"Tales Of Heresy" (short story compilation)

'Tales Of Heresy' is the first short story compendium of the Horus Heresy series. I actually like these a lot; they give you an opportunity to learn a bit more about a legion's pre-Heresy background, or a particular battle, or Dark Scheme, or Desperate Attempt At Defense, and then move on to something else. If an author's great, then that's a bonus; if they're indifferent, they don't have time to get dull - and if they're TERRIBLE, you don't feel like you've been cheated for the cost of the book. Since they're all different stories, I'm gonna do some different reviews. I'll just get right to it.

YEAH I ROCK THE AQUILA, FUCK Y'ALL

Blood Games: This is set on Terra, about a year after the events described in Flight Of The Eisenstein. It really has two halves: the mysterious, enigmatic intro where you're all "what is this character?" and "why is he doing this?", and then the slight letdown of the 'special diplomatic mission' scenario that makes up the rest of the story. This might be my least favourite contribution to the Horus Heresy made by Dan Abnett, The Dan Abnett (chosen of GW, anointed by the Four) but it says a lot about the quality of his writing that the 'least favourite' one is still very, very good. It gives us a bit more of a feeling for the Custodes, their slightly antagonistic relationship with the Astartes, and their 'background' role in the Heresy (they're like 30K era Terra's MI5 or Spectrum or something); a lot of this stuff was done better in later HH books featuring Custodes, but you can't build on foundations of nothing, can you? It's also nice to see some characters combining a nice mix of stealth, espionage, techno trickery and lettin' da gunz blow. What the fuck do you mean, "exactly like in 'Legion'"? Get out. I give Blood Games 7/10, and that's probably a little harsh.

Wolf At The Door: I could do with this being about half as long (I doubt this is the last time my inner editor, who is a spiteful cunt, gets a voice) but it isn't terrible. Much like Mike Lee's Dark Angels novel... or was that the bad one? I know I absolutely hated one of the 1st Legion books and didn't really care for the other... but which was which? I digress. In 'Wolf At The Door', Space Wolves battle foul debased xenos who are attempting to prey on an innocent planet of humans. But IS EVERYTHING AS IT SEEMS?!?! The story, again, feels like something that's been done better before and since, but has some great moments; the combat scenes in particular are well written. Additionally, there's a nice little sting in the tale that says a lot about the frustrating nature of the Great Crusade.

One criticism I've seen of this is that Abnett drastically changed the 'feel' of Heresy-era Space Wolves, and thus the 'honourable space-Viking' portrayal here feels... off. This is unfair, as it was written and published long before Prospero Burns - but yes, I too would rather have the Rout version than the mead-chugging Brian Blessed version. Really, though, this is a pretty entertaining story considering that usually my attitude is "pfft, Space Wolves? Fuck that shit." I'd give it 6/10 (ignoring the over-long intro which I'm not sure needs to be part of the story at all...). Oh, and hey, dark eldar, guess your units haven't changed in 10,000 years... nice to have the GW miniature line described so faithfully. SNARF.

Scions Of The Storm: A Word Bearers story. This deals with the period following the legion's censure, before they were all full-on jackin' off to Chaos. As you can tell, this is the period which was covered in the first period of The First Heretic. In terms of order of publication, I think this might be the HH debut of Lorgar and Kor Phaeron. Much like Wolf At The Door, I feel Scions Of The Storm suffers from a boring-as-shit intro and some pretty poor dialogue and characterisation... again like Wolf At The Door, it also has some crunchy fight scenes which are well-described, and some WHAT A TWIST!!!! moments. Unfortunately, this one suffers a bit more than the Mike Lee story because I feel that The First Heretic is a fucking masterpiece and Scions prominently features a mix of stuff First Heretic improved upon greatly (ie the forced compliance of a world which deploys 3-legged artificials) and stuff that First Heretic has rendered useless (the stuff about the Emperor telling Lorgar off privately on his 'battle barge' and the legion left to wonder "what was THAT aboot, eh?"). What also annoys me is that I just KNOW some asshole somewhere is reading First Heretic and sneering "All this shit was covered way better in Scions Of The Storm, GW need to pull their finger out and stop milkin' the cash cow!!!!" Oh well. I give it 5/10.

The Voice: I hated The Voice when I first read it, but mainly because I didn't have a clue what was fucking going on. Most stories in Tales Of Heresy need just a cursory knowledge of the Heresy storyline to pick up and appreciate, but that's not really so for The Voice. It concerns of one of the (fairly) minor characters from Flight Of The Eisenstein, and is set after that book finishes. It's full of allusions to vol. 4 of HH and while it's not technically mandatory for you to have read Flight Of The Eisenstein for you to understand The Voice, I'd really recommend it. Due to this it went from one of my least favourite short stories in the whole series, to one which has some of my favourite moments in Tales Of Heresy. Featuring a classic scenario - some iron-tough Silent Sisters battle through a Black Ship apparently claimed by THINGS from the warp - this tale has some great bone-crunching battle scenes and is rounded out with some fairly nifty Lovecraftian cosmic/body horror.

I'll be honest, I was utterly confused to death by the part near the end where it turns out the creature fucking with them is not in fact a daemonic critter of Horus but in fact a future version of one of the Sisters. Erm, or was it all a trick str8 outta Warpton? I admit, I don't have a fucking clue. First time I read this I was in so much of a hurry to get through this that I thought the Sisters were being contacted by the spirit of Garro, but reading it more closely, I'm barely the wiser. Anyway, the good thing about 40K fiction is, when you're a bit confused by shit, you can just go "well that sly motherfucker Tzeentch is probably behind the shit then". OH FUCK, I SHOULDN'T HAVE TYPED HIS NAME, MY HANDS ARE TURNING INTO FISH! I give The Voice a high 7/10.

Call Of The Lion: Siiiiiigh... the Dork Angels. These douches. I never really 'clicked' with any primogenitor loyalist chapter back in my days of being a full-on 40K player/fanboy, but probably Dark Angels were the ones I liked the least. Ahh, fuck it, I hated them all equally. Anyhow, let's just say they haven't been particularly well-served by the HH series so far in my opinion; it hasn't really challenged my view of them as pursed-mouth, uptight shitheads. But hist, what is this?! A good Dark Angels story?? Fucking hell!!!

I'm actually not sure if any of the guys in this tale are from the two full-length DA novels. Not that it matters. The story here on a basic level deals with tension between space marines from Terra and those from a primarch's homeworld. It's often hinted at in these books, but rarely shown in such explicit detail as it is here. Astelan is a battle hardened Terran Dark Angel; fairly intractable, but also conscious that even Space Marines need to build and not just destroy. Belath is a young Calibanite and he's ruthless, bloodthirsty and dogmatic... a true son of the Lion. Can these wacky, mismatched partners put aside their differences and show the Galaxy what they're made of????? When they encounter a human world with an apparently stable and non-debased society, they squabble over what exactly to do. (Yeah... another 'bring um to compliance nicca $$$' story! You sick of these yet?) I don't think it's a spoiler to say it doesn't really end well.

'Call Of The Lion' is a great story; it gives us a bit of insight into what's happening in the Dark Angels chapter and how not everyone is "on board" with their "new direction", it gives us some nice battle scenes, and even though The Lion himself doesn't appear, I think it tells us quite a bit about him. With the similarly entertaining story 'The Lion' in the Primarchs anthology, it could be that Gav is THE best choice to make those First Legion fuckboys seem a little bit less unbearable. (Still, 'Savage Weapons' is another great Lion story - an Aaron Dembski-Bowden study of 40K-era Cypher, or of Heresy-era Caliban could be superb.) This shit shows 'Wolf At The Door' and 'Scions Of The Storm' how to do it. Bow down to the OG. Imma give this 8/10.

The Last Church: I have mixed feelings about The Last Church. A lot of HH fanboys go crazy over it, and I kind of get it; if nothing else, The Last Church is different. It's one of the only stories in the canon so far where there's no combat, no warp shit, and no Astartes. Instead, it deals totally with a priest-bro just gabbin' bout God with The Emperor (yikes, spoilers - but anyone who doesn't realise withing a few pages of starting The Last Church that the mysterious stranger 'Revelation' is in fact The Emprah... well, they might actually be retarded). My first caveat here is I don't necessarily 'get' McNeill and why he's often seen as the Black Library's premier author, tied with Abnett. I love some of Graham's books - ie Outcast Dead and Mechanicum - but some I just find stodgy and uninteresting. (Dembski-Bowden, Swallow and maybe Thorpe are all BL/HH writers I prefer.) However, all his stuff seems to feature at least SOME excellent moments, and 'The Last Church' is no exception. The characters are pretty memorable and some of the dialogue is very well done. Unfortunately, a lot of this is just Cliff notes of various theories and arguments I remember from A-Level philosophy. And, man, I haaated A-Level philosophy.

The arguments aren't exactly measured, either; the priest just angrily jams his fingers in his ears whenever the Emprah makes reasonable points about negative aspects of religion, and the Emperor comes across as a smug Internet atheist with all the answers - someone who's dead set on belittling you and making you renounce your entire way of life simply through use of his massive intellect. The fact that we know the Emperor has the blood of millions on his hands, yet is still going on about how religion is super gay and makes mad wars brah, makes him seem like, well, a dick. The dickishness is reinforced by the knowledge that the Emperor is going to birth the Imperial Cult - the most harmful, joyless, restrictive religion of Mankind's history - and subjugate the entire race to it. Perhaps we can't say empirically (huh huh) that he planned it that way - but I take the Traitor Legions view that THAT was his intention all along. Ho hum, well, Tzeentch is a jolly rogue isn't he. "Snide teenage goth vs aspergic born again Christian" vibe aside, I have to admire this for really trying to fuck with the Big Questions. Some shit that the haters would not expect from BL/WH40K affiliated fiction, for sure. Also, I liked the glimpse we got of the Unification Age here; it makes sense that McNeill shoved some Thunder Warriors into Outcast Dead - he uses them very well here, and they're barely glimpsed. For the sake of argument, for trying something different, and for the memorable, great moments in here (the Emperor sniping "Finally, a spirit I can believe in" when given a glass of liquor is a real keeper). I'm giving this 8/10.

After Desh'ea: Well, THAT title sounds like a 90s R&B singer... haha. I love After Desh'ea, it's actually one of my favourite short stories in the whole series and probably the moment (since I read Tales Of Heresy pretty early on) that convinced me I was down for the HH long haul and wouldn't just pick up the Abnett books as they were released.

Let's face it, the World Eaters could be the most widely/easily stereotyped legion in all the Chaos lore. I'll admit I don't own ALL the fluff, but my second/third edition run of White Dwarfs and Codexes has a dearth of Khornates doing anything but howling "Blood for the Blood God!" and splitting a motherfucker's head with a chain-axe. (Apart from that weird Kharn story I read once where his entire troupe of Berserkers get corrupted by a Slaaneshi Chaos Lord and get a little bit fey before becoming extremely dead.) GW have kind of written themselves into a corner with these guys; they have no Librarians, no real 'ranged war' capacity, and no tactics beyond getting out of the drop pod, thumbing the 'on' switch on the chain-axe/sword/glaive/mace/gunblade and running towards the enemy while yelling "FUUUUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUU" in some form. And yet here we get Angron doing an impression of a sissy-ass nobleman, Angron discussing tactics and, goddamnit, Angron showing actual human emotions beyond RAGE. Admittedly, it is mostly rage - this guy was created 28,000 years too late to become the world's best 'tough guy hardcore band frontman'. But we also see extreme vulnerability here, and how the Emperor's retrieval of his 12th son may have completely damned him; not only did it result in everyone Angron cared about dying, but he has no real way of comprehending a being more powerful than himself and - if he wasn't critically fucked in the mental before this - he sure as shit is now. Guess I always pictured The Red Angel as constantly yelping monosyllabic KILL KILL SHOOT SHOOT BLOOD BLOOD WHOOP WHOOP like some gigantic superhuman Waka Flocka Flame... yet this story shows him as someone who could be articulate and poetic, but finds it horrendously difficult to follow the thread of his own thoughts since the Butchers' Nails implanted in his head won't give him peace. I remember reading an Amazon review that said this entire story was kind of pointless "since we all know Angron was crazy" - well, that's fair enough, but with that attitude why bother reading HH books at all? We all know what happened anyway, right, in vague terms, so why expand on them...?

'After Desh'ea' does what I never thought any story could do: it humanises Angron and Kharn. I was pretty much expecting a meeting of these guys to involve them smashing their foreheads together howling "SHHHYYYEAHHHH" while Pantera played in the background, and sure there is some of that, but there's also pathos, humour and, well, the tragedy of seeing Kharn when he was still partially sane.
Like 'The Last Church', 'After Desh'ea' also adds to the 'is the Emperor a giant chode?' query: when he met Angron face to face, why did he permit someone so powerful, yet clearly and irrevocably broken to not only continue existing but twist a whole fucking legion of superhuman warriors to his every whim...? Of all the primarchs save perhaps Night Haunter, Angron is the one who so clearly needed to be fucking euthanised, and the fact the Emperor (who is no fool) was cool with giving them this much power, just shows (IMO) that he wanted some 'deniable assets' he could wipe out quietly once they'd done his dirtiest work. But hey, I'm kind of glad that didn't happen, since we have this and Betrayer as a result (I still haven't read that one tbf, but "Angron + Lorgar + AD-B" is unlikely to = shitty; I kind of hope he's continued at least some of Farrer's ideas).

Unfortunately, author Matthew Farrer doesn't seem to have tackled any other HH stories, or be in line for any. I know that the Index Astartes dealt with a lot of the 'introduction moments' when a primarch met the Emperor and their legion - and they did it very well - but I want MORE STORIES LIKE THIS. Goddamn. I give this motherfucker 9/10, goddamnit, and ONLY BARELY does it escape 10/10. GRRRRRR!

A THRILLING CONCLUSION: So is there an overreaching theme to Tales Of Heresy? Well, not really, beyond the, well, heresy. There's not really a common time-period, Astartes legion, or scheme uniting these stories. Perhaps the 'a world needs to be brought to compliance, but some fuck shit occurs' motif could be called a "theme" if were were being generous. Some stories here are kind of shitty, some are great, some are like nothing that had come before (or sometimes since) in HH and some seem like just more of the same (Wolf At The Door and Scions Of The Storm really shouldn't have been right next to each other). In other words, it's your common/garden anthology. As a book, this gets 7/10 from me. I thoroughly recommend it; just don't make it your very first purchase unless you already know at least the basic 'overview' of the Horus Heresy.

New to PurpleHeresy? Head on over to the index page to see a more chronological list of the Horus Heresy reviews on this blog.