You know, I really like Space Marines, but for a reason that I don’t see mentioned often as a plus.
For those not familiar, Space Marines are genetically engineered humans. They take kids still in their puberty and surgically implant them with “Gene Seeds” that start the process of turning them into the giant mascots of the franchise. But it’s not only size, the Space Marines have extra organs like an extra heart, glands that let their wounds close faster, a shell in their rib cage that lets them interface with their armor and so on. After this they get effectively brainwashed and/or mind-wiped into being fit for service.
So we have hulking monsters trained in inhuman conditions and equipped with top of the line weaponry, these, however, are also children that never had a normal life and were taken away before they could mature in any normal way.
If the Imperial Guard is a satire of both the industrial machine and the military industrial complex where any problem can be solved by throwing enough bodies at it, the Space Marines are a satire of the ideals that the military is based on.
To me, the best Space Marine stories aren’t the ones where they act cool and above everyone else, but the ones that reveal how this stunted development straight into warmongering results in superhuman manchildren.
This book, shows this perfectly through its main events.
The core quote of this one is “I was there when Horus fell”. Which aside from being another on the nose quote, this one is also literal because it refers to Horus being mortally wounded. It’s also not a quote you see elsewhere for good reason I’ll explain later.
Ever since the last book, Horus and many of his children have had doubts about the way the world (err… galaxy) was changing. They were fighting for humans that would complain about them on a whim and “didn’t get it”, the glorious campaigns of conquest of the start of the crusade were slowing down, that whole “council of Terra” nonsense was proving more and more annoying, and also all of the victories were made in the name of the Emperor, an emepror holed up doing god knows what while Horus barely got any recognition, and any that he did get would by proxy go to his dad.
And so, during a war council, Erebus of the Word Bearers interrupts Horus’ speech to tell him that the governor of the moon of Davin, someone that Horus considered a good friend, has declared the moon independent from the Imperium, and also that Horus is a bitch, a basic bitch at that, sending Horus into a blind rage to get revenge… and also quell the rebellion while at it, I guess.
It’s a very cavalier and obvious show of Erebus just egging on Horus’ hurt pride that would come accross as patronizing to the reader… if that wasn’t the whole point. After the whole thing, Ignace Karkasy, a poet that Gaviel Loken put under his care because Karkasy is a piece of shit that will always be blunt about the truth, lives up to his role and explains to Loken step by step how Erebus egged Horus to be angry, likening it to a very cheap performance that amateur actors wouldn’t be caught dead trying to push.
So they go to quell the rebellion and Horus faces his old friend, now corrupted by “Nurgleth”, he’s also fighting Horus with the blade that was stolen by the Interex, and the moment he said Horus’ name to it he fought with singleminded resolve, possesed by the blade. Horus was only glanced by a slash, but that was all that was needed.
This is where the earlier quote comes from. When they came back, Horus fell unconscious, everyone panicked until Loken was the first one to not flail like crazy and called for a doctor. In their rush to get him to the medical bay, the Space Marines trampled on many civilians indiscriminately, blinded by the anguish that their dad was in critical condition.
It’s a harrowing sequence of events, Horus wasn’t dying like a warrior, he was convalescing and fading away, Abaddon, one of his generals, was more concerned with punching the doctors for not saving him faster than doing anything. Loken was, again, the only one with any semblance of maturity and decided to, if nothing else, try to find the weapon to get a cure.
It’s then that Erebus comes in and, in usual cult leader fashion, offers a “solution” to the problems of emotionally vulnerable people, sending Horus to Chaos cultists that could possibly save him. And in a fun reflection of what’s to come, half of Horus’ Mournival take the side of the solution that Erebus proposed, while the other half was of the mind that, as regrettable as it was, the solution was worse.
While in the “treatment”, Horus is sent to some warp dimension where Erebus (disguised as Sejanus, the Mournival member that died in the first book) shows him visions of a future where the Emperor is venerated as a God, and worse of all, Horus and half of his brothers are nowhere to be seen.
Magnus, another of Horus’ borthers tries to warn him despite breaking his mandate to not use magic by doing so, and Erebus’ mask slips, making Horus angered that even now he’s just being used by others that only care about what they can get out of him.
After Horus’ recovery, they encounter another human offshoot, the Auretian Technocracy, in events clearly meant to mirror the encounter with the Interex in the last book. But unlike last time, where the peace talks broke down by Erebus doing something behind everyone’s backs, here Horus is the one to initiate the war to get the technology of the Auretians.
Oh yeah, while all of that was happening, the humans didn’t take kindly to being stomped on, with one of the directors of the expedition demanding justice for the affront.
And also in the midst of all this Kyril Sindermann (effectively Loken’s grandpa role-wise) accidentally summons a demon while trying to decipher the writings on Erebus’ body, which then results in Euphrati Keeler (one of the rememberancers from the first book and one of the first main converts into the cult of the Emperor) banishing it back into hell with… effectively a miracle, falling unconscious afterwards.
The ending of this book is one of my favorites.
Horus has decided to take radical actions, to secede from his dad, and obviously some dissenting voices need to be hushed.
That quote I mentioned all the way back? It’s from Petronella Vivar, she debuted in this book as Horus’ personal remembrancer, and she was coming up with it after Horus spilled out all his (emotional) guts on his death bed. Horus comes to visit her and says that sadly, all of that will never be published and that Petronella knows too much. She’s smart enough to catch the implication of it and is rightfully scared for her life, but Horus tries to calm her down, putting a hand on her shoulder…
…and snapping her neck with a casual flick of the wrist.
I love the whole scene (and many moments in this book, really) because as maximallist as 40k is by nature, you can talk about how Space Marines can lift rubble like it’s styrofoam packaging all you want, but being able to snap someone’s neck with no effort that way is not only more visceral but more creepy and personal.
Oh and Karkasy (the piece of shit poet) was choked to death and made to look like a suicide by Petronella’s Manservant/Concubine because Horus told him once that he was cool and now MAggard is ready to die (and kill) for him.
While this book isn’t hard to read as a standalone, it was clearly made deliberately to mirror Horus Rising. In fact, it’s such a deliberate mirror that if I ever bothered to explain the very VERY small nags I have with Abnett’s style I could just use these two books.
Without getting too derailed, a couple of examples that come to mind are how Abnett is better at idle banter, but McNeil keeps the pace going in conversations. How Abnett’s writing can disorient you when changing scenes (spoilers: the Eisenhorn novels are particularly notorious with this) but this book flows like a singular event even when many things are happening in parallel…
You even have two ominous radio transmissions by demons to compare!
It’s gonna be interesting to compare all of this with the third book, since those three are meant to be seen as a singular trilogy where each book is by a different author.