"The Reflection Crack'd" by Graham McNeill

Whaaat? I thought he had quit this blog!!

Whaat? He already reviewed that story!!

Yeah, I'm back. There were times in 2015 where I wanted to walk away from the HH series completely... just drop the mic and peace out. But things are starting to look up, if you believe BL's often-misleading marketing (credulous idiot that I am, I believe it every time). With 'Master of Mankind' and 'Descent of Angels' on the way, the interesting-looking 'Sotha' already out in eBook format, some potentially great anthologies announced, and a sequel to 'Scars' or even 'The Crimson King' not an impossibility before year's end, I'm 'back in' (though more cautiously than before).

Yeah, I'm hoping to finally write my 'Outcast Dead' review. I'm hoping to get a lot of audios and novellas reviewed that I haven't had the will to touch at all. But first... I've got some shit to get off my chest about the stories in 'The Primarchs'. Starting with Fulgrim and his boys.

Fierce.

For all the flaws I believe ‘Fulgrim’ has (vastly overlong, characters’ extreme stupidity seeming to serve nothing but the rolling forward of the plot, the exact nature of Fulgirm and the Legion’s corruption being poorly handled, terrible Remembrancer storyline), I really enjoyed the exploration of Lucius as a character. Dan Abnett might have ‘created’ this III Legion legend’s persona in the Horus Heresy era, but Graham McNeill is the one who mastered it. So it’s fortunate for me that ‘The Reflection Crack’d’ leans heavily on Lucius as our viewpoint.

Following the events of Isstvan V (‘Fulgrim’) and the subsequent revelation to Lorgar and the other traitor Primarchs that Fulgrim had been possessed by a daemon (‘Aurelian’), we pick up the III Legion lurking in space. In fact it begins where ‘Aurelian’ left off: in the wreckage of La Fenice. And who’s that lurking in the shadows? Lucius is committed to achieving martial perfection and has dedicated his efforts to unknown ‘patrons’ who sent the daemons to destroy La Fenice. Yet he’s still haunted by the loss of his looks, and driven by a suspicion his beloved Primarch is no longer what he seems. It’s a nice way to set up his continued character arc here (let’s gloss over the fact he has set up spikes inside his shoulder-pads which prick him if he makes sword-fighting moves that aren’t perfect enough. How would that work? Would he not just be forced into making the same moves again and again?)

The conflict between the different factions of the Legion here is much more enjoyable than the good side/bad side dynamic which I thought was clumsily handled in ‘Fulgrim’. Here, they’re all ‘bad side;, but they still have different views on what the Legion actually is: the same disciplined, well-drilled mechanism as before, just serving a new master – or perhaps a completely different beast, embracing every possible perversion?

And… perversion… yeah, about that. In my time in the 40K/Heresy fandom – both online and ‘IRL’ conversation with other fans – I’ve found there’s a general attitude that the Emperor’s Children are “the gay ones”. Perhaps a curious assertion, since the fluff seemingly implies (to my reading) that Astartes are celibate, not affected by sexual urges, and incapable of sexual reproduction (perhaps even ‘chemically castrated’?). But, yes, they wear purple or pink, they pout a lot, and their behaviour can often be described as a little camp. Yes, the relationship between Emperor’s Children Legionaries seems closer to courtship than the fraternal bonds which other Legions have (with its flattery and rejection and temper tantrums and frustrated longing).

Still, ‘The Emperor’s Children love the cock’ is as stupid and reductive a statement as saying a particular Chapter or Legion is ‘emo’. Often this manifests in “bums against the wall, lads”-type comments when Fulgrim and the 3^rd are mentioned; sometimes it’s more subtle and insidious. Warhammer is still, in my perception, a male-dominated culture and of course in any predominantly male group you will get some people who have objections to homosexuality for a variety of reasons. That’s not something that I want to get into, but while I don’t necessarily appreciate or agree with this attitude, I also don’t require all potentially gay characters to be shining saints of virtue. In fact I think that would be just as dull and ultimately harmful to the story as portraying them all as cruel, sadistic monsters who are intent on destroying or ‘turning’ all the straight, upstanding citizens of the galaxy (like those super-hetero Ultramarines).

To my mind, ‘The Reflection Crack’d’ strikes a pretty good balance in that regard. Graham neither shies away from the homoeroticism deeply stitched into the III Legion nor the dishonest, bloodthirsty nature that’s now common amongst its warriors, but I don’t think he ever implies that one is responsible for the other. I can definitely see some finding this problematic – the intertwined way that homoeroticism, excess and cruelty are portrayed in this book could be pretty offensive. But hey, to me, it’s fine – that’s all I’m saying.

A lot of what’s good about this book is setup for ‘Angel Exterminatus’, so I’m not sure if you’ll enjoy one if you hated the other. In his burgeoning psychic powers and knowledge of the Warp, we get hints to Fulgrim’s imminent ascension to daemonhood. As well as expanding on (or perhaps distorting) the character of existing III Legion monsters like Vairosean, Fabius, Kaesoron and Eidolon, Graham introduces new hopefuls like Abranxe, Krysander, Ruen and Kalimos. As a result, by the time ‘The Reflection Crack’d’ ends Graham has set up a potentially diverse and interesting rogues’ gallery of III Legion warriors, providing a strong foundation for the Legion’s command structure in future books… or so you would think. The fact that he spends much of ‘Angel Exterminatus’ bloodily whittling down this roster is a shame, but it also makes a point often neglected in the Heresy books: warriors who appeared to be significant or important died in droves over the course of this war without accomplishing what they hoped.

The scene of the Emperor’s Children utterly losing their minds in Fulgrim’s presence gloriously illustrates just what a debased mess their Legion now is; I only wish that the journey to these depths of corruption had been handled as well as the destination is. There’s a creepy atmosphere of over-the-top gothic horror to the Pride of the Emperor now; Graham’s descriptions make me visualise its corridors as all clogged up with dead leaves (for no logical reason) on some real Edgar Allen Poe shit. And of course, Eidolon’s terribly misjudged questioning of Fulgrim’s orders is a great scene, showing how dangerous and unpredictable Fulgrim has become – and the face nobody seems to care about his ‘death’ also emphasises how far the Leigon’s fallen. While this storyline (and the way it continued in ‘Angel Exterminatus’) goes some way to justifying the online comments from assholes along the lines of “Heresy novels are worse than Marvel at keeping dead people dead!!!!”, I always quite liked it, and it led to some fantastically creepy moments.

As the story accelerates towards its end, we get a couple extremely memorable scenes. The Order of the Phoenix using deadly force against their Primarch is one of the most brutal, yet gripping, battle scenes Graham has ever written. And then, of course, the controversial torture – the conspirators get into some diabolical shit on Fulgrim’s helpless form, pausing sporadically to have a philosophical debate on the nature of suffering. And, of course, Graham uses some slightly flowery language to disguise the fact that Fulgrim gets some arcane butt-plug rammed inside him while loving every minute of it. Yep, I’m going to go with ‘memorable’ for both of those.

Do I have any particular beef with this tale? Well, the torture scene is utterly ridiculous, but I get the creeping sense it’s meant to be. Julius Kaesoron’s name was always a rather unsubtle historical allusion, but giving Fulgrim one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ is – well, rather too obvious even for Graham. And the military battle sequence for the Prismatica cluster seems to be there by BL mandate rather than actual necessity; I think it saps the momentum of the story, drawing focus from the plot elements which are really important. (Yet part of me thinks this is thematically appropriate; it’s well-established that Slaaneshi warriors routinely engage in ‘pointless’ combats in order to gain things they feel are aesthetically pleasing.) Graham was also successful at making the great revelation of ‘The Reflection Crack’d’ a real blindside volley, but he made it surprising by, well, not foreshadowing it at all or even giving an indication of how it happened. Even with the meagre explanation offered in ‘Angel Exterminatus’, I still don’t feel we’re close to a satisfactory explanation of how Fulgrim overcame his ‘passenger’.

Aside from maybe ‘Butchers Nails’, this might be the best short-form prelude ever to a mainline Heresy novel. Re-reading it has got me really excited to read more from Graham about Lucius. Graham has left Games Workshop/Black Library now but has stated he still intends to write for them – like I was saying before, hopefully ‘The Crimson King’ will come out in 2016? 9/10

New to PurpleHeresy? Head on over to the index page to see a more chronological list of the Horus Heresy reviews on this blog.