The End And The Death: Volume I (The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra Book 8)

Product Information

The Emperor and Malcador discovered Malcador could use the Throne and not immediately die some time after first finding it, so Malcador takes the throne while The Emperor goes to meet Horus. Malcador dumps all of his final instructions and thoughts out onto his chosen agents telepathically before sitting the throne The Emperor lives and steps into the shadows as leader of the perpetuals. He assumed that suppressing religion would suppress Chaos. The strategy failed. He doesn’t give up on His vision. He re-strategises on how humanity can conquer the universe and free themselves from warp travel/the taint of Chaos. It takes 10,000 years but in 40k the Emperor is ready for another great crusade. A perfectly fine novel that could have used some significant editing and the surgical removal of several of the sub plots that primarily serve to ensure everyone’s favourite characters are mentioned at least once. There’s definitely a really strong Warhammer novel in there somewhere, and if the viewpoint characters had been restricted to Loken, Corswain, Sindermann, Malcador, Horus, Sanguinius and Oll we might have found it. Instead the tour round minor characters detracted severely from the pace of the novel. “Oh, here we go, Fafnir Ran is killing things again” was not the enduring takeaway I expected after Johnathan Keble (who puts in the usual hard yards as the audiobook narrator) spoke his last. These scenes would be better left to a short story compilation than trying to squeeze them into a mainline novel.

ToW: There’s a real sense of scale to some of the scenes in here – things like the sheer size, grandeur and esoteric nature of the Palace, the terrible nature of what the traitors have turned into and how it affects the loyalists – and it feels like some of the language you use throughout the book deliberately emphasises that. Was it a deliberate choice to do that, to try and reinforce some of these ideas through language and word choice?Always start with a compliment; Jonathan Keeble is excellent, and I enjoy his performance every time. His characters and tone are consistent and recognisable, and the quality of his recording is clear and precise. Good job! So what is it about? “It’s the final hours of the Siege, the confrontation between the Emperor and Horus, which is immense. And it’s also obviously the fallout of all the other major events that are going on at the time. It’s the end of the Heresy era and the beginning is something new. There is a sense of history, pivoting in the most dramatic sense, and a lot of very important loose ends come together.”

It starts great and gets faster and better untile second half of third part. Then it hits breaks. Story slows down as if Dan realized that there must be seconde book.

Table of Contents

The plots that move forward are interesting and occasionally great. Sanguinius has a nicely done Virgil and Dante interlude before facing up to Horus in the great duel, which is done extremely well and worked to a satisfyingly gruesome end. We know Sanguinius has to die, and we know how he dies, but it’s still a fight worth reading about, even if you’re trying to work out exactly which hit Sanguinius gets in is “THE” hit. Dorn gets some of the most interesting sections of the book that play with the bounds of the warp in interesting ways. Valdor gets his setup for another series, and I can’t begrudge him, or Dan, that opportunity. Even the Perpetual gang start doing something interesting. The content that means something in this book is great – but it’s also thin. Standard BL novel sized, at most.