Purple Heresy looks at 2016, part 2 of 2

So… non novel releases. There were a LOT of things like this to write about in 2016. And I’m a bit more positive about this side of the Black Library line.

The HH Primarchs: Roboute Guilliman, Lord of Ultramar: 

Like a lot of the HH developments of this year, I’m conflicted about the announcement of the ‘Horus Heresy: Primarchs’ series. If these all end up being Crusade-era with frequent foreboding reference to post-Heresy events, then that’s kind of boring. I don’t love Ultramarines stories, and Annandale is thus far a slightly uneven writer (can end up a little too grimdark). However, this ended up being one of the most enjoyable Heresy stories of the year – maybe, as with ‘Angels of Caliban’, because my expectations were low. Trust David Annandale to show us a dark side of the XIII Legion, of all things (if not a dark side of their Primarch, who still, despite everything, is one of the most likeable Loyalists). It helped that central to the plot were the mysterious Nemesis chapter, the Ultramarines Destroyer cadre I’d been dying to find out more about since I read about them in ‘Tempest’. And hell, in the year of ‘The Beast Arises’ when at times I prayed I’d never have to read another orks v space marines battle, David made that scenario pretty fucking tolerable, even great at times. Kind of brilliant!

The HH Primarchs: Leman Russ, The Great Wolf: 

I need to restate here how much I fucking love Chris Wraight as a writer and as a cool guy who’s nice to fans, since it sort of feels like I’m kicking him around a bit in this entry… but I’m sort of done with Chris writing about Heresy-era Space Wolves. I mean, I liked Russ’ role in ‘Scars’ (and he sure as hell can write about ‘modern’ Space Wolves – I loved ‘Blood of Asaheim’) but I found ‘Wolf King’ overall pretty dull. Chris has picked up the baton from Dan Abnett about as well as you could reasonably expect, and I’m not sure if there are any writers on the bench right now who could do a better job. That doesn’t stop ‘The Great Wolf’ from being a bit of a missed opportunity.

This story weaves together a few different strands: the Wolves’ attitude and warmaking style in the Great Crusade, the 13^th Company’s struggle with the Canis Helix/'curse of the Wulfen', the rivalry between the Lion and Leman Russ, and (similar to in the Roboute story) the post-Scouring dourness of Russ and the Space Wolves, now forced into the restrictive box of being a ‘Chapter’. It’s an interesting group of concepts, but it at once seems too short and too languid: the first two-thirds are a bit of a slog, the pieces slowly being manoeuvred into place, while the last reel seems incredibly rushed. 

If I had my way, I would have liked to have seen this book be a little longer and to have solely focused on the Russ/Lion plot; the Lion sadly isn’t developed much being a nasty/posh foil to Russ’ likeable barbarity, but flashes of an interesting character can be seen beneath it all. (There’s also a scene here that completely contradicts what I’d always understood as the post-Siege timeline for the First Legion, but, well, fuck it.) Chris is a gifted writer and I think he’d definitely smash an in-depth character study of Lion ‘El Johnson, but… not this time.

Short Fiction: 

This year, short stories are one area that I can unreservedly say was a success for Horus Heresy fiction. Perhaps that’s because so few were published? Part of me hopes they don’t do many more HH short stories because focusing on novels seems smarter – but there are some really good short story writers in BL and the economy of form here suits them down to the ground. I’ll skip over my least favourite story, ADB’s ‘Into Exile’ – a ‘Memento’-style backwards story about Arkhan Land’s escape from Mars that seemed pretty dang unnecessary – and instead talk about my most favourite, ‘Blackshield’, written by Chris Wraight. The Blackshields (a catch-all term for Heresy-era Marines who have allegiance neither to the Imperium or Horus) of course make an appearance, as does Crysos Morturg, the improbably named Loyalist Death Guard Isstvan III survivor who has featured heavily in the Forge World material. Chris was absolutely the right choice to integrate this FW material into the ‘mainline’ series, and I hope he gets the chance to pick up this story as part of a longer work. On top of this, Chris is carrying on his quest of retroactively making Graham’s hit-or-miss Mortarion scenes in ‘Vengeful Spirit’ look way better by giving them more context and emotional weight. What a nice guy to help out Graham like this! Chris Wraight also wrote the quickie ‘Last Son of Prospero’, which potentially closes down the most irritating things about the Arvida storyline, and opens the door for that character to potentially do some interesting (unique??) stuff going forward.

‘Myriad’ was another awesome ‘fight for Mars’ story, but at this point I’m already convinced that Rob Sanders is the guy to tackle the climactic Martian Civil War book – any further stories like this will seem like throat-clearing. And ‘The Painted Count’ sees Guy Haley get back to doing (arguably) what he does best: writing really good ‘Prince of Crows’ fanfic. Once upon a time, a story like this would make me say Guy should be doing ‘Nightfall’ rather than ADB, but after ‘Pharos’… well, maybe a third option is the best choice.

Jim Swallow’s ‘Exocytosis’, a follow-up to the epilogue of ‘Angels of Caliban’, left me conflicted. On the one hand, it feels like Jim completely wasted the cool setup of Fallen Angels and Traitor Death Guard teaming up, instead making both factions mistrust each other and barely interacting. He also reused the ‘zombie Nurgle cultists’ antagonists from ‘Garro: Legion of One’, and I felt like his Dark Angel characters were a little one-dimensional. Despite all these complaints, I loved Jim’s portrayal of Typhon here and how it dealt with his supercharged slide into corruption without seeming rushed. If he is the one who has to write a Fall of Mortarion novel, then on this evidence I am good with it (though of course Wraight would be my first choice).

Audio: 

It was less of a marquee year for audio stuff, though maybe ‘Thirteenth Wolf’ will change my mind when I get to listening to it. Lowlight for sure was ‘Red-Marked’, an overlong trudge that saw Nick Kyme burning the last remaining goodwill I had from ‘Censure’ – I really don’t care about Aeonid Thiel anymore, that’s for sure. This was also structured very poorly; opening with a flashback that you re-tell in full over the course of the story is maybe OK in print, but in a ‘time is precious’ format like audio? Fuck that. Lastly, I think it’s fucked up that this was a full-price MP3 in January and within a few months it was available in print as part of ‘Eye of Terra’. If I’d known I wouldn’t have fucking bothered!

Laurie Goulding’s ‘The Dark Between the Stars’ (AKA ‘The Heart of the Pharos’) was certainly better; Laurie has the Guy Haley-like ability to imbue his stories with a really winning enthusiasm for the material, but this storyline isn’t done much justice in its tie-in novel, ‘Pharos’. Hovering midway between disappointment and reassurance is ‘Valerius’, a short audio picking up the badly botched Therion Cohort story after ‘Corax’ / ‘Weregeld’; Beta-Garmon will hopefully get a full novel soon, but this isn’t a great appetiser. Marcus Valerius’ story continuing is at least a positive; Marcus Valerius’ story continuing thanks to a literal deus ex machina is something I’m much less keen on.

Recent surprise ‘Children of Sicarus’ feels like it should have been my favourite this year, with so many parts falling into place (the return of Anthony Reynolds to the Heresy! A follow-up to Dan Abnett’s ‘Macragge’s Honour’ letting us know what Kor Phaeron did next! A Traitor Legion adapting to a daemon world! A cool ‘female’ daemon antagonist!) but I can’t 100 percent back it, because I think Anthony Reynolds can do much better. This will hopefully be the foundation for a really cool Scouring-era Kor Phaeron novel, I guess. Slightly more cogent to the HH narrative as a whole was the Eidolon drama ‘The Soul, Severed’, which did skip over the Mortarion/Eidolon shipping I had hoped to get more of after ‘Path of Heaven’ (but my guess is we’ll see Morty and Eido’s sweet goodbye at the beginning of the next Death Guard book). If there’s a criticism I can make of ‘The Soul, Severed’ it’s that it felt like a re-tread of a few of the year’s ‘best bits’ done better elsewhere: Eidolon being a shit, lethal Legion infighting, the moment of “And so, onward to Terra” that it feels like we’ve had five or six times now, the portrayal of the last slide from ‘real bad traitors’ to ‘actual Chaos Space Marines’. Still, Wraight owns this character: Abnett sketched him, McNeill painted over that first in broad strokes, then slightly more subtly, but Wraight has put the finishing touches on Eidolon.

I think in the end my favourite audio in 2016 has been ‘Perpetual’. It was a short Abnett-penned sequel to ‘Unmarked’, which I’ve been anticipating for a while. It feels like it needs at least one more short story before it ‘gets anywhere’, but I’m really hoping that (as rumoured) there’s at least one more Abnett novel in the Heresy series before it dies. The Alpha Legion apparently now working with warp-entities is a plot point that annoyed me a bit, but unlike with the other Alpha Legion bullshit this year, I near-instantly went from annoyance to thinking “Hmm, I want to know more about how we get to this point and where we go from here.”

I want to give a special not-quite-Horus-Heresy ‘participation award’ to The Beast Arises series. The series was seriously, seriously flawed in a lot of ways. Whole storylines were dropped or (worse) had their resolutions botched. The midsection of the series was extremely flabby (three assaults on the enemy stronghold using pretty much the same approach?). Gav Thorpe ruined my hopes for the #GavThorpeWinning2016 hashtag by contributing one of the worst, most boring pieces of 40K fiction I’ve ever read (‘The Beast Must Die’). The concluding volume was two or three novels’ worth of plot resolution jammed into one novella; it made a valiant effort, but it was doomed to miss a lot of its swings. I have to put this in the positives, though. The sheer balls-out insanity/improbability of Black Library saying they would do a novel-a-month full series in the space of one year and actually hitting that target is an achievement in itself. But the fact that a good amount of the series ended up being really solid – maybe I’d even say fantastic - makes TBA something I have to applaud. 

In particular, David Guymer and Rob Sanders made a potentially goofy/dumb ‘Imperial Fists descendants team up with Iron Warriors’ storyline something haunting and elegant. And, hey, it’s cool that we got a little snapshot of the post-Scouring Imperium. I’m hoping this means we’ll get some more miniseries in the time between 30K and 40K.

Lastly, let’s look at what’s allegedly coming out in 2017. (Shout out to ‘Track of Words’ for the info on what they said about this at the recent Weekender; you can read their rundown here. https://trackofwords.wordpress.com/2016/11/24/black-library-live-coming-soon-the-horus-heresy/ ) I am saving my ‘Garro’ ebook as a treat, and I haven’t cracked open my Forge Word ‘Inferno’ book yet, but I’m looking forward to getting to grips with both of them. 

As for new novel material, at last, ‘The Crimson King’ looks like it’s finally coming out; sure, I remain one of the few who doesn’t love Graham’s ‘A Thousand Sons’, but I’m certainly interested in reading another (final?) Heresy book from the man who gave us ‘Angel Exterminatus’ and ‘Vengeful Spirit’. David Annandale has ‘Ruinstorm’ in the pipeline, which should finally put the capper on the Imperium Secundus storyline; I’m not sure that’s a scenario that will allow Annandale to put his best skills to use, but I have faith that will be a strong novel. I’m less excited about ‘Old Earth’, Nick Kyme’s final chapter in his Vulkan series. There was a time when I thought maybe Nick wasn’t as bad as the more negative fans insisted… but honestly, I can’t really say a single nice thing about anything he’s done over the last few years. Unfortunately, this is apparently also going to finish off the Meduson / Marr storyline… Fuck, I really had hoped Graham or Dan would wrap that up.

The HH Primarchs stories will continue, with Perturabo (Guy Haley), Lorgar (Gav Thorpe) and Fulgrim (Josh Reynolds) up next. I'm certainly interested in reading more about all those guys - no complaints here... though I am worried about that Lorgar book. He's a character that can all too easily fall into one-note 'evil priest' pantomime, and Gav's characterisations don't really tend towards the subtle...

Word is on the street that the mainline Horus Heresy series may stretch beyond 50 books after all. We still have some information to come to us about the last few books leading up to the siege, but Dan Abnett is rumoured to be penciled in for the last book. That makes me oddly optimistic. And there are some other interesting projects on the horizon; Chris Wraight and John French have Inquisition-centred series starting this year (could this mean BL may acknowledge that a certain long-dormant Inquisitor-themed novel series might be worth finishing?). Aaron’s new Black Legion book will doubtless be a self indulgent mess but at the same time, I’m sure it’ll be worth reading. And perhaps most intriguingly, after a looooooooong hiatus the Gaunt’s Ghosts series is getting another installment courtesy of Dan Abnett aka The Man Who Wasn’t There. 

It's not 2015. There are things to be excited about in the Black Library upcoming release schedule again. I just don’t know if I have it in me anymore to be excited enough. I don't have the commitment and energy to read and re-read those books, scribbling notes down on the bus, turning them into long messy reviews and posting them.

I’m not sure PurpleHeresy has a future. If not…. Well, it was fun while it lasted. If it does have one... I'll see you for that 'Damnation of Pythos' review one day!

Love and kisses

IndieFaceKillah

PS: Formatting is fucked up on this post! I'm sorry, I'm trying to remove i