The Talon of Horus by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Review & Discussion

[Fantomex]

Well now.
Well, well, well.
This is something decidedly exciting to write about.

At this time, I'd assume that most, if not all of the lucky 1500 who jumped rabidly at the chance to get their paws on a copy of this book have received theirs, and a substantial number of those will have already ploughed through it like a dog eating hot chips.

I chose a more sedate route, not limiting myself to an allotted amount per day or whatnot, but rather taking it up when I could truly relax and focus upon the book without distraction.

So.

I'll do a spoiler-free review of The Talon Of Horus first, and add some spoiler-based chatter in a post later, I'd not want to ruin anything for those devoted fans who are waiting until the regular version comes out. Amongst the spoiler post, I'll also review and talk about The Wonderworker, the short story only to be featured in this version and never again printed.

I won't give away some of the main plot points, just the single most prudent and most obvious one. Oh, will there be more to discover for yourselves. OOOOOOH..

Anyway, without further ado, my review.


...On Chaos

The Sons of Horus are a spent force, depleted, dying, being soundly crushed by all and sundry during the Legion Wars in the Eye of Terror. This is seen in different ways by different souls, but the end result is the same, the other Legions who allied themselves with Horus consider it the fault of his own sons that their war against the Emperor was a failure. The constant infighting and splintering into warbands of the Legions is becoming a situation of mutually-assured destruction.

Something must change.

The book is told from a purely first-person viewpoint, that of Iskandar Khayon, Sorcerer of the Thousand Sons.
Khayon, as many of Aaron's traitor legionnaires tend to be, is a breed apart from other astartes.
Absent is the slavering "GRR KILL HATRED INSANITY" so typically espoused by some regardless of Legion, as also is in his own words, the "autism from the outside" nullity and lack of social understanding so often seen in the more homogenised post-heresy/current era 40k loyalist astartes' personalities. That's mental conditioning for you.
If you enjoyed the more verbose and characterised members of First Claw in his Night Lords series, then you will feel very much at home here.
There is plenty of individuality, witty interaction, and very quotable lines, a burgeoning trademark of Aaron's writing. It is enjoyable to a ridiculous degree.

As a parallel to that series, you should do well to remember that this is a time far enough from the Horus Heresy for the Imperium-at-large to have forgotten a good deal of that era and allowed it to fall into degraded rumour and legend, but also far from the point at the 13th Black Crusade with the panoplies of war materiel and raw might of Chaos behind it.
These are not aged, 10,000 year-old astartes succumbing to taint, this is the first fledgling steps of a small group on the road to the Long War, the very foundation of what will become the most dire threat to the Imperium in all time.
Look at the group as the brutal club or rock which will gradually be supplanted with the wooden spear, then the sword, then the gun.
They are the beginning of a long end. Refinement and progress will always take time.

Having said that, the comparatively small number of characters for the book coming from a quite recognisably wide range of sources is incredibly refreshing.
A minor complaint I would level at some books in the Horus Heresy series is the fatigue at being given a Dramatis Personae of several dozen fairly standard and disposable similarly-named line officers all of a singular Legion that can be easily forgotten and interchanged without much disruption.
That is not felt here.

We have only two non-rubricae Thousand Sons aboard Khayons ship, Khayon himself and Ashur-Kai Qezremah, naturally both sorcerers. As events unfold, they find themselves allied with a returning Sons of Horus character from the Horus Heresy, Falkus Kibre, as well as a warband of World Eaters led by new character Lheorvine Ukris (you will enjoy him greatly), and another returning character from the Emperors Children, Telemachon Lyras. (You will possibly recognise Telemachon and Khayon from the Index Astartes: Death Company ebook)

The quest? To seek out the power with which to wage their own wars on their own terms, rather than, as many of the traitors have been doing, "just surviving".
They seek the Vengeful Spirit.

As those who follow Aaron's social media output and blog would have heard, Abaddon himself doesn't arrive on the scene until much later into the story.
And arrive he does, a man apart from both the Heresy-era captain and the M41 Despoiler, this is a character who has become introspective, reflective, scholarly in pursuits esoteric, alien, unfathomable, grounded, warlike, theoretical and unpredictable.

Much like Horus before him, Abaddon has done thing his own way in the downtime after the Heresy. The stern Captain you knew before is no more. Here stands a different man with a very different plan. But he needs help, which is where Khayon comes in.

The book itself is not all-action bolter porn, as some have waggishly accused other writers of in the past. Much like the Night Lords books and the Grey Knights novel, Aaron knows when to drop in the action and it never misses a beat, but as with his other brilliant books, fighting is used sparingly.
In its place there lies exposition, story, plot, pace, a deepening fascination for the heretofore-unknown times between the Heresy and the Long War.

This book will shock and educate you.

I confess, I was a disbeliever in Abaddon, and a disbeliever in the Black Legion. I can see how this came about, there has not been much in the way of traitor victory written about in the Black Library, and the codexes only have a finite amount of space for adding background about anyone, so they can't be faulted for that.
Plus, the whole deal of the codexes is that they're meant to have a certain level of bias and apocryphal confusion inherent, history being written by victors and all that jazz.

But yes, I thought Abaddon was just a chump, a two-bit punk masquerading as a badass but ultimately incompetent. But I'm wrong. It's because nobody has tackled the important stuff like this before.

There is very, very little written about any of the Black Crusades, and because we haven't seen the burst bodies and scorched planets and trophies taken from these immense spanning conflicts, we tend to underestimate them.

Hell, some of these crusades have possibly lasted for longer than the entire Horus Heresy.
Yeah, just let that sink in for a moment.

The Black Crusades could individually stand to extinguish just as many human lives, this isn't just a series of mostly Astartes-based conflicts like the Heresy any more.
Cadia surviving is no longer the counter to weigh the impact of a crusade against. It's a blip. A mote of dust in what will inevitably become a hurricane.

But before I get carried away, I go now, to sum up.

Man, there's so much I could say about this book, I could gush effusively about the lore revealed, the nature of Chaos and the warp. I've talked about plenty, but I've left the bulk of it out. It's that rich.

You will see the birth of daemons. You see the variations amongst daemonology and the innumerable potential avenues of exploration this opens up. You learn the fate of fabled stories and tales of old. You learn of relics, legends, and the unseen. You learn of the Astronomicon and how it interacts with the Eye of Terror. You will see the most awesome use of telekinesis I think has ever been written about.

You witness the birth of the Black Legion.

You will not regret it.

10/10.
Buy this book. Now. Yesterday. Damn, transmute the laws of the universe and get a copy.
If you see Aaron, shake his hand, buy him a beer, bow before him and offer up your firstborn child. It's worth it.

[clively]

I confess, I was a disbeliever in Abaddon, and a disbeliever in the Black Legion. I can see how this came about, there has not been much in the way of traitor victory written about in the Black Library, and the codexes only have a finite amount of space for adding background about anyone, so they can't be faulted for that.
Plus, the whole deal of the codexes is that they're meant to have a certain level of bias and apocryphal confusion inherent, history being written by victors and all that jazz.

But yes, I thought Abaddon was just a chump, a two-bit punk masquerading as a badass but ultimately incompetent. But I'm wrong. It's because nobody has tackled the important stuff like this before.

Interesting. Given the stuff published in the Black Legion supplement, most people should have figured out that the previous 12 crusades were anything but a failure on Abaddon's part. In each one he had a major objective which he successfully completed. Maybe you should stop paying attention to the IoM's spin on things...

[Gridlock]

One thing i noticed in the story was that little titbit saying: "There are things in the Webway, that even the never born fears".
That got me thinking okay what in the world could be so scary that even a demon would fear it?
Also perhaps since the Webway was made by the old ones and W40k and WF shears much of the same fluff, they didn´t just use it to travel in this universe but other dimensions too.
That would give credence to the fact that when the Webway broke during the fall of the Eldar it wasn´t just demons from the warp that came through the cracks and holes, they where just the most visible and recognisable ones.

Perhaps other things from other dimensions came through, things that make even the biggest and baddest demon pale in comparison.