#Horus rising book review series#
TL dr: It has flaws, it's a good book, but not a great introduction to a series IMO.
If you want to get into the Horus Heresy series, read it (aside from setting up the setting and characters, it's just a general nice read to ease into HH) but tbh I haven't read any of the other HH's to compare it to and frankly I'm worried with how "bad" I've heard it gets. That said, the writing itself is superb, the plot does make sense (I just found it lacking IMO), quite a few of the characters are strong (just there's a lot of them) in that I can still remember minor characters like the drunk Remembrancer after a year (usually I forget absolutely minor characters in a month) and like I said it is one of the better "Show the world of 40k 30k" novels. That said, the problems with it is it's fairly large cast 3 Primarchs, 16 Luna Wolves, 5 between Blood Angels, Emp's Children and Word Bearers, 4 Imperial Army personnel and 9 civilians, for a grand total of 33 characters that are given at least some attention in one way or another I found myself flicking to the Cast of Characters more than once to remember who was who and what they did.įor me the other major problem was the lack of "anything happening", it felt more like a prequel to me than an actual start of a series (it builds, but no actual Heresy stuff, a little Chaos but nothing Heresy-related yet). I'll admit, it's better than most 40k books in that there's actually characterization, a linear plot and doesn't just go for battle-porn.