A book featuring the Emperor by Aaron Dembski-Bowden. That sentence is enough to make Warhammer fans drool. The Master of Mankind promised to give us two things: war in the Webway, and a POV from Big E. It gave us both, but in constrained, disappointing ways.
I'll start with the big one. The main draw of The Master of Mankind was that it would give us a glimpse inside the Emperor's head. It gave us several, and all were fascinating, but they also came with the usual catch: all perceptions of the Emperor are subjective. Whether he is sharing his 'memories' with a Custodian Guard or consulting Arkhan Land on Angron's condition, the Emperor is as those speaking to him wish him to be. It's a neat way of handling the Emperor without actually giving readers any hard facts about him. We probably shouldn't have expected anything different, but it's a disappointment nonetheless.
The War in the Webway aspect of TMoM offers a different kind of disappointment. The struggle of the Emperor's forces to hold back the tide of daemons trying to invade the Imperial Palace is the driving force of the plot, but the actual battle gets less page time than it should. In fact, most of the first three-quarters of the book are devoted to a slow accretion of loyalist dregs gathered for a battle that takes far too long to come. When it comes it is everything you could possibly want out of the Emperor wading through an army of daemons, but it doesn't quite justify the long slog to get there.
The Master of Mankind is excellently written and offers some great new characters (see the aforementioned Arkhan Land), but in terms of plot it has little more to offer than some scheming amongst the Mechanicum. It is a book given over to concept above content, that reaches for greatness but doesn't live up to its potential. It is a well-presented exercise in what could have been.
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