Review - The Horus Heresy, volumes 1, 2 and 3

This is Horus, apparently.

I am currently reading through Warhammer 40,000’s The Horus Heresy series, a literary adjunct and scene-setting apparatus for the popular Games Workshop board game. I was going to write a single review for each book in the series, but after finishing three of the things before I had time to sit down and write, I figured I’d just combine my comments on the first trilogy into a single critique.

So here’s the thing about The Black Library (Games Workshop’s publishing house): no two consecutive books in any of its series are written by the same author – meaning that responsibility for writing The Horus Heresy’s opening trilogy was split three ways. This would have been fantastic had all the authors been of equal competence, but they were not. Not even close. Dan Abnett, Graham McNeill and Ben Counter – in that order – take the Horus Heresy all the way from the heights of story-telling perfection to the depths of “the comma is a mystery to me” and “what the fuck is a synonym?” within the page count of a single George R. R. Martin book. So, so irritating, especially when you’re dealing with the same characters between books and are forced to watch your favourite protagonist go from articulate voice of reason to burbling fool in the space of a few story days.

I’ve heard it quipped that a camel is a horse designed by committee, meaning that… well, yeah, you get it. Thing is, I suspect that parts of The Horus Heresy series of novels being placed in the care of dyslexics is irrefutable proof of the benefits of creativity via committee. Or, at least, it’s proof of its ability to ensure that the glaring stylistic and grammatical malfunctions of individual writers don’t spread to the architecture of the all-important plot. Thousands of hours of brainstorming at Games Workshop has given these rent-an-author fanboy hacks an iron-clad narrative framework that they couldn’t deviate from even if they tried. I have the strong impression that each book started as a comprehensive brief composed by some ancient gaggle of unshaven 40K lore guardians who firmly delineated in dot-points the two states between which each character must move in any given chapter. The what was taken care of. All the authors had to come up with was the how.

Any. Way. Let’s do this thing, book by book.

Horus Rising by Dan Abnett

It is the year 30,000 and the immortal Emperor of Mankind has withdrawn from His great galactic crusade after 200 years of battling to reunite the lost fragments of humanity under the banner of His secular Imperial Truth. With matters to attend to back on Earth, the Emperor has left His most trusted son, Horus, in charge of things out in the void. But Horus is no ordinary man. He and his 19 brothers are genetically engineered giants called primarchs, each embodying a different aspect of the Emperor’s personality, and each tasked with commanding an entire legion of the Imperial army. The legions are composed mostly of regular humans, but also of elites called Astartes. These massive, triple-lunged, double-hearted warriors represent the absolute cream of the Imperial forces sent to render the galaxy compliant. It is from the ranks of Astartes in Horus’s own legion, the Luna Wolves, that Abnett draws The Horus Heresy’s first protagonists.

Basically, we know from the get-go that Horus is going to defy the Emperor. This is, after all, the Horus Heresy. What we don’t know is how, or why. We also don’t know why, within an ostensibly secular human paradigm, it’s called the Horus “Heresy” and not the more appropriate (if somewhat less alliterative) Horus “Treason”, Horus “Mutiny” or Horus “Rebellion”. Abnett does a great job early on of painting Horus as the most magnificent icon of physical, intellectual and moral greatness that mankind has ever known, and as we experience the contagious esteem in which he is held by the Astartes under his command, we’re soon fascinated by the potential paths of his demise.

It also helps that Abnett writes in much the same way as a Space Marine fights – with supreme confidence, efficiency and skill. For what I thought would be a schlock novel, Horus Rising is surprisingly well written, with a no-nonsense approach to language that expertly rides the line between zippy pacing and vivid illustration. Abnett’s talent is in understanding that not every noun needs an adjective, especially in the heat of battle, and in knowing how to write the emotions of huge burly men without making the largely young, male readership squirm in their proverbial chairs.

Via the primary protagonist – Garviel Loken, Captain of Horus’s 10th Company – we learn that the secular philosophy espoused by the Emperor and His subjects may not be entirely correct. As it turns out, the warp – the Warhammer 40,000 universe’s version of hyperspace – is home to more than just raw, fluctuating energy. It also houses vast, malevolent intelligences that would like nothing better than to see the entire universe destroyed. But they cannot affect the physical realm unaided. They need the complicity of sentient, flesh-bound agents. And what better agent for a force seeking to destroy an entire dimension than a superpowered, charismatic human behemoth operating under the title of Warmaster?

False Gods by Graham McNeill

False Gods opens with a very different, angry and reclusive Horus. He’s upset, McNeill tells us, after the closing events of Horus Rising, which essentially amounted to Horus having to fight a battle he didn’t want to fight. I suspect, however, that Horus’s personality shift is more due to McNeill being incapable of matching Abnett’s powerful portrayal of the primarch than any deliberate adjustment in the story’s characterisation.

Honestly, the biggest compliment I can give Graham McNeill is to call him competent. Here is a competent writer capable of holding a story together for 400 pages. That is all. His descriptions aren’t brilliant or inspiring, but he commands a perfectly adequate literary arsenal for the average reader of Black Library schlock. As I said before, the story carries on totally oblivious to the skill level of the author at the helm, much like one of the Imperium’s unstoppable war titans. As long as someone is fleshing it out with explosions and conversations, there’s very little that can go wrong. Which is why I was able to read this book almost totally drunk. (I know I said I wouldn’t do that again, but believe me, False Gods is no Neuromancer).

So in this book Horus heads off to a moon orbiting a planet called Davin, from where some sort of signal is being broadcast. When the Luna Wolves arrive, they find the once-pleasant moon has become a plague-ridden swamp full of animated corpses. Not knowing what to think, they plunge on toward the source of the original signal and find a crashed starship, which appears empty. Upon further investigation the entire thing topples over onto Horus, hurting but not killing him, and eventually leading him to a suppurating bubo of a man named Eugan Temba. Originally the planetary governor placed in charge of Davin, Temba has now become a slave of the Chaos gods. Deep within the murky bowels of the ship they fight, and in the process of killing Temba Horus is injured with a cursed weapon given to his opponent by – anyone with even half a brain will figure this out, so I’m not spoiling anything for anyone who’s not legally retarded – the First Chaplain of the Word Bearers legion, Erebus. Cue Horus’s emergency extraction to his starship, the Vengeful Spirit, for medical attention. In a sort of weird development, I thought, the Astartes carrying Horus kill and injure dozens of crew members in their rush to get the primarch to the infirmary, inadvertently starting an insurrection that never really gets off the ground. But I suppose this element of the narrative was a simple way to create a plausible ideological divide in the minds of the crew of the Vengeful Spirit subjects to precede Horus’s and his legion’s outright fall from grace. I don’t know.

Despite his best efforts, Apothecary Vaddon cannot stop Horus’s bleeding and Garviel Loken, our protagonist, volunteers to return to the moon to find the mysterious weapon responsible for his wounding. While he finds the weapon, it proves useless to Vaddon. Meanwhile, Erebus convinces the other members of Horus’s inner circle to take the dying Warmaster to the surface of Davin to cure him by means that, while likely succeed, fly in the face of the Emperor’s secular truth and eschewal of all forms of worship.

And so on and so forth, some stuff happens, Erebus gets his throat slit open, Horus has some dreams where Erebus manipulates him, Magnus the Red tries to warn Horus of the dangers of the warp via long-distance psychic communication from Prospero, Horus’s inner circle splits in two, and eventually Horus wakes up fit as a fiddle.

So, in summary this book is nothing more or less than the series of events that put Horus in a position to choose Dark over Light and reject the Emperor. However the true meaning of Horus’s choice is not apparent until Ben Counter’s Galaxy in Flames, which is a disastrously written thing that would likely have been of more benefit had I boiled it in chicken stock and tried to eat it.

Galaxy in Flames by Ben Counter

But still I must review it. I will apply to this part of the review as much effort as Ben Coulter has writing talent. That is the best way to give you some idea of just how horrible a reading experience this book was. You can see that I have already started to not use any effort. I am barely lifting my fingers from the keyboard. Ok, so Ben Counter pretty obviously loves the story he’s trying to tell. But it’s much like a blind man telling you he loves Picasso. He has an idea of art, but it is likely wildly divergent from anyone else’s and unless he is some kind of genius (and with Counter’s infuriating misuse of commas, I am certain he was no gifted and talented child), for all his trying he can produce nothing resembling Picasso. This is a fairly sketchy analogy, but fuck it, I am not going to go back and try to clarify it except to say that Counter has no idea how to describe something using words. He has an idea of how writing should sound, but it comes out onto the paper with such a paucity of meaning and so many hiccups in its flow that I legitimately wondered where the story had gone.

Yeah, new paragraph, I know. That was a big call there. The problem with Counter is that I suddenly couldn’t see anymore. I felt surrounded by a kind of fog in which everything was obscured, especially environments and geographies. I really wanted to be able to imagine things clearly. I wanted preemptive answers to unasked visual questions. Those fanboy bastards at Games Workshop could have fixed his book too. But they didn’t. They just published his shit and sold it to me at an ever-so-slightly cheaper price. And then, smarty pantses that they are, they told James Swallow, who was responsible for writing the subsequent The Flight of the Eisenstein, to rehash the entire war outlined in Galaxy in Flames because nobody among the readership had had a fucking clue what Counter was on about. And so that’s what he did, except from the point of view of the Death Guard Legion instead of The Sons of Horus (the name Horus gave his legion after his miracle healing on Davin) so Counter and the rest of the pillocks responsible for telling the first story of Istvaan IV could save a little face. And then The Black Library took Swallow’s work, which was 70% rehash/30% new material, shrunk the text size to make that also fit within 400 pages, said “here, have some incredibly colourful descriptions of reanimated corpses” and hoped that nobody would remember Galaxy of Flames.

But there is one advantage to the fact that they told the same story in both the third and fourth books, which is that I can wait until next time to talk about the war the Astartes prosecuted on Istvaan IV, and how during it Horus condemned them all. And that’s very exciting. Besides, James Swallow deserves his own review, and much, much more of my effort.