Horus Rising

Horus Rising by Dan Abnett is the first installment in the Horus Heresy series. It is also the first part of the series' opening trilogy, which chronicles the events leading to, during and immediately after Horus's fall to Chaos.

The Horus Heresy series is Black Library's flagship franchise. To date it spans thirty-three novels and anthologies, as well as numerous other short stories, novellas, e-shorts, audio dramas, supplementary rulebooks and inscriptions hidden inside dust jackets. It has made the New York Times bestsellers list on multiple occasions and launched its own subset of the tabletop war-game to which it owes its genesis. It is hard to imagine Rick Priestley believing that so much would come from the few lines he included in the earliest codexes to explain the origin of the feud between two of his game's main factions. Today the Horus Heresy is one of the most prominent facets of Warhammer, and yet it had to start somewhere, with a few of Black Library's established authors sitting down and deciding to have a go at chronicling the origins of the ten-millennia civil war that defines the Warhammer setting. The result was plans for a trilogy of novels that would explain how it all began. The result was Horus Rising.

If you are reading this blog I assume that you are familiar with the Horus Heresy, but I would like you to imagine for a moment that you aren't. Imagine everything you know about the backstory of Warhammer has come from battered issues of White Dwarf loaned from local libraries and the war-cries shouted by the tiny digital figures in Dawn of War. Imagine you are scanning the shelves in a bookstore that no longer exists and spot the first book in an intriguing-looking series. Imagine you skim over the dramatis personae and, turning the page, are met with this:

'I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor.'

With its very opening line, Horus Rising tells us that it is the start of something vast and sweeping, and that the character speaking these words at its very beginning must surely be there to witness its very end. Of all Black Library's authors Dan Abnett is the one who most brings the setting to life through the depth of his world-building and richness of detail, and in Horus Rising he creates a galaxy at the height of a Great Crusade to reunify the lost colonies of Man after the terrible Age of Strife. The Horus Heresy is a story about Space Marines, but Abnett also provides human perspective through the eyes of various remembrancers sent to chronicle the Great Crusade through art. The story begins on a planet designated Sixty-Three Nineteen, where the Luna Wolves Sixteenth Legion Astartes and their primarch Horus fight a battle written by the sheer genius of Dan Abnett to be a parable for the Siege of Terra. The main protagonist is Garviel Loken, an honourable Astartes raised the ranks of the Mournival, Horus's informal advisory council, to replace a former member slain by underhand foes. Level-headed and dutiful, Loken embraces the Emperor's secular creed but has his faith shaken by the daemonic possession of an underling and cares enough about the truth to seek answers with Kyril Sindermann, an ageing human iterator who acts as his mentor, and Ignace Karkasy, a drunken but honest poet whom he takes under his wing. As the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet moves across the stars battling giant insectoid beasts and encountering alien cultures Loken recounts his experiences to documentarist Mersadie Oliton, and together she and Karkasy keep an eye on their friend Euphrati Keeler who, after witnessing the daemonic horror that was once Loken's sergeant, turns to forbidden worship of the Emperor to find solace. 

Horus Rising is not drop your bolter and praise the Emperor fantastic. The overall plot is somewhat disjointed, and there are one too many scenes where characters scoff at the possibility of Horus's turning on the Emperor or the Space Marine Legions fighting each other. We get it, it's funny because it does happen. That said, it is only the first part of a trilogy, and it does a masterful job of introducing the setting and starting plot threads that will be resolved with interest later. While it ends with no more revealed from the overall plot than the identity of our first villain, Horus Rising is a quality novel that's true value lies not in its own story, but in the story it begins.

Check back for my next post, in which I continue the review of the opening trilogy with Graham McNeill's False Gods.