I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy in preparation to start the sub-series Siege of Terra, and this is my review of Slaves to Darkness , book 51 in the series. By now, the traitor legions are getting awfully close to Holy Terra, but Horus himself is mortally wounded. Again. Still.
Things look bad for Horus. He is, very ironically (but only if you know the future), sitting around on a throne in a near-catatonic state. The primarchs loyal to him each respond to this differently, and that's the plot of this book. Or rather, those are the plots of this book.
This book is really three or four stories.
First of all, Perturabo (primarch of the Iron Warriors) is gathering the forces of the traitor legions so they can all go attack Terra together.
Also, Mortarion (primarch of the Death Guard) is racing forward to clear the path to Terra.
In the mean time, Lorgar (primarch of the Word Bearers) is plotting to take Horus's place. After all, Horus is dying and most of the traitor primarchs who would normally answer to him have literally become daemons themselves. In Lorgar's view, the Warmaster is no longer relevant or worthy. Ostensibly to gather more support, but secretly to find someone capable of assassinating Horus, Lorgar and Angron and Layak get Actaea, the blind and mysterious Confessor, to lead them through the Webway into the realm of Slaanesh. There, they find Fulgrim (primarch of the Emperor's Children), and recruit him. Or at least, they try to recruit him. He's pretty distracted by being a Slaanesh daemon now, and just doesn't care a whole lot about petty human and superhuman politics.
If that's enough plot threads, Maloghurst (Horus's faithful Equerry) starts wandering around in the Warp in an attempt to contact Horus. He binds the daemon Amarok to his service, which is pretty amazing, and eventually succeeds in reviving Horus just before the exciting end of the book.
There are a lot of really cool moments in this book.
Entering the Webway with Actaea is amazing. You don't know what's real, you're not allowed to look back, you're utterly lost but direction doesn't matter anyway, and you end up chatting to daemons. It's disorienting and disconcerting.
Actaea herself is endlessly intriguing. She's too smart to be overtly coy, but she's obviously not who she says she is, and she appears to be playing her own game in all of this. She's a really exciting character.
Fulgrim, on the other hand, doesn't really work for me in this one. He's totally given in to Slaanesh at this point, so he slithers around cooing and purring at people in a sort of parody of one of those I'm-so-sexy-but-I'm-also-a-serial-killer type characters in a bad crime film. I found him very tiring.
To be fair, though, that may have been what the author intended. Sure, I think Fulgrim is a little too over the top, but I admire how unique the characters within the chaos legions are. I have no reason to expect anything less from Black Library authors, but you can imagine characters like Actaea and Fulgrim and Lorgar being written as generic psychopaths. Instead, they're all totally unique from one another, with personalities and motivations all their own.
Also, there's Sota-Nul, a member of the Dark Mechanicum. She's cool, mostly because she's essentially cosplaying as a mechanical arachnid, and of course she's got that lofty [Dark] Mechanicus attitude. I'm partial to Adeptus Mechanicus, so I'm mentioning her purely on account of her affiliation.
This book has two settings. You're either on a weird vision quest through the Webway or the Warp, or you're in the heat of heart-pounding battle. And both are equally fascinating. It strikes a great balance.
The two battles that really stand out is the Jaghatai Khan confrontation, and the Blood Angels ship battle. There are probably more, or maybe not. Even if there are only two real confrontations, they both made an impression on me, and after the book had ended those were two scenes that stuck in my memory.
There's one real problem with Slaves to Darkness, and it's so bad that I want to physically deface the book. For whatever reason, the author or the editor or somebody decided to cut back and forth between storylines, usually several times each chapter. It was almost certainly meant to ramp up tension, but its effect is completely the opposite. You can't keep track of what's going on, who's where, what time it is, or why anything is even happening. Just when a story is getting good, the book cuts away to a different story.
On paper (so to speak) I can imagine this seemed like a reasonable idea. I'm not sure it's entirely about tension, either. Were the stories told in individual sections, this book would probably look like a collection of short stories.
Plus there's the problem of getting all the characters to converge for the final few scenes. You can have several "books" within one volume, but then what happens at the end of each one, when the end is that all the major players end up in a room together to assassinate or support Horus? I guess you could end each book with some standard phrase or story beat, so that it becomes apparent to the readers that we're "pausing" so we can start back at the beginning for the next small story. Then you resume the big story once all the small ones have been told up to the same point.
It obviously gets messy, so I don't know that there's an easy answer. But I think part of the answer is to not cut so often. I don't know why it doesn't work in this book when it clearly works in movies. Maybe there's just too much going on.
That's the only issue I had with the book, but I do feel like I'll need to re-read it again some time to get it all straight in my memory.
I enjoyed this story. It was fascinating to see loyalties shift, interesting to see the cost of chaos, and exciting to see the story nearing its inevitable, eventual, confrontation. In a way, I think it was actually more exciting than it deserves to be. Most of the book is people reacting to Horus apparently being on his deathbed, and a lot of it takes place in Webway or in the Warp or in Horus's comatose memories. That doesn't sound exciting. But don't let that fool you. It's very exciting, and there are a lot of characters here that you've been (presumably, if you're reading this) invested in for at least 50 books.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.