Fear to Tread

Fear to Tread by James Swallow is the twenty-first installment in the Horus Heresy series. It follows the Blood Angels Legion as they fall into a trap set by Warmaster Horus and find themselves fighting for their survival against daemons without and within in the blighted Signus Cluster.

The novel opens slowly as Swallow takes his time introducing each of the main characters and gathering them together, and the beginning feels like it could have been shorter. The prologue reveals that in the thirtieth millennium the Red Thirst is a dark secret among the Blood Angels that only Sanguinius and his closest advisers know of, a secret that Horus manages to discover and swears to keep. In the story proper, after Horus has fallen to Chaos, he uses the promise of a cure to lure Sanguinius and his Legion into the Signus Cluster, where the human population has been wiped out by daemons and the entire system turned into an enormous trap. The action picks up as the Blood Angels explore Signus, encountering such disturbing phenomena as the eight-pointed star forming in the crust of a burned planet and a living city that attacks the Astartes sent to investigate it. Hard-to-forget images of fiery canyons forming the Chaos sigil in the face of a planet, streets folding over on themselves to crush Space Marines and mountains hurled into space as projectiles mark the Blood Angel's progression through the system, but the marines themselves remain frustratingly ignorant of the nature of the threat until the last possible moment. The Blood Angels' unwillingness to recognise their attackers as daemons and ignorance of the Red Thirst mark this out as a Heresy story rather than a 40K one, but both beliefs are shattered by the novel's end as the Legion undergo a profound change on the hellish plains of Signus Prime.

One of the more interesting facets of this story is the disunity between the factions of traitors working against the Blood Angels. Erebus and the Slaaneshi daemon Kyriss have painstakingly set things up so that Sanguinius will fall to Chaos, but Horus sees Sanguinius as a potential threat to his leadership and colludes with the Bloodthirster Ka'Bandha to kill him instead. Thankfully for the loyalists neither of these things happen. The large amounts of set-up pay off in the final quarter of the novel, which is solid battle scenes as the Blood Angels succumb to the Red Thirst and slaughter an army of daemons, broken up slightly by one Librarian's journey into his comatose primarch's mind during which he, and we readers, are treated to glimpses of the future as it could possibly play out for Sanguinius. The best scene in a novel filled with great scenes comes when Sanguinius recovers and engages Ka'Bandha in single combat, tearing the Bloodthirster's wing off with the line 'only angels may fly' before casting the daemon into a pit of fire.

Fear to Tread is not easy going; it takes its time setting up then pays off in one of the longest most brutal battle scenes in the entire series. The novel has its problems, but they are outweighed by spectacular imagery, strong themes and an epic climax. Fear to Tread earned the 13th spot upon the New York Times bestseller's list upon its release and is an excellent contribution to the Heresy series.