"Death And Defiance" (short story collection)

This is a bit of a first for Black Library. A Horus Heresy novella-length hardback which is available at a normal price from the beginning of its publishing cycle. No limited edition at double the cost and then it’s unavailable for two years. No ‘event only’ availability. As pissed off as I am about what I now know regarding 'Legacies Of Betrayal', I’m glad Black Library can pleasantly surprise me with stuff like ‘Death And Defiance’. 

Fulgrim looks like fucking shit! What is this, a Conan book?

Despite what I personally think is one of the worst pieces of HH cover art in years and years, I was fucking PUMPED to buy this collection right after Warhammer Fest finished and it went on sale on the BL site (with surprisingly little fanfare). There are five stories here, written by some old faces and some new. Let’s get right into them.

Imperfect by Nick Kyme: Nick is very uneven as a writer, in my opinion – but his audio drama ‘Censure’ is a firm favourite of mine, and the micro-story ‘Phoenician’, concerned with Fulgrim and Ferrus’ Isstvan showdown, impressed me a lot. So I was excited to find he would be tackling those characters again in this collection. Here, Fulgrim and Ferrus face off across a regicide board, but is their good-natured banter all that good-natured? Is this regicide game everything that it seems? Any time that question is posed, the answer’s going to be “no”, isn’t it? Man, at this stage of the storyline, I would kind of get a kick out of it if the regicide game was just some flashback to happier times (ending with a soft-focus montage of Ferrus and Fulgrim riding their bikes, laughing, while Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’ plays). But that’s not what’s cooking here. Since this is Purple Heresy and not a site by actual professionals who put effort and journalistic ethics into making good reviews, I’m just gonna spoil the shit out of this. The ascended Daemon Prince Fulgrim has cloned Ferrus Manus many, many times and is playing a regicide game against each one – I believe the story implies that he is trying to see if there is some chain of events or line of reasoning he can put into play that would result in Ferrus’ loyalty switching to Fulgrim (and Horus) rather than the Emperor. Sadly, each attempt ends in failure, with each clone trying to kill Fulgrim and failing. You’d have to eventually say, could we not just play 2-player Halo or something?

I do really like some elements of this story. Nick’s Fulgrim is different to the preening, histrionic drama queen Graham sketched so entertainingly in ‘Angel Exterminatus’. Here, Fulgrim is more subdued, more guilty, and his actions – if not his internal monologue – seem to present him as deeply ashamed of his failure to turn Ferrus, and the fratricidal incident this led to. He seems desperate to right this wrong in some way. An interesting twist on the characterisation of Fulgrim so far; we’ll see if it’s taken further.

I feel there is meant to be some big, shocking implication to the fact Fabius has some cloned infant with a “Cthonian birthmark” in his laboratory, but I assume this is foreshadowing for the cloning of Horus – something Aaron already wrote about in ‘The Talon Of Horus’. Then again, it seems a little early in the HH timeline for that event hundreds of years in the future to start getting set up, which means maybe this is going to tie into a different Sons Of Horus cloning plot. I think it’s too early to really give a fuck. Maybe he’s cloned Loken so there can be an evil Loken in the Mournival? At this stage I would not be surprised if Fabius was growing cloned Cthonian babies so that he could eat them alive just for kicks. I like the III Legion a lot so whoever writes them, I’ll read it, but after my initial optimism, it doesn't look like Nick Kyme plus Emperor’s Children is guaranteed to always be good. That new 40k Salamanders book he wrote sounds kind of interesting, but I’m still not hugely into the idea of another Horus Heresy novel by him. I bet it’s coming whether I like it or not, though. This one I give 7/10.

Howl Of The Hearthworld by Aaron Dembski-Bowden: A pack of Space Wolves bitterly protests their assignment as ‘watchpack’ to Rogal Dorn, then eventually accepts it. They get on a ship and start on some poor clerk guy. That’s pretty much the events right there, though of course there’s more depth to it that I’m not doing justice to. I probably won’t write much on this (I think it’s the shortest story here). My gut reaction is that these seven warriors will end up being the only Space Wolves present on Terra for the Siege, and will probably play some significant/tragic role there. Maybe we’ll see more character development before then, maybe they’ll start a brawl with Bror Tyfingr and get murdered, maybe they’ll never even reach Terra. The Space Wolves here did seem interesting and I certainly want to find out more about them, but as in some moments of ‘The Talon Of Horus’, it feels like Aaron is over-writing some of this stuff. I’m not saying every 40K novel has to be bleak, hard-bitten Mike Hammer type shit, but – though I hate to say it – it means that Aaron’s Space Wolves are just not as enjoyable to me as Abnett’s or Wraight’s. This would be fine (as different portrayals of the same Chapter are equally valid in 40K) if I didn’t feel like he was aiming for the same exact area as those two but JUST missing it. It may grow on me over time, but at this point I’d say ‘Howl Of The Hearthworld’ is the least enjoyable Horus Heresy material Aaron’s ever produced. Still, I didn’t like ‘Betrayer’ at first either. For now, I give this 7/10.

A Safe And Shadowed Place by Guy Haley: With Aaron’s portrayal of the Night Lords perhaps one of the most widely loved explorations of a Legion, it’s not easy to step into the Horus Heresy with a Night Lords story. Guy Haley has written relatively little Heresy fiction, but with ‘Shards Of Erebus’ and ‘Strike And Fade’ he showed he could stand with the big boys. I also really enjoyed his ‘Hunter’s Moon’ audio drama. Fucking good thing I did, because less than a year later it will be taking up like 20 pages in the "new" story collection ‘Legacies Of Betrayal’. That’s a rant for a different time, though. It’s ballsy that Guy’s jumping in with a direct sequel to ‘Prince Of Crows’, one of the fan favourites of the HH canon. He doesn’t follow Sevatar’s arc, of course (apparently set to continue in audio drama format this year); if anyone but ADB handled that, there would be riots in the streets. Instead, ‘A Safe And Shadowed Place’ deals with Skraivok, a Night Lords officer whose badly damaged ship has limped to the borders of Ultramar following the Dark Angels’ battering of the Night Lords fleet. Abandoned by the few captains that were accompanying him, he struggles to deal with his fractious command and the frustratingly slow repair of his vessel. The waters are muddied by Krukesh the Pale (a minor but memorable presence in ‘Prince Of Crows’) showing up with a much larger Night Lords fleet and starting to throw his weight around.

Guy seems to have studied Aaron’s Night Lord characterisation very closely, but he puts a lot of ideas in there that are clearly his own as well. While I wouldn’t call any of the characters here staggeringly original, Guy is a good writer of both action and dialogue, and while Sev’s barbed witticisms are sorely missed, there is some bleak humour here. I can’t believe Black Library let him put in the moment where our VIII Legion hero idly thinks to himself that a female bridge officer “looked like a screamer”. Yeah, I know he was supposedly thinking it in the context of considering skinning her alive, but… I’m pretty sure the innuendo was intentional. Hilarious.This was the first story in the book where I didn’t feel a vague sense of disappointment after reading it. With a growing Night Lords fleet presence lurking near Sotha, and Kurze still apparently on Macragge intending to wreak yet more havoc on Imperium Secundus, I’d assume this story is a one-off intended as further VIII Legion antagonistic setup for Dan’s sequel to ‘The Unremembered Empire’ – but I’d certainly not object to more Guy Haley Night Lords stories. 8/10.

Virtues Of The Sons by Andy Smilie: I think this might be the first Andy Smilie Horus Heresy story. He’s more famous for writing a lot of 40K-era audio dramas and novels, most of which seem to be about the Flesh Tearers. Black Library’s frequent attitude of thinking someone is perfect for Horus Heresy books about a Legion because they write about that Chapter or its successors in 40K books has not always resulted in the highest quality books. Here, though, I reckon they’re on to something. Smilie obviously has a real ‘feel’ for this Chapter and is keen to get his teeth into their origin story. Of course, Amit, ‘the Flesh Tearer’, the possibly-Khornate Blood Angels warrior with anger management and impulse control issues, is a prominent character in this story, but it’s not all about him. Sanguinius and a Blood Angel called Azkaellon are also heavily featured. Primarch writing is always tough, I think, but Smilie writes Sanguinius possibly a little better than James Swallow did (yes, that is a compliment, I really liked ‘Fear To Tread’). As for Azkaellon, his juxtaposition with Amit makes me think he’s also going to be a Blood Angels Successor Chapter founder, but I can’t be sure about that. I could do some research, but I kind of prefer to be surprised in this case.

This kind of has the opposite problem to a lot of HH fiction: it’s very well written, but the events here, taken by themselves seem a little insignificant. The cynical side of me thinks this is a little bit of foundation-laying for ‘Sons Of Wrath’, the book about the first years of the Flesh Tearers Chapter following the end of the Heresy and Sanguinius’ death. I was planning to buy that book anyway, since immediately post-Heresy fiction interests me almost as much as the HH series itself, but knowing Smilie writes this well made me realise it’s going to be a mandatory purchase. Perhaps I’ll be grateful for ‘Virtues Of The Sons’ once ‘Sons Of Wrath’ is out, but for now, I’m giving this 7/10

Gunsight by James Swallow: My lengthy and quite whiny review of ‘Nemesis’ may have mentioned that this story was on the cards. I don’t know if anyone was after a ‘Nemesis’ sequel starring Kell the Vindicare Assassin; ‘Nemesis’ wasn’t super-well received and I get the impression most people thought Kell died at the end. But fuck me, this is really good. Kell is aboard the Vengeful Spirit, a lone gunman in the truest sense, consumed by an obsessive desire to finish his mission. The way that Horus’ shift in allegiances has changed the Spirit is really well captured; I liked what Graham did in his book, but I think Swallow just has a more evocative way with scene-setting. He also tackles one of my favourite themes in the 40K universe: the insidiousness of Chaos, and how easy it is to be corrupted especially when you believe yourself incorruptible. This is the other side of the coin shown in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, where Gaunt and his men are able to overcome the darkness by clinging to their faith and their basic human decency. Kell is not so lucky. Still, there are some surprising twists along the way, and the door is very much open for a continuation of Kell’s ‘mission’ (in a way). I almost wanted a full-blown ‘Nemesis’ sequel after this… well, maybe just a novella, since this also reinforced my opinion that James Swallow is really good at short stories. Him becoming a near-exclusive audio drama/short story guy is a smart deployment of his talents. Against all odds, this is an excellent story; I give it 9/10.

So overall, this book didn’t have a collection of top-notch stories, but considering my least favourite was one of the shortest and my favourite was the longest, I can forgive a little inconsistency. I hope Black Library releases these a bit more frequently. It might take the sting off them apparently thinking a HH story anthology’s primary function is to be a fucking recycling dump. In the midst of all my bitter ranting I give this one 8/10. 

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