"Prospero Burns" & Genre Update

First, a genre advisory: We have now reached the end of the Horus Hersey novel series published so far, putting aside short-story compliations and books with horrid Amazon reviews. Further reviews will have to wait for more books to be published (check my wishlist). I do have "Collected Visions", but this is a 800 page coffee table book that I'll mostly be flipping through. I hope you've enjoyed our trip through the Horus Hersey, and now we can move off incredibly nerdy books about the far future back to incredibly nerdy history books. But first, let's examine the last novel from the series I read...

Prospero Burns (Dan Abnett)

This book is titled "Prospero Burns" with the subtitle "The Wolves unleashed," but a more accurate title would be "A bunch of boring rememberancer crap" with the subtitle "ZZzzzzz".
Okay, maybe I'm being mean, but this book is frustrating. How do you take eight-foot tall genetically engineered space vikings and make them boring? The answer, as you may have already guessed, is making half the book a pointless slog of a flashback. Oh, how I wanted to start skipping pages as the flashbacks droned on and on, serving no purpose and boring the shit out of me. Oh, how I wanted to get back to the present, to see the Space Wolves - who the book is supposted to, you know, actually be about - fucking do something. It would almost be better if I could just dismiss the book totally and say skip it, but the parts of the book actually about the Space Wolves are excellent - action-packed, filled to the brim with interesting charecters and situations.
And then you cut away from this to see a rememberancer bumblefucking around in the library for ten pages. Who cares? Having finished the book, I can tell you that the flashbacks are totally pointless - they end up having an impact on the story, but this could have been filled in with ten or fifteen pages, or even just totally axed by keeping the (not very interesting) events they lead up to off-camera. In fact I'll say right now you can safely skip these scenes, which is what I would recommend. You'll need to have read "A Thousand Sons" for the end to make sense even then, and if you have, I'd just leave it at that.

Whole Book Grade: C-
Part About the Space Wolves: A