The End And The Death: Volume I (The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra Book 8)

Product Information

I especially liked the portrayal of Alpha Legion (I am really warming up to these guys), Dark Angels (splintering of the the Mighty First might not be as clear cut as one would expect) and of course Legio Custodes. I want this to be an appropriate end to a long-running and successful series, and I’m dying for people to get out there and read the whole thing as one piece, and go ‘Now I get why that mattered in book one!’”. The arch-traitor Horus Lupercal's forces have bombarded Terra and the Imperial Palace lies in ruins. With the Emperor's dream in tatters, he seeks only to rob Chaos of its ultimate victory…

In the end – or close to it – End and the Death simply isn’t a great book. If you’ve got this far in the series you’re going to read it anyway – but that isn’t an argument in its favour. On to Part Three. May the Dark King bless us all. The arch-traitor Horus Lupercal's forces have bombarded Terra and the Imperial Palace lies in ruins. With the Emperor's dream in tatters, he seeks only to rob Chaos of its ultimate victory... So here we are. We’ve been to see the Elephant , and for nine long months the Emperor, Sanguinius, Rogal Dorn and Constantin Valdor have been frozen in the scant moments (or several hundred years) after arriving on the Vengeful Spirit. In all that time, particularly since the revelation that we would get three volumes of this one, single, book, I’ve wondered “What happens next?” Now, at the final hour of the final day, the Emperor rises. With him come his Angel, his Praetorian, and his Captain, all determined to enact terrible vengeance. Yet the hope is slim, for the Warmaster sees all and knows all, and the ultimate victory of Chaos is at hand. ToW: Again, I don’t think this is a spoiler, but this book felt like it was really Malcador’s story, as much as anyone else. Was that something you were specifically aiming for, to give him his moment in the spotlight? (BTW I love that he doesn’t refer to the Emperor as ‘He’ like most characters do, but rather ‘he’!)

Customer reviews

I’ve read the first 62 books of the Horus Heresy series, knowing nothing about the wider WarHammer universe or lore. I don’t know whether the Emperor dies or triumphs, the fate of the legions, or humanity’s place in the future. I’m waiting impatiently for the final two books to be released, so that I can start reading 40k and find out what happens. However you ended up here, whether a long-standing veteran of tabletop and trader, a new recruit to Warhammer skipping to the end to read the last bits, or a dogged fan of the books alone, there’ll be something for you here to enjoy. This is another good Siege book. There’s lots of shooty-shooty, lots of choppy-choppy, demons explode all over the place, and cosmic truths of the 40k universe are either flat out revealed or slyly hinted at. You might already know the truth of it – it’s likely you’ll read this book, eventually. That makes this review a little pointless, but I wanted to write it anyway because I’m not sure you should read it. The End and the Death is the eighth and final novel of the Siege of Terra series. [1] It will be split into an unknown number of parts. [2] Other plots you could drop and lose nothing – or visit once, instead of four, five, a dozen times, throughout the novel. It’s nice to see Sigismund again, but his narrative arc was completed a few books ago and retreads old ground here. Fo is a bafflingly long side-show that provides some great seeds for a 40k RPG and seems to be setting up for a Scouring series more than providing compelling plot here. Others are duplicates, loyalist/traitor mirrors. Taking an axe to some of these threads, leaving them in the red snow, would, in my opinion, make for a better book.

Unfortunately if we’re talking about dropping plots, we have to talk about one in particular. Here’s a big spoiler for one of the most exciting things that Volume 1 tantalised us with – the Dark King. Expand this at your peril. Book is very readable, very cinematic, main story chapters with lots of [what author calls] fragments sections in between. In these fragments sections we are given scenes from the battlefields, civilians escaping the city battlefields, we see actions of Abaddon and his troops, Horus' POV (which is hilarious) and finally Neverborne's thoughts and reactions on the Horus' progress. Chapters are relatively short so pacing is pretty fast. All in all very well organized, with only downside being author's use of some more exotic dictionary that made me scratch my head for a while. I was looking forward to returning to characters like Loken – who obviously has got to be in it because he was there at the start – and Jon Grammaticus. But as is ever the case, when you’re writing a character, you bond with them in a weird way and they become a favourite. So I loved writing Malcador and other characters who I’ve never really had the same level of time to spend with. DA: I did, and ‘Vengeful Spirit’, but that was taken 🙂 I like the simplicity of The End and the Death, and the sinister overtone, as it is an ominous quote, from the daemon Samus, from the very first book, Horus Rising. The Emperor wants Sanguinius to stay because his wounds from Angron were grave but Sanguinius believes he is fated to die due to Horus. If he stays then that means Horus will kill the Emperor and then come to kill Sanguinius. But if Sanguinius is killed by Horus first it means the Emperor has a chance. Sanguinius however still wants to defy fate and kill Horus.A perfectly fine novel that could have used some significant editing and the surgical removal of several of the sub plots that primarily serve to ensure everyone’s favourite characters are mentioned at least once. There’s definitely a really strong Warhammer novel in there somewhere, and if the viewpoint characters had been restricted to Loken, Corswain, Sindermann, Malcador, Horus, Sanguinius and Oll we might have found it. Instead the tour round minor characters detracted severely from the pace of the novel. “Oh, here we go, Fafnir Ran is killing things again” was not the enduring takeaway I expected after Johnathan Keble (who puts in the usual hard yards as the audiobook narrator) spoke his last. These scenes would be better left to a short story compilation than trying to squeeze them into a mainline novel. Warhammer Community: Dan Abnett Interview – How to Start and Finish the Most Epic Series in Sci-fi (posted 8/6/2022) (last accessed 8/6/2022) It starts great and gets faster and better untile second half of third part. Then it hits breaks. Story slows down as if Dan realized that there must be seconde book. That at this point Horus has devolved into a delusional, almost mindless husk doesn't help the series either. Horus was such an effective antagonist because he was brilliant, while his fall is handled badly in the Heresy, he was supposed to be an individual that initially raised valid concerns and was pushed over the edge by the involvement of Chaos. The Empire remains, but in a diminished and stagnant state. The Emperor and loyal primarchs are forced to fight fires (for example, the abominable intelligence, or Chaos incursions)

He’s on his way to becoming something even more dreadful yet, but he almost alone among the Traitor forces is aware of what they’re sacrificing and he hates it! He wants to be the warrior that he knows, and to win by military means – but things are slowly slipping away.” Anyway, the book has quite a number of basically superfluous battle scenes that do nothing to advance any plotlines, only show that Choas is bad and evil - which might be ok if we haven't had to muddle through 60+ books establishing that fact. Also, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith would be proud with the sheer amount of mind-breaking, sanity-blasting eldritch vocabulary thrown at us readers. Especially when it comes to Choas, which faction, it bears repeating, is Eeeeevil.ToW: You’re dealing with a huge number of characters and arcs, here – did you go into this knowing who you wanted the main POV characters to be? Or did they develop over the writing process, in which case how did you go about choosing them? Horus kills the Emperor permanently, realises his mistake, frees himself from Chaos’ influence, purges the immaterium, retains the power of Chaos, effectively becoming an Emperor-equivalent being. The loyal primarchs expel him from the empire, but Horus aids humanity from the shadows.