Swallow's Gunsight, a sequel to the excellent Nemesis, and Guy Haley's Twisted, also set on Horus's flagship. The rest of them are mostly all right, I guess?

To be honest, I don't really know how I feel about these anthologies. The good stories are good and I enjoy them. Even the mediocre ones are fine to read while commuting or such. But I don't really remember anything about them. Would I buy these if I wasn't doing this reading project? Probably not.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 27: Vengeful Spirit

The dead of Dwell were screaming.

 - The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit, Graham McNeill

After the White Scars, I'm taking a gamble on Graham McNeill and Horus. This one's set on Molech and I've got the Adeptus Titanicus expansion named after it, so I expect Knights. We haven't actually seen that much of Horus and his legion, so I kinda miss them.

**

The plot of Vengeful Spirit is basically that Horus thinks there's something very important to the Emperor on Molech, so he's scheming with Fulgrim and Morty to get it. Meanwhile, Malcador and Leman Russ are scheming to kill Horus, so they order ex-Luna Wolf Gavriel Loken to gather a special team to assault Horus's flagship.

If the latter plot sounds pretty much exactly like Nemesis, that's because it is, only Nemesis was better. Loken's team is made up of loyalist marines who are all completely forgettable, except that the contrarian Iron Warrior is called Tubal Cayne. The whole Loken plot is frankly quite boring and meaningless, and the book would have been better without it.

The part where we follow Horus and his new Mournival is much more interesting. It feels a lot like Horus Rising, but with the tragic absence of all the best Luna Wolves. In fact, a lot of the whole thing is practically a direct sequel to Flight of the Eisenstein, which isn't a bad thing at all. McNeill's Horus is light-years better than in False Gods.

The aerial assassination attempt on Horus made me want to get some Fire Raptors for Legions. But while the idea of various loyalist marines randomly attacking Horus like Cato assaulting Inspector Clouseau is very funny, wouldn't you think that if Horus is going to spend quite a bit of time ensconced at a strategically important facility, it would occur to someone to have at least some kind of anti-air defenses, or even surveillance radar, around? Especially since soon after, we're given detailed descriptions of the air defences on Molech.

Luckily most of the middle part of the book is dedicated to the Sons of Horus and the fighting on Molech. For some reason, the initial battle Horus leads is a practically suicidal frontal assault on a strongly fortified loyalist position, and most of the other fighting doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. I will say that the boarding shields definitely make me want to build some breacher squads. It says a lot about GW's priorities that we got a new edition of Horus Heresy before we got all of the troop choices in plastic.

The fighting is good, though, and Horus's schemes make for good epic space opera. It feels like ages since the plot's properly advanced, and now it has. There's good stuff with Knights and Titans and so on, even if the goings-on in Knight House Devine are quite sordid. That and the sheer length of the book are more than a bit Fulgrim, but this is much, much better. I think Vengeful Spirit could have done without about half of its sideplots and characters, but as a Horus Heresy novel, it's actually quite good.

**

So here we are: Horus is on his way to Terra and I'm recommending Graham McNeill and avoiding Dan Abnett. It's a strange old galaxy.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 26: Scars

He rolled onto his front, coughing blood between broken teeth.

 - The Horus Heresy: Scars, Chris Wraight

We're here with Chris Wraight, who I've read a couple of short stories from that I liked, and the White Scars, the space Mongolian horde of Warhammer. I have to admit that I know practically nothing about the White Scars other than what I just said, but I do have an abiding interest in all things Mongolian, so why not play some Hu and give this a shot.

**

Scars follows several characters, starting with two neophyte Marines and going on to include the primarch, a female Departmento Munitorum officer, and a Librarian, or whatever it was they call them in the White Scars.

The Librarian, separated from the rest of the legion, ends up traveling with a motley crew of Salamanders and Iron Hands. There's a fun detail when they capture a Word Bearer ship:

The Word Bearers had done something very strange to their machines.

They no longer output binaric derivatives, but seemed to operate on a base-four internal mechanic, the reason for which eluded him completely.

I assume it's base-four because of the four Chaos gods, and I love it.

There's a couple of slightly silly scenes in the book, but overall I think it's well-written and I like how the story slots in to the general Horus Heresy narrative. The White Scars have been off on their own, so when the Heresy starts breaking out, they don't know what's going on or who to trust. They face off against the Alpha Legion, go to Prospero to see what happened to the Thousand Sons, and as all this is going on, the warrior lodges in the legion are mounting a coup. It's good stuff.

What I didn't expect is that Scars goes into what happened at Nikaea quite a bit. Apparently one of the few pre-existing details about the White Scars in the Heresy was that Jagathai supported the Librarius, and here they end up being one of the legions - along with the woofs, of all people! - who refused to disband their psykers. I said before that Nikaea seems to have been a terrible mistake, and there's a suggestion here that Horus actually engineered the whole thing, or at least set it up to fail, to some extent. It makes sense, but still leaves us with the question of what on earth were Emps and Malcador thinking.

**

Anyway, Scars is just a really good Horus Heresy novel, and an excellent deep dive into a legion that I really knew nothing about.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 25: Unremembered Empire

That phantoms should haunt Macragge, after all the horrors that had been recently visited upon the planet and the five hundred worlds it held in fealty, came as no surprise to anyone.

 - The Horus Heresy: Unremembered Empire, Dan Abnett

It's Abnett and the smurfs again. For some reason, Unremembered Empire was re-released in the middle of my reading project, which meant I had to wait for it and pay double the price of a regular Horus Heresy novel. This did make me wonder if it would be worth it.

**

I like that not only does the book start with a Shakespeare quotation in the 31st millenium, but that he's also present in the text as Shakespire. I also absolutely love that the title of a ruler of Ultramar is Battle King. It sounds so childish, which means it's perfect for the Ultramarines.

However, there's a lot of other stuff here that I don't love. As with Know No Fear, the Ultramarines are incredibly boring. They're all like utterly average video game NPCs, and the worst part is that Abnett's caught a case of Gav Thorpe and gives us Guilliman's endlessly boring internal monologues. Things spice up a bit when the Lion and his legion show up, but on the whole, the home side is playing yet another snoozer.

In addition to the space marines, John Grammaticus from Legion is here, but sadly his side plot here isn't at all interesting either. He's also teamed up with a sidekick who I swear is the silliest character in the entire Horus Heresy series. He's like a terribly written Marvel UK character, and just takes so much out of the Grammaticus scenes.

I'd say the best part of the book is definitely Konrad Curze, who is honestly shaping up to be one of my favorite primarchs. I am all the way here for Curze butchering smurfs like the Crow. But even his scenes are let down by the frankly silly Cabal stuff, and the even sillier constantly regenerating Vulkan. I'm just going to decide that for canon purposes, none of that happened.

**

But here we are: this is the second Dan Abnett book in a row that I do not at all recommend reading. It was definitely not worth the price.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 24: Legacies of Betrayal

I remember much of what he said even now, but we all learned quicker from example than words.

 - Brotherhood of the Storm, Chris Wraight, in The Horus Heresy: Legacies of Betrayal

Apparently Black Library were reworking Unremembered Empire when I was going to buy it and it wasn't available, so I skipped ahead to the Legacies of Betrayal anthology.

**

The book kicks off with Chris Wraight's White Scars novella Brotherhood of the Storm. I've actually been reading about Mongolia and seen several movies set there recently, so I had mixed feelings about White Scars fiction. But I liked this, and I'll have to consider reading the full-length novel.

After the novella, there's a whole swathe of short stories, some significantly shorter than usual. I won't go through all of them, but I'll give some examples of what's in this anthology.

 - several decent Iron Hands stories; I can't help but feel that all these badass Iron Hands stories are trying to make up for how stupid McNeill made them look in Fulgrim.

 - a nautical story by Guy Haley, featuring a sailboat and the Alpha Legion.

 - two genuinely good Gav Thorpe war stories where he's in a proper old-time Epic mood: Honour to the Dead is just excellent, and the other one has a Capitol Imperialis.

 - Aaron Dembski-Bowden with Butcher's Nails, another superb story of Angron, Lorgar, Khârn, Lotara Sarrin and the Ursus Claws.

 - a Shakespearean monologue from Horus, by John French

And lots more, none of it bad.

**

Shockingly, I think I'd recommend reading this anthology. There were lots of good stories in there.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 23: Betrayer

Skane was the one to find the body.

 - The Horus Heresy: Betrayer, Aaron Dembski-Bowden

"If the Bureau of Ordnance can't provide us with torpedoes that will hit and explode ... then for God's sake, get the Bureau of Ships to design a boat hook with which we can rip the plates off a target's side."

 - Rear Admiral Charles A. Lockwood USN, Commander, Submarines, Pacific Fleet, at a 1943 meeting of the Submarine Officers' Conference, quoted in Clay Blair Jr., Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and New York, 1975.

"Status on the ursus claws?"

 - Flag-Captain Lotara Sarrin

We're back with the Word Bearers and the World Eaters, conducted by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, who I think has to be the best Horus Heresy author by quite a margin. Betrayer is one of the books Games Workshop has kept in print, and it's a nice change reading a physical book again. I loved Dembski-Bowden's First Heretic, and have been looking forward to this.

**

Once again, Dembski-Bowden fully lives up to expectations. As grand and intoxicating as First Heretic was, this picks up where it left off, with the excellent addition of Angron and his equerry Khârn. Lorgar has some great interactions with Magnus and Angron, and Horus even phones in psychically, but the stars of the show are indubitably Khârn and Argel Tal, two of the most charismatic characters of the Horus Heresy. It's like being with the Mournival and friends in Horus Rising again.

If you remember the Super Star Destroyer from Battle for the Abyss, it turns out Lorgar has two more of them. The combined Word Bearers-World Eaters fleet tears through Ultramar, fighting smurfs all the way. Probably my least favorite feature of ADB's prose is when he pontificates on war, especially as I can't really not fact-check it as I read it. But the battle on Armatura is a delight of mil-sf. The way both the captain of the Conqueror and the Legio Audax titans have to work around the World Eaters' senseless rage is excellent, and I can barely describe my astonishment when the World Eaters get resupplied. Actual logistics!

The prize for best supporting character, by the way, definitely goes to Captain Lotara Sarrin of the Conqueror. I love her, and I hope she gets to bombard a planet soon. After Armatura, the gang heads to Nuceria, where they have a climactic battle for the ages. It's got everything from Warhound Titans fighting an Imperator to Erbs being horrible.

I could write so much, but I don't really want to. I strongly recommend experiencing Betrayer yourself. I feel that if any Horus Heresy books come close to transcending Warhammer fiction, this is one. For my money, Horus Rising, First Heretic and Betrayer are by far the best books in the series, and I'd say Betrayer is the best of the lot. Great characters, great war stories, great drama and tragedy. It's simply epic.