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I happen to like Kevin J Anderson. Not so much Karen Travis but it's readable. Better than Nick Kyme by any standards. Or William King..... I get that Space Wolves are like the butt of a Nordic joke but overkill is still overkill.

Kyme is a wonderful editor, but his writing lacks panache. I think Abnett and Dembski-Bowden are still writing really marvelous stuff, though.

The Macharius Trilogy is a good read. Also, the Iron Warriors Omnibus is a great read, with a very interesting Honsou... But I read BL books knowing they are poorly written and sometimes incoherent. They are a guilty pleasure, nothing more. I am sure if I was a chick, I would be blowing throwing Danielle Steele books.

A lot of it does boil down the author, but I broadly loathe "bolter porn."

Space Marines aren't decent people, hell, they're not even really human with upbringings that would and should result in fundamentally broken people. I don't mind the more human approach to Marines in the Heresy books, as the whole environment is different, but I still like Abnett's work on that particular plot arc the most, as he still keeps his Marines sufficiently inhuman, particularly in their interactions with "mere mortals."

I'd say that BL's stuff on not-Marines is, on the whole, better. Most of the Imperial Guard books are enjoyable, ranging from pulpy, predictable but fun (the later Cain books, for instance) to interesting, developed character pieces not unlike more respected historical fiction (Gaunt's Ghosts) to shockingly grim setting pieces (15 hours). There's trash out there, of course, but the percentage seems significantly lower, much like the Inquisition stuff.

Part of that, I suspect has to do with the ease of writing much more normal characters; if the author has a developed imagination, they can imagine how they or people they know might react to the insanity of the 40k universe, and write accordingly, but also, I suspect, to BL's focus on SPEHSS MEHRINES. They want to keep pumping out Marine stuff, as GW prime considers that the most important aspect of their IP, so if you're writing about something else, chances are it's on the author's own initiative, and perhaps they see less corporate oversight to their writing.

it's purely conjecture on my part, but seems to be within the realm of reason.

 PhillyT wrote:
Black Library has never been stellar. You are reading them to get novel style fluff. It isn't winning many awards!

This. BL isn't going downhill; it started at the bottom of a lake at the bottom of the mountain of quality literature, and once in a while resurfaces to gasp for breath to keep itself alive.

 Bronzefists42 wrote:
BL is artistically bankrupt no doubt about it. I read most of their books as guilty pleasures. A few are objectively good (to me) however:
1. the 3rd HH book, Betrayer, The first Heretic and a Thousand Sons are all amazingly well written, Betrayer ranking the highest due to somehow making feel sad for the WE.
2. parts of priests of mars (the parts with the mechancius were actually poorly written but any part talking about the menials lives was amazing)
3. Helsreach was good for showing how broken SM have ended up after 10,000 years of war and how they have lost nearly every trace of human emotion since the heresy barring a few exceptions.

My biggest issue is their depiction of Orks. They are always shown as mindless savages, despite being the only empire on the same level as the Imperium (size and manpower terms here) and speaking the same language as IOM are never shown interacting with them language wise. Deff skwadron was better than almost 75% of BL. Also a lot of recycling goes on in these books. I can't find it now but a sequence in Mechanicus is repeated almost word for word in Priests of Mars and they seem to repeat a lot of plot points (SM Protagonist #13132121: gasp the mindless orks outsmarted us!)

I read BL books in between good reads to just keep the habit going. It can be quite demanding going from Toqueville to Camus, so I break it up with trashy fantasy and sci-fi to let my brain recover.