Is it M41 yet??

Errr... no. So it's been a while since I wrote any posts on this 'do shitty reviews of all the Horus Heresy books and feel bad when nobody even reads them' project. But I haven't given up, by any means. I have, however, been busy with 'other pursuits'... Necromunda and Netflix have taken up most of the time I'd normally be using on this project, and I've also been trying to read a few non-Black Library books and remembering the time when I used to read Serious Literature. Heh.

I've felt a bit of pressure building when it comes to PurpleHeresy as there's so much I haven't even begun to tackle that I hoped I'd have done before 2014 started. I have rough reviews of 'Aurelian' and 'Honour To The Dead' which require a fair amount of editing before they're suitable even for this shit blog, and notes from my readthrough of 'A Thousand Sons' which I haven't begun to transcribe (they may rival my 'Fulgrim' readthrough notes for length). I've also read 'Brotherhood Of The Storm' and 'Scars', not even trying to make notes. I feel like for those books, my notes would have just been alternative phrasings of 'HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE BOMB PEW PEW PEW', so I'll save it for my second or third readthrough. I will say that 'Scars' was one of the best Horus Heresy books I've read in a while, and unlike many fans, I've really enjoyed the last 10 or so, so that really says something. I've also enjoyed the audio drama 'Wolf Hunt' and the e-book 'Wolf Of Ash And Fire' - that one in particular makes me salivate at the prospect of 'Vengeful Spirit' in a few months, as my confidence in Graham's writing gets stronger and stronger. And, as always, I'm pining away until there's an official release date for 'The Talon Of Horus'.

I'm beginning to re-read the 'Silent War' arc, or the books I loosely group together under that banner. Stuff that loosely involves subterfuge, particularly the ones set or partially set on Terra. I've started with 'Legion' (still amazing) and I'm planning on moving on to 'Flight Of The Eisenstein' and 'Mechanicum' shortly after. This will ultimately lead to me writing a review of 'The Outcast Dead', which may be... interesting. I enjoyed it a lot the first time round, maybe this time I'll understand why all the nerds hate this one in particular.

I don't tend to do this on here, but I'm going to talk about two non-HH Black Library books I've read recently (which, as per usual, I bought only because of their tie-ins to the HH line).

First off, John French's 'Ahriman: Exile'. Despite my hopes, I was disappointed by this. It seemed like an automatic success at first. A 40k-era continuation of Ahzek Ahriman's story as he wanders the stars searching for knowledge and redemption, written by one of Black Library's rising stars. 'Tallarn: Executioner' was superb after all (review coming soon... maybe). And I've always been a Tzeentch devotee at heart so Ahriman's story was always interesting to me. But 'Exile' fell short of what I feel French was capable of. In being a dark, grimy story about being a very small, yet important part in a huge conflict, it felt like it was heavily influenced by Abnett's Inquisitor books and ADB's 'The Emperor's Gift', in intent if not form. It was full of unpleasant, or abrasive, yet well-drawn characters, and it frequently put its "heroes" into situations of genuine peril which they couldn't get out of just by planting their feet on the floor and rapid-firing a boltgun. But Ahriman's character didn't really... click for me. As in 'A Thousand Sons', Ahriman comes across as a bit of a boring place-holder at times (but, sacrilege: the writing quality here is leagues beyond 'A Thousand Sons'), so insular and withdrawn that one of the main joys I take from this kind of fiction - seeing how different Traitor Legions interact with each other after their fall from grace - was hardly present in the book.

At times he seemed like a power-armoured Shinji Ikari; bubbling with self-hating "Ooooh I'm such a despicable coward" sobs even as he did phenomenal, world-changing and suicidally brave things. The best thing you could say about 'Exile' was that somewhere, someone was reading it and getting ideas for the best Dark Heresy campaign ever. And that's not a bad thing to say about a book like this. Ultimately, I wouldn't say the book was a waste of time to read at all; there are setpieces which will probably stay with me forever, and there are enough mysteries around at the end of the book to make me take note if a sequel is released. (And I hope John French gets a full Horus Heresy book soon.)

Next up, 'Pandorax' by C Z Dunn. I bought this hefty tome because a gamer friend mentioned casually that there's a plot strand in this where one of the original Grey Knight Grandmasters shows up after 10,000 years in stasis - a former Fallen Angel Librarian who fought in the Horus Heresy. When I heard that, I flipped the fuck out. I knew there was only one Fallen Angel that was gonna end up being, and it totally disproved my theory about Zahariel's ultimate fate (trumpeted loudly in my 'Fallen Angels' review). And you know what? This is better. My version was dumb. The added prospect of seeing the Dark Angels and Grey Knights fight shoulder to shoulder and try to overcome a deep distrust of each other, as well as appearances from Abaddon and Huron Blackheart, convinced me that it was worth a look. Hey, I'd never read anything by this 'C Z Dunn' before, but with a story like that, anyone could knock it out of the park, right?

Well, no, as it turns out. 'Pandorax' is terrible. It's fucking garbage. It is honestly one of the worst books I've ever read.

...OK, it's not really BAD bad, not bad enough to get this angry about, but it's dumb bad. So fucking dumb bad.

'Pandorax' is about the defense of Pythos, a jungle/hive world from the Black Legion, who show up with support from the Death Guard and a shitload of boring daemon assholes in order to get some magickal MacGuffin which apparently has been hidden on the planet for milennia. With help from some stalwart Catachans, a friendly visiting Inquistor manages to get a distress signal off before the planet's defenses are overwhelmed and guerrilla warfare commences. Many months later, the entire Dark Angels chapter shows up, along with a company of Grey Knights. But are they trying to save Pythos, or are their motives a bit more complicated??

So far, so good, so what? The plot goes to hell quickly, involving dissent and argument between the Grey Knights and Dark Angels just because, a Heldrake that's fucking super tough and indestructible until the plot says it isn't, apparently interchangeable Imperial Guard regiments with vastly different specialist skills being namedropped with no reason other than to add variety to the battle scenes, every single Chaos general stabbing each other in the back, generally for no obvious gain (yeah, I guess that one's fair enough though) and my absolute favourite device in BL fiction, a horde of unstoppable daemons ripping apart huge armies of Imperials. Yeah, an unstoppable force murdering all the guard, we ain't seen THAT shit before. The way their armies tend to be portrayed, Tyranid and Daemons players must be those guys who insisted they never got killed when they played with other kids. "I shot you!" "No, I had another guy. I always have another guy, and so my guy can never die. Not really die. I'm in THE WARP, not dead, so I ACTUALLY WIN!"

But put all that aside. The plot, really, doesn't bother me much. What bothers me in particular is how predictable, lazy and rote the character development is. Aside from one character betraying their comrades quite early on (heavily signposted, too) everyone acts EXACTLY the same from when they're introduced to when they die (or the book ends). There is, for all intents and purposes, NO character development at all. In its own way, it's even more agonising than the shitty characterisation in those first few McNeill HH novels. To add to this, the book is so full of awkward phrasings, garbled syntax and oddly mangled clichés that it feels like it wasn't even run through a basic grammar check. An unfortunate flaw, as C Z Dunn has primarily worked for Black Library as, er, an editor. 'Pandorax' feels like it has a terrible line, confusing phrasing or straight-up mistake on every page. I mean, 'Battle For The Abyss' needed to put the thesaurus down, but aside from a few glaring examples, grammatically it was tight... But like that book, 'Pandorax' feels like it was rush-written due to GW demands rather than, well, needing to be written because the story was worth telling. Advertised as an 'Apocalypse Novel', it's supposed to cater to fans of the ridiculous version of 40K where you need to field armies that take hours to complete a single movement phase. But actually only a fairly brief action sequence near the end of its 400+ pages is an 'Apocalypse'-level engagement, the rest being more standard-size fights or even small skirmishes involving around ten or so on each side.  That's not a complaint though, at least there's SOME variation instead of just "start with 100 vs 100, work up to 1000 vs 10,000!!"

So, what did I like? Well, it heavily features Grey Knight Supreme Grandmaster Kaldor Draigo, who is the internet's favourite illustration of how immature GW fiction is (and almost illegally obviously named after the internet's favourite horselord rapist, Khal Drogo). As opposed to the way Matt Ward has portrayed him, Draigo here isn't just an unstoppable juggernaut capable of 'bombing' a daemon Primarch's heart Wildstyle. He's an arrogant but incredibly capable rising star in the Grey Knights. I guess it's dumb to say I 'liked' this but at least I didn't hate it, not compared to the fucking dull-as-dishwater non-character that is Azrael. I also found the hints about the Grey Knight founding really interesting - this is probably old news to people who have one of the many, many Grey Knights-related rulebooks or novels out there, but, yeah, so there were eight 'Grandmasters' originally at the Chapter's founding in the Heresy era. Their identity is entwined with the Horus Heresy series of Garro audio-dramas. Now, we already know that Garro's 'dirty dozen' are going to end up heavily involved in the founding of the Inquisition and the Grey Knights. But we also know that Garro, Qruze, Loken and Varren don't have psyker abilities (unless there are drastic changes to their characters), so Rubio and Severian are the only Malcador recruits even slightly likely to become Grandmasters. And whaddya know, that's almost directly confirmed in this book by Abaddon (what a helpful guy). We also are given to believe Zahariel (well, who else could it be?) became Epimetheus, the Grandmaster in this book. Of course this raises the question: how did this come about? And shortly after that: who the fuck are the other FIVE Grandmasters?

There's a contentious theory that the Grandmaster Khyron is actually the Night Lord Sevatar, based mainly on the fact that in 'The Emperor's Gift' a statue of him is depicted as brandishing a Nemesis halberd and Jago totally used a chain-glaive which is not 100% dissimilar and the plinth shows some attributed remarks of Khyron alluding to the fact he had committed treachery in his past and that's totally applicable to Sevatar since he totally killed or tortured hundreds of Loyalist marines! Ehhh, about this I'm ambivalent. Aaron's already said in no uncertain terms that Sevatar dies in the Heresy timeline. Now, maybe he's just being creative with the definition of 'death' and Sevatar's identity rather than his physical form is what dies. I'd also LOVE to see acid-tongued Sev playing off a bunch of ramrod-straight Grey Knights. But... to me, I think Sevatar's too far gone to ever accept The Emperor's Gift. That's not to say that if it turns out to be Sev, I won't weep tears of joy...

Anyway, at this point we have to seriously think about all the Astartes psyker characters which exist in the Horus Heresy: who's it going to be? Is my facetious theory about Mhotep still being alive going to end up being true? Maybe Yeseugi Khan is going to be the Grandmasters' 'token ethnic stereotype'? Maybe they're going to pull the Severian trick of "this character's really a psyker despite it not being mentioned before" on someone surprising. One thing I'm fairly confident of: there probably won't be an Alpha Legion Grandmaster.

Anyway, all this stuff that I actually care about is from a couple pages where the fluff is briefly discussed. For most of the book, I couldn't even raise a yawn. Read the stuff about the Grey Knight history online, and consign this bullshit to the list of forgotten BL books. If you want to read a Grey Knight story, read ADB's 'The Emperor's Gift'.

Oh, the title is actually the name of the system it takes place in, and it's also a portmanteau of 'Pandora's Box', which is a myth where a certain cache is opened up and releases damnation on the world. Subtle stuff.

Oh, the other day my copy of 'Macragge's Honour' arrived. The "time it takes to read it" to "money spent on it" ratio is extremely unfavourable, but I can't even try to complain about it; it's fucking gorgeous. I'm not sure how much re-read value it will prove to have, but I'm very glad to own it. There may be a bile explosion when I see it on sale for a third of the price I paid in a year or so, but... that's in the future, and I have my beautiful renderings of Kor Phaeron's smugness now. That said, I fervently hope that Black Library does NOT begin to branch into graphic novels as a "regular thing". Just seems like an opportunity for them to release even slimmer volumes than their novellas and charge even more. Something tells me a £14.99 'trade' paperback of a Black Library graphic novel is incredibly unlikely.

Yeah, so, tl;dr: 'Aurelian' review coming soon I hope, and I still love the Horus Heresy despite recently being told it's "a terrible series that makes all the primarchs seem really emo".