Purple Heresy Looks At 2016! Part 1 of 2

So. This entry is a real bummer to write. But I’m formalising what’s probably very apparent to anyone who’s been checking PurpleHeresy in 2016. I am considering mothballing the site for now (to use a gross/anachronistic phrase). I didn’t think that a year could end up rougher than 2015, which had one deeply mediocre novel to tide us through… but I think my feelings as 2016 closes are more profoundly negative as a HH fan than they were for 2015. At least with 2015 I could say “Sure, it’s bad, but think of all the marquee titles that await us!” 2016 was when those books came out and were… mostly bad, in my opinion.

So why not just write about that? Why not continue the day-to-day operation of PurpleHeresy but fill it with poison pen reviews? Well… that goes back to the whole reason I started this blog. I would always look at the response to Horus Heresy (even just general Black Library) books on forums and be disheartened by how negative and dismissive people were. I always wanted PurpleHeresy to be… not that. (Of course, I was originally going to somehow combine my love of hip-hop mixtapes with my love of Horus Heresy on one review site, so the original concept seems pretty far away now, but still.)

This entry is going to be 2 things: 1) way too fucking long 2) a valedictory ‘overview’ of what happened in 2016. Before I get underway with my complaining, I’ll just note what I haven’t checked out yet and therefore won’t be commenting on: I haven’t listened to ‘The Thirteenth Wolf’. I haven’t finished ‘Sons of the Forge’; my Kindle tells me I’m not quite halfway through it, though I’ve been slogging through for – literally – months. Also, I haven’t read ‘Fabius Bile: Primogenitor’ which feels like it could have quite a bit of relevance to the Heresy series. Still, I think I’ve absorbed like 95% of Horus Heresy material published in 2016.

So here we go. 2016 Horus Heresy novels.

Pharos: 

It seems a little like cheating to put Pharos on here, since it dropped as an e-book in very late 2015, but I only really count them from when the ‘dead tree’ format drops. That’s not very modern of me, I guess.

This novel felt like it should be a lock: it was a follow-up in the ‘Unremembered Empire’ strand, which began as one of the most entrancing and strange plots in the whole Heresy series. Furthermore, it was being written by Guy Haley, someone who’d showed he was excellent at picking up characters and plots other authors had discarded – as a follow-up to his Night Lords story ‘A Safe and Shadowed Place’ alone, I was looking forward to it.

As it turned out, Guy’s ambition to continue ‘Unremembered Empire’ didn’t produce great results: he can’t write Primarchs as well as Dan (well, few can, but this story leaned on them a lot), and his heroic ‘blue team’ space marines tend towards the dull - a dangerous situation when you’re dealing with a lot of VII Legion and XIII Legion characters, which in my (admittedly biased) viewpoint are dull by default. Most disappointing was the way the Night Lords story went – I ended up feeling like most of what happened was pretty pointless.

Upon finishing ‘Pharos’, I got a feeling of: is that it? Is that how far the story has progressed after this quite-long novel? Not that I am desperate for the end of the HH series, but I was expecting both the Imperium Secundus and Night Lords plot threads to be much closer to the endgame when I reached the last page. As it turned out, so many things just seemed functionally the same as they were when the story started. It wasn’t the last time I would feel that about 2016 HH material, and looking back on it in the context of 2016 as a whole, 'Pharos' is at least not actively *bad*.

Eye of Terra / The Silent War: 

Not going to spend long talking about these, mostly because I haven’t read them as collections, but I am already familiar with all the material. It’s great that BL are catering to all the people who don’t want to consume their work as mp3s or ebooks, and they could potentially be some of the best compilation books in the whole series, but I’m not going to count these towards what’s good or bad about 2016: they belong to the past.

Path of Heaven: 

Amongst the HH novels of 2016, to my mind ‘Path of Heaven’ is by far the best-written, and the only one I’d consider comparing favourably with some of the past highlights of the series. The timeskip felt clumsy, I was disappointed by some of Wraight’s III Legion characters, and perhaps at times it felt like it was more ‘Scars Part II’ than the fresh, individual story it ideally should have been, but I ended up satisfied with how it pushed this plot line forwards and the way the characters evolved. 

But considering how joyous and positive ‘Scars’ felt, and how energised and enthusiastic I felt about the series as a whole when I finished it, I have to say, boy, was ‘Path of Heaven’ not like that. Can I fault it for being, by necessity, a bit of a downer? Hardly, but… boy, was ‘Scars’ a breath of fresh air; I just hope we get another book with that energy from Black Library sometime.

Angels of Caliban: 

While I said ‘Path of Heaven’ is the best HH book of 2016, it was a little disappointing by virtue of just how high my expectations were, and I’d say ‘Angels of Caliban’ is the one I most enjoyed this year (although, yep, it was a little disappointing as well). I came to this thinking it would be average at best, since Gav Thorpe is not near my personal ‘top tier’ of BL authors, but in particular the Caliban story strand was an enjoyable (if somewhat derivative) high-tension, high-intrigue romp that I’m enthusiastic to see continued. 

The Lion El’Johnson/’Unremembered Empire’ strand was a lot more hit-and-miss (the Dreadwing are lame as shit, and Gav can’t write Primarch interactions anywhere near as well as Dan Abnett) but ‘AoC’ comfortably takes second place for 2016 and is easily the best First Legion long-form story we’ve seen for the Heresy. Good work, Gav! On this book, at least...

Praetorian of Dorn: 

Hhhhhhhh...

Dan Abnett’s ‘Legion’ made me care about the Alpha Legion in ways I’d not thought possible. Subsequent XX Legion-focused fiction like ‘The Serpent Beneath’ and ‘The Seventh Serpent’ didn’t always measure up, but it felt like the authors at least got why so many people loved Dan’s creative take on these mysterious psychopaths; I really didn’t get why they seemed so hell-bent on moving the focus away from the Cabal and the labyrinthine schemes of the AL's human operatives, but they had some interesting ideas. 

So how would the next Alpha Legion-focused novel ‘sequelise’ ‘Legion’? Well… essentially, by ignoring it and ignoring all AL plotlines in the series, and ending with a big punch in the dick to all the ‘twin serpent’ fanboys out there.

While initially sold as an Alpha Legion novel, actually ‘Praetorian of Dorn’ pushes the Imperial Fists to the fore (as the title implies). John French clearly loves the Fists, which is a good thing in theory, but the way he portrays them is incredibly boring to me. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted to smack an emo anime character as much as I want to smack French-written ‘oh so deep and tortured’ Sigismund, but at least he’s barely featured; still, the ‘jaded wise old guy / young idealistic rookie’ dual protagonists of this book are equally predictable and non-engaging.

It’s made more frustrating by the fact John is obviously a capable, gifted writer – some combat sections, particularly early in the book, are gritty and cold masterworks of ‘hard SF’ writing, and this guy can build dramatic tension like a motherfucker. But how the plot ended up, the character motivations, and the way that the ‘good guys’ in particular lean so hard on well-worn character tropes… all of that made it difficult to enjoy.

Maybe I’m too close to this to be as objective as I’ve prided myself on being for most of my reviews, since it is the first book in 8 years dealing with my favourite Legion. Am I just a weeping AL fanboy saying “this book is bad because it makes my home team look bad”? Am I taking this as the ending of an early-HH arc when in fact it’s just a late-HH arc beginning? Maybe I’ll look back in 5 years and say hey man, ‘Praetorian of Dorn’ is GOOD NOW. It’s not impossible.

I don't think that's going to happen. Ultimately, this book kills a character and storyline that, in my view, was potentially one of the most interesting and satisfying in the whole HH series, and… to what end? Why? Seriously, WHAT WAS ALPHARIUS THINKING WITH HIS ACTIONS THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK BUT PARTICULARLY AT THE END?

‘Praetorian of Dorn’ annoyed me so much that it made me question what I even liked about Black Library fiction. If 2016 really has led to ‘the end of PurpleHeresy’, it began here. And I'm sure as shit going to think twice about buying a John French book again.

Corax: 

On the plus side, ‘Corax’ gave me another opportunity to read ‘Ravenlord’ which I think is a really solid concept for a novella and perfectly-executed by Gav. But that was published in 2014, so we can’t really count that in its favour here. And the flaccid, uninteresting 'Soulforge' is one of the dullest pieces of writing in the whole Heresy, but, again, was first published some years ago, so that's kind of a wash. 

On the minus side, ‘Corax’ wraps up the titular Primarch’s story with ‘Weregeld’, which is… unfinished. It’s like a videogame which ships ending on a cliffhanger and then tries to sell you the ‘real ending’ as DLC. Except instead of the end of ‘Weregeld’ missing, there are huge chunks simply gone from the middle of the story (Corax! There's no time to explain these crazy circumstances! We have to fight the huge army, though you won't see the fight!) and instead of a £5 DLC add-on, it runs the risk of being filled out in a near-£100 Forge World supplement. I’ve seen Laurie Goulding’s assertion that it’s all going to make sense when we’ve read the follow-up book that’s about the Wolf Cull and Beta-Garmon and Yarant and what have you. I'm not entirely convinced. As with ‘Praetorian of Dorn’, perhaps when more books are released, I’ll look back and think "Yeah, this was a good starting point, setting up what was to come." But for now, I have to judge 'Corax' on its present merit. What is written in ‘Weregeld’ is uneven. There are some great moments, and there’s some really fucking lame bullshit as well. Even leaving the botched plotting around Yarant aside, and there are still awful character beats, which end up making Corax an extremely unsympathetic character.

Gav guided Corax’s post-Isstvan story through peaks and valleys for years. The idea that he could wrap it up in such a haphazard way and walk away saying “alright, peace, I’m happy with what I did here” is so fucking depressing.

The Master of Mankind:

Probably one of the longest-anticipated Horus Heresy novels that will ever exist, ‘The Master of Mankind’ was set up to be an anti-climax. Considering ‘Betrayer’ was the last work by ADB I really enjoyed, I adjusted my expectations waaaaay down, but ‘Master of Mankind’ was still surprisingly disappointing, which seems a fitting capper to the year.

Like John French, Aaron seems to have become a staunch advocate of portraying Astartes as Cumberbatch’s Sherlock: hyperintelligent, abrasive, arrogant, unfeeling, with no regard for social niceties. Fluff-wise, that’s perfectly sound and in fact probably the ‘truest’ way to show these characters, though a lot of other authors have basically showed Astartes as regular humans in cool armour with superpowers, and I think that’s just as acceptable. The problem with Aaron’s approach is that often it leads to characters it is difficult to empathise with or relate to on any level – and actually, a lot of them are downright detestable.

Aaron's approach has certainly worked in the past. Argel Tal, First Claw, hell, even Squad Castian are some of my favourite Space Marine characters. They are decidedly non-human in many ways, but they also have real/relateable emotional reactions to stuff – or at least their non-emotional responses are framed in a way that makes them relatable. Here… Here it feels like Aaron thinks it’s a virtue to create characters that want to push us away (they are quite literally repellent – it took a LOT of sittings for me to finish this book). To be fair, there are barely any Astartes in this book – but before you think ‘whew, bullet dodged’, most of the time when Aaron writes Mechanicum and Custodes characters they fall into the exact same trap. I almost want to applaud him for how awful these Custodes are. I mean, even at their most villainous, the Custodes so far in HH haven’t been *this* psychotic. The cantankerous Mechanicum egomaniac Arkhan Land is a halfway-great character, but seems like he’s been dropped in from another, better book (namely: some kind of 40k retelling of ‘Gormenghast’).

If a book with about a hundred Sherlocks and not a John Watson in sight sounds appealing to you then ‘The Master of Mankind’ might end up a good time. That ain’t me tho. 

As someone who is very concerned with how the existing storyline of HH is going, particularly the dearth of momentum from the Traitor side of things, and as someone who maybe isn’t desperate to learn what the Emperor is up to right now (especially when we already had a Terra-centric book this year), I might’ve never been the intended audience for ‘TMoM’. Luckily, it looks like a lot of HH fans do really like this book! And that’s good for them. But it doesn’t really ever get close to winning me over. By the time the book gets to its big tentpole revelation, it’s too little, too late. Perhaps a few years ago this twist on the Big E’s motivations would have shocked or disturbed me – by now, I just don’t fucking care. (You know what? Writing this a few months after I finished ‘TMoM’, I can’t even fucking remember what the twist was.)

And, of course, wow, we have The Emperor himself, not the ‘main character’ as such but certainly pushed to the centre as he never has been before in a Heresy novel. As Aaron states in his afterword, everyone sees a different aspect of the Emperor so there’s no ‘canon’ interpretation of him, but since every character here is basically a huge, unwiped asshole, the Emperor behaves in kind. This will certainly fuel both sides in the ‘Emperor is infallible god hero’ / ‘Horus was always right’ debate. I don’t think I care enough anymore to engage with that (but *Horus was right*, at least at first, and the Emperor is a piece of shit).

The bow to wrap all this up in? Aaron’s writing style has become unbearably pompous (I think ‘Talon of Horus’ was when he started writing like a frustrated student poet). You know, authorial style changes over time and as fans we gotta respect that, but I can't help but wish we had the old sardonic, clipped style of Aaron back. This book's ornate passages led to more eyerolls than any other this year and I can’t help but hope whoever replaces Laurie Goulding is a little less in love with Aaron’s prose and cuts it back a little.

Yep. Those last three HH novels of 2016 really fucking... sucked. Just my opinion.

In my next entry, I'll talk about the Horus Heresy releases that weren't 'mainline' this year, and what awaits us in 2016 and beyond. Yay?