Reviews and Comments

Going into a book about the most overdone chapter of space marines out there, I wasn’t expecting to have a good time. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the book. While it certainly isn't a masterpiece, it’s quite a decent novel.

Despite the novel being an Ultramarines novel, I actually feel like Uriel isn’t that pivotal of a character. Most of the plot revolves around a group of cartel leaders and their political machinations to control their planet. Meanwhile, the Ultramarines are investigating raids on the other side of the system, which is interesting enough. Unfortunately, the nocel does sometimes stretch into the expected generic Ultramarines tropes, ‘courage and honour!’, ‘for the primarch!’, etc etc are half of their dialogue whenever they are in battle or not actively investigating something.

Other things, such as the depiction of the Imperial bureaucracy as incompetent due to infighting is always nice. The Dark Eldar torture scenes were pretty well written. Despite the title of the book, the Nightbringer and Necrons only really show up in the last two chapters of the book, but I suppose they serve their purpose.

Overall, pretty decent book. Not much to write home about, but enjoyable enough.

Honestly a downgrade from the last novel. While I do enjoy the characters, especially Thrawn, it feels like he never really feels like he’s winning. In universe and real life people always hype Thrawn up as a genius military tactiction, and while he does come up with interesting plans and is quite intuitive, he always loses as someone comes up out of left field. It makes the titular character of the trilogy feel like he’s not actually a threat most of the time. Another thing that isn’t necessarily a major issue is that to me the Dark Force’s existence and peoples knowledge of it is strange. I get that its a legend that probably wouldn’t have been in the original trilogy movies, but literally everyone knows what this fleet is, and that really bothers me. Despite all this, the book is still enjoyable enough, but not nearly as much as the first unfortunate.

This collection contains the novels Elric of Melniboné, The Fortress of the Pearl, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and The Weird of the White Wolf. Elric of Melniboné is a very different story to what I have ever read previously. The writing feels somewhat strange, but I find it rather appealing, the way that characters talk in a very fantasy way to me, pulp fantasy you could call it. Things also just tend to happen in the story. A giant butterfly monster appears out of nowhere? Ok Elric can deal with this. A boat appears and transport Elric across time and dimensions? Sure lets see what happens. Its all very weird and I enjoy it quite a bit even if it can be difficult to explain or understand. Also, Elric is an interesting character, and seeing the way he views and goes about things is enjoyable to read, even if often his solution to any problem is to call upon some deity to solve it for him. Out of the 4 novels contained within The Weird of the White Wolf is my least favorite, maybe it is because it was the first few Elric stories put together and the way he wrote the character hadn't formed into how he did for the 3 novels preceding it chronologically. The shift of events from Sailor on the Seas of Fate to The Weird of the White Wolf was very sudden, to the point where I had to look up forums to see if I had missed something that explained Elric's actions. Even then though, the story was still very enjoyable to read, if just less so that the preceding stories. If you're interested in reading some old school pulpy fantasy that I'd highly recomend Elric of Melniboné.

The End and the Death: Volume 3 is the End and the Death of me. Its the final part of the final novel of the final subline of the Horus Heresy and I really wish that it was better for a series I’ve been reading for the last 5 years. When it comes down to the negatives of the book, they’re pretty much all the same as my complaints for Volume 2. There are too many plot lines that don’t feel like they matter, the Dark King doesn’t really matter whatsoever, and its just too long. The fight between Horus and the Emperor was featured in a short story all the way back in 1988 in Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned, and I just wish that the duel in this book was better. In the original William King short story Horus gets a nice little speech to the Emperor, which is basically just homaged in the novel, and the fight lass several chapters. It feels like the book is confusing an epic conclusion for a long one. Of course there is also the little recurring feature of warhammer novels of the chad loyalist vs the soy traitor conversation, where a traitor talks about their conviction just for a loyalist to respond with essentially ‘nuh uh’ or ‘i know you are but what am i’. Here it is between Horus and Loken, and I dislike it just as much as usual.

For the positives, I like Abaddon i guess. It was shorter than volume 2, it made it drag on less so thats good. Really the fact that Abnett is good at writing is the only thing making the book remotely enjoyable. In the end (and the death) this 3 parter has left me very sadly disappointed that this is 50 books lead up to. For the 3 parts together id probably give the book 4/10? Maybe that will change if I ever reread them, but thats all it gets for now.

The End and the Death: Volume 2 is the next part of the finale of the Horus Heresy series and continues directly from the end of the previous volume, as could be assumed. This is the biggest volume of the 3 parter, being ~750 pages, and at some points you can really feel it. There are some plot lines that feel rather unnecessary and that they only exist to fill time. For example the Dark Angels defending the Astronomican, it’s nice to see Dark Angels doing stuff, but is it really necessary to the point of the novel? Along with this the plot following Basilo Fo is interesting, but so far its not doing much for the main plot. This story focuses on conflict between Malcador and the Custodes which is interesting, but it lengthens the novel in ways that may not be necessary. Unfortunately though, until the end of Volume 3 I cant actually say for certain if these plot lines matter. This point causes an issue with a rather big plot element involving the Dark King, which we get a bunch of buildup to and interesting character interactions surrounding, but it /literally/ gets thown out half way through the novel. I have to assume that this will come up again in Volume 3, because if it doesn’t I really feel like I’d need to decrease my rating of this to at best 4/10. Though there are plenty of things that I really enjoy in this book. As previously mentioned Basilo Fo’s plot is quite interesting to me, alongside what was being done with the Dark King. Additionally, the fight between Horus and Sanguinius I felt was quite well done. There is quite a lot of things I like in this novel, but its just too long I think for what it provides. On the whole, the length is an issue, to the point I can’t comfortably call the novel that good. I’ll currently give it a 5/10, but that may change for better or worse depending on the final Volume.