Thursday, April 25, 2013

"Soul Hunter"

Soul Hunter (Aaron Dembski-Bowden)

There's a bunch of Space Marine legions that don't get much attention in W40K; The Ultramarines show up everywhere, but the likes of the Salamanders, Iron Warriors, and White Scars never get any ink. This book is about the Night Lords, one of these neglected groups, and it may be understandable why they've been ignored up until now - the concept behind them is Batman, if he went around murdering criminals to keep everybody in line. This is an interesting concept, but in the world of 40k where you can be an intolerant, murderous, paranoid bunch of religious fanatics and you're still as close as the setting comes to being the good guys, "killing criminals" isn't really that evil.
Luckily, they've been placed into the hands of an author who's already worked miracles with one chapter. The result isn't quite the masterpiece of The First Heretic, but it's quite good. The Night Lords are admirably fleshed out so that their underlying concept kind of makes sense. I only have two issues with this, and in fact these are my two issues with the book itself. One is that the Night Lord's leader, Konrad Curze, let himself be killed by an Imperial assassin; the book kind of lays some groundwork for why he let himself be killed, but never comes out and says his reason (or if it did, I didn't understand it). To be fair, there's an earlier novel about the Night Lords that probably covered this ground. The second issue is that the titular Soul Hunter of the novel's title has a long flashback towards the end of the book that explains his name and fleshes him out as a character, but coming where it does also drains a bit of the tension out of the climax.
Both of these are minor issues, though. The rest of the book is great, and the author is able to pull off one of the most difficult literary tricks out there - mixing humor and drama and pulling it off well. He's also able to repeat an effective technique from The First Heretic where you come to root for our anti-heroes even as they go around murdering innocent people and generally acting like, well, Chaos Space Marines.
So, to sum all that up: Book good; you should read.

Grade: A

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