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Now, I know that Battle For The Abyss was a bit poo ok? Everyone does. But I think that this author has a great many more good books in his favour.

What about Daemonworld? Or the Grey Knights series, the Souldrinkers series and let us not forget the seminal Galaxy In Flames either!

I know he has Phalanx coming out soon but that was serialised in Hammer and Bolter. My question is: where the hell has he got too these days? He was one of my favourite authors back in the day but since Hellforged (which was also a bit meh too if I'm honest) he ain't done nothing (double negative intended)!

Iv'e noticed that Chris Roberson doesn't seem to have been given the chance to write a sequal for the highly forgettable Son's Of Dorn so could this be what happened to Mr Counter?

BRING BACK BEN COUNTER I say! He was one of the only ones that who wrote his stories from the chaos/renegade marine point of view which I found incredibly engrossing (although Henry Zou has written a stunning book (Blood Gorgons) since Counters disappearance).

Come back Mr Counter, your fans miss you!

The Soul Drinker series was love or hate with many people.
I liked it.

Ben Counter (sometimes the O is omitted, depending how much you like/dislike him) is pretty well known to be one of the lesser BL authors. Although he's not as bad as CS Goto, his writing style is particularly bad from what I've read. Twelve Wolves in Legends of the Space Marines was flat out embarrassing to read. I laughed out loud on the bus while I read it. I also read a preview passage from one of the Grey Knights books and I was alternately rolling my eyes and chuckling at how he wrote. It was pretty unpleasant.

While I never read the Soul Drinker books, I've heard precious little praise for them. Most people consider them pretty Mary Sue-ish, and silly even for 40k. Considering Legends of the Space Marines came out in 2010 or so, I think that's the most recently he's written for BL.

If you want to read things from the Chaos point of view, for the love of god get the Night Lords novels by Aaron Dembski-Bowden. They're the best BL books I've ever read, and damn good sci-fi regardless of their BL connection. Henry Zou is pretty good too, but ADB is a boss.

For Mary Sues they seem to die in alarming amounts...
Though they did pull off some pretty ridiculous things.

Brother SRM wrote: Although he's not as bad as CS Goto, his writing style is particularly bad from what I've read. Twelve Wolves in Legends of the Space Marines was flat out embarrassing to read. I laughed out loud on the bus while I read it. I also read a preview passage from one of the Grey Knights books and I was alternately rolling my eyes and chuckling at how he wrote. It was pretty unpleasant.

Can you give a few examples of what's so horrific about this guy's writing because I think it's easy to jump on the bandwagon in slating someone and I would like to know exactly what it is that riles people up about him.

Some of his books are not as good as others but so is the case with every author, they have 'off day's'. For a good example of how well this guy can write just look at Daemon World. Now that book won awards and is one my all time favourite books ever.

Also, if you were to read the opening trilogy of the HH series without knowing who wrote them but was told that they were in fact wrote by the same person you would believe them because they are all of the same high standard and anyone who say's "oh stay away from the third, it's just laughable but the other two are great", is being plain unfair!

There are author's out there that are FAR worse that keep getting published like Rob Sanders, for example, who's book's Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps are two of the slowest, most boring BL books Iv'e read to date (and Iv'e read about 90 40k books) but he doesn't get consigned to room 101 does he? No.