User Profile

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.