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Apologies if this book has already been addressed in another thread. (And feel free to refer me there. I looked around but didn't find anything on this.)

I just finished listening to Dan Abnett's latest and was curious about how it is being received.

The fact that it is called "The End and the Death Vol. 1" is enough to tell you that the title's promise goes unfulfilled, in classic Black Library drag-it-out manner. In general, I guess I'd say I'm disappointed, although I think the novel's failings are in large part structural.

Abnett started the Horus Heresy book line with a bang with Horus Rising. He did it, in part, by giving us a main character to follow in the form of Loken. And, as with the Eisenhorn trilogy, Abnett did it in part by seizing the opportunities inherent in beginning a story and claiming uncharted territory with gusto. He embellished a lot, invented a lot, and fleshed out a lot, introducing a slew of interesting new characters and giving established characters who had previously been cyphers depth and character. Abnett excels at that.

Bringing Abnett back to conclude the series makes a lot of sense, but it presented him with different challenges, most notably tying together the incredible pile of spaghetti strands that the Horus Heresy has become since he first wrote Horus Rising. He didn't rise to meet those challenges.

Some minor spoilers follow.

At first, I found Abnett's impressionistic leaping about from character to character to character to character to character interesting, hoping that all of these colorful facets would ultimately congeal to reveal a sweeping portrait of the war. Some beloved characters return that were great to see again - Loken, yes, but also Sindemon, and even our very beloved Samus gets to have a nice, nasty say about the proceedings. But as the character hopping just kept going ad nauseam, the coherence of the narrative just breaks down, and the book devolves into a rambling, picaresque series of short scenes.

In large part, I think that's because with so many preceding books and characters to work in, Abnett couldn't anchor events around a single, identifiable protagonist anymore. Loken is in it, but passingly. The emperor is in it, but passingly. Horus is in it, even rendered with some trademark Abnett narrative inventiveness and perspectival fooling around to prevent the author from getting bored, but even Horus is not given enough time in this crowded ensemble. We essentially get a snapshot of his disordered mind, which is a good idea in principle - it is interesting to know what Horus is like at this stage, how he's changed since the beginning - but not enough of it to be fulfilling. In a way, Horus' interactions with the ghosts of former companions exemplifies what's wrong with this book - it's a brief echo of relationships that were interesting and meaningful in the past, during the original trilogy. Meaningful and interesting relationships that Horus has with his sons in the present, on the other hand, are scarcely touched on or developed. All we really get is that he's losing it and they're worried.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting this to be a great book. After some brilliant novels in the beginning, the Horus Heresy line has been a mess for a long time, which is why I've only dipped back in to it occasionally.

But Abnett, when he is good, is so very, very good. And now that the series is finally ending, I wanted to see what happened to Loken and company even if it wasn't going to be Shakespeare. And I figured that with such major events unfolding, Abnett could still surprise me and enrich the known lore enough to be worthwhile. I admit, I hoped that there was an outside chance that he could actually pull this off and make this a worthwhile chapter of 40K lore.

But it feels like Abnett made the journeyman film-maker's mistake: trying to do it all, and give every member of the sprawling cast their moment, in too little time.

Having read (or rather "heard") "The End and the Death vol. 1," I'm now certain that I could have skipped it and just waited for "The End and the Death vol. 2." Or maybe 3. Or perhaps "The End and the Death vol. 17." Whichever one turns out to be the actual, real End and the Death, and not just more treading water. (Or perhaps this is the final, horrific triumph of Chaos: The End and the Death never actually ends, extending in an infinite succession of volumes from now until the end of time and humanity and the Fab Four dance the Watusi on the ashes of mankind, etc., etc.)

Now that I've had my negative say, did anyone actually really like this book? If so, I'm fascinated: what did I miss? I read one review that said by the end of the book reader expectations would be upended in some significant way, and I kept waiting for that, but if it ever happened, I must have blinked and missed it. Maybe it had to do with the "Dark King" stuff? If so, I still don't get it.

I'm afraid I must disagree with you on everything you've said. Broken down into parts, this is my reading of the book.

Multiple POVs


Splitting the story


Horus


With regards to skipping

Gert, don't be afraid, please disagree with me! I enjoyed reading your reply. It's a long book with a lot going on, one I think I'll need to listen to again soon to fully digest. Having read your reply, I'll be that much more attentive to the parts you pointed out on the second read-through.

I remember Keeler's doubt but it didn't stand out for me, but maybe I lost focus at that point in the narrative. I was listening to an audiobook while also focusing on painting rather than reading a paper book, which does make it easier to mentally drift away from the story at times.

I mostly agree with what you said about Horus and his appearances, but I would have liked a lot more time spent on him. Truthfully, I'm probably also nostalgic for the early days of the Mournival, when Horus and his four advisors weren't set in their fates yet, and they had more room to breathe and spark off of one another in less to-the-death ways. I really enjoyed the pre-doomed Luna Wolves characters. Warhammer 40K doesn't work unless Horus falls to Chaos and nearly brings down the Empire, but I liked the more open-ended future of the expanding empire / Compliance era, as well as the and endless variety of alien and human cultures encountered during that time.

Perhaps you've been a more faithful follower of the series than I have, too, in which case some of the characters and their story arcs will be more familiar to you than they were for me.

I would have thought there would already be a thread on Dakkadakka about this book, or even a specific dakkadakka forum section where people review and discuss Black Library books. If so, I must be blind, because I'm not finding them. If there's just not sufficient interest out there for that, that's too bad.

Audiobooks are something that I used to enjoy but have moved away from as a form of media. I much prefer to have the book/ebook to read because there's nothing to distract me. I would listen to an audiobook while I was hobbying then find I didn't actually know what was going on at points because I'd focussed on building a difficult section or gotten to batch washing 20 models and then zoned out.

I won't debate you on any of that. I've run into the same hazard while listening and painting.

But audio books are fantastic for road trips. I have no problem following a story while driving.

Having finally struggled to the end of this, I can say the whole novel seems like a reflection of the problems throughout the HH and Solar War series.

It desperately needed an editor to excise a lot of the dead weight from the novel. Part of this is because there are still some story threads that were left hanging from previous books that shouldn't have been. Part of it is also deciding some of these stories even need telling here in the first place. I get that the Emperors, Horus, Keeler and John and Oll are coming together into one finale and Malcador's sacrifice is a big part of the final battle. But at this point we shouldn't still be dealing with Loken, or Rann or Fo. This is where the editing and planning would have helped. I'd also argue you could probably deal with Keeler's story outside of this too. Ultimately, it all comes down to this novel being far too long for its own good and something needs to be excised but I get the feeling Abnett wasn't given the option for a lot of it because there are still threads hanging from other novels.

The bizarre, repetitive fragments of the war that relate to absolutely nothing of any import are all on Abnett, though. I get what he was going for, and I think as an initial framing device they would have been fine. Instead we get them basically constantly throughout the whole novel and they just get in the way of the story we want to tell. It gets to the point that it starts obscuring what's actually important and causing resetnment towards some of the older characters who seem tangential to the resolution of this story, like Loken. We get it, things are bad. You've had hundreds of novels, short stories and novellas to explain that during the HH series, and another 8 novels during the Solar War to continue to do that. Filling up the penultimate novel with it is just a waste of time.

It probably doesn't help that many of the characters are not very well developed, especially if you haven't been reading every novel in the series. Again, some editing and planning might have helped here, as it becomes difficult to care, or even remember, about certain characters in the endless fragments scattered throughout.

I sincerely hope the second volume is much more focused than the first.

Upon reading the title, whilst I understood putting Vol.1, I felt a little disappointed that they didn't commit fully and do the first book as, 'The End' and then the follow-up as, 'The Death'. That, or keeping the title for the very last book and come up with something else for this one. Regardless, moving on.

As an aside (not particularly relevant to the story overall), this one really struck me with how much the book's title was rammed down our eyes (or ears for audiobook). "It is... the End... and the Death." ROLL CREDITS. When it first came up, I rolled my eyes and thought, ah well, it's Abnett being artistic and squeezing the name in but it just didn't stop. I feel like you could have a drinking game with how many times it was used (next time I read through, I will count the number of times).

The Dark King:


Undermining the Traitors:


Custodians:


Sanguinius:


Representation of Chaos Corruption:


Dorn:

With regard to the Custodes point.