Angron: The Red Angel (Warhammer 40,000)

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I think it’s their valiant and futile attempts to overcome the burning ball of rage that is Angron, are the high points of the novel. Every character within this story (with the exception of one which I will speak of later) has a very interesting arc and I never wanted to skip one character’s progression in favor of another. The rest of it focuses solidly, absolutely on several different portrayals of the World Eaters past, present and future without leaning hard on 'big names'.

A deeper character study of Angron is something I think I would have enjoyed more (and is possibly what his Horus Heresy-era novel is more in line with) but given what little I know about the man, perhaps it is wise to keep him off the page for as long as Guymer does. THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES and the names of the characters, items, events and places therein are trademarks of The Saul Zaentz Company d/b/a Middle-earth Enterprises under license to New Line Productions, Inc.Because it felt like the true point of this book was to make you understand how the nails feel and operate. They could have been larger than life characters, but boiled down as they are to big, stompy, angry men, they sort of blur into one. I think my only gripe is the number of Sarrin ex machina, and it's entirely reasonable how it happens, I just didn't find it narratively compelling all the time (and it does happen rather a lot). Naturally, Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Betrayer was a big part of my preparation, being the seminal Horus Heresy World Eaters novel.

David: All of the veterans of the Long War have degraded since their time in M31, but you’d be hard-pushed to say any have fallen as far as the World Eaters.They live in a wholly different world than the rest of the Imperium and Guymer lays it all out in this book. The problem is that, swept up as they are in Angron’s orbit, everyone else in the book feels very similar. So we learn quite a bit about the World eaters and Angron is left to his entry in the Primarchs serie. Half a galaxy away, Graucis Telomane of the Grey Knights has been readying himself for this day, and plans six centuries in the making are finally set in motion – plans that will see the eradication of the Emperor’s greatest mistake once and for all.

I fully admit that I am biased, as Angron and the World Eaters are my favorite primarch and legion respectively. In a way, it’s strange that I’m so happy jumping on board at the end of the story rather than climbing on at the beginning with so many others. But also the breadth of work across the Horus Heresy series, as lots of authors have written about the Primarchs in lots of different situations, and the reading I did for both books put me in a good place to continue Angron’s story. That became one of my favourite parts – in another world, I could have written a novel about that story alone! Parts are easy enough to follow, others made me question whether the intention was to give the reader an impression of how the butchers nails feel.Equally consumed by Angron’s mere existence, they at least have different ideology to the rest of the cast. The characters tended to blend together as they were almost all very similar, and I found myself losing interest as the story went on. For taste, the best scene in the book is a Heresy-era World Eater realising how Angron has been actively screwing over the Legion for literally millennia.

David: Yes, especially Gorgon of Medusa , as that was also more about the Iron Hands around Ferrus Manus than the man himself, and how he affects those he leads. They’re more like an overwhelming destructive force, so rather than presenting scenes from his point of view, to ruminate on his wants and ambitions, it’s more about characters experiencing him, and how his presence affects their own lives. Knowing that this is but a prelude to what sounds like some really galaxy shaking events in Angron's Arks of Omen book does make me want to know the fates of the named survivors of this book as well. My interest dipped a few times, but that might have been my mood more than any fault of what Guymer wrote.

He is wholly animalistic, wholly driven by Khorne, and there is nothing left of the Primarch that once was. You want the inside scoop on a Traitor Legion in the same vein as, say, the Night Lords books, here's your huckleberry. I just can’t help but feel there’s a fundamental flaw in the book, in that I just don’t find Angron interesting. It was definitely challenging to find avenues to look at that in new and interesting ways, exploring how that rage transforms people differently.