Reading the Horus Heresy, Book 5: “Fulgrim”

I know I’m late to the party, but I finally decided to start reading the “Horus Heresy,” a huge series of novels set in the universe of Warhammer 40,000 (though it is set much earlier than the year 40,000). I thought it would be awesome to blog the series as I go. With more than 50 novels and many, many short stories, there will be a lot of posts in this series (I doubt I’ll get to all the short stories). I’m reading the series in publication order unless otherwise noted. There will be SPOILERS from the books discussed as well as previous books in the series. Please DO NOT SPOIL later books in the series.

Fulgrim

Boom. Boom. Boom! This book was awesome. It has some serious tones of dark fantasy and horror melded into the relentless metal action I have come to expect from the setting.

The plot is a story of the fall of Fulgrim, along with his Remembrancers, into the hands of Slaanesh, the Chaos god of extravagance, lust, and various evils. Fulgrim has tried to make his legions pursue perfection over all other things, and in the novel he comes to a turning point in which, while fighting some Xenos (aliens), he turns to the aliens’ means of self-perfection through genetic modification. In doing so, he corrupts the plans of the Emperor and begins a path from which he seemingly cannot turn, believing the whole time that he is perfecting his Legion.

There are some pretty gross scenes here, though, so fair warning. The violence is really over the top in parts, including sexual violence and the like. Pretty gruesome. A lot of it centers around the fall of the Remembrancers as they experience the corruption of Daemons as well. The elements of horror are really woven into the foreboding sense that I got as a reader observing how the artists and historians included in the party also fell into the clutches of the daemonic. This is a dark sci-fi novel through and through.

What makes Fulgrim great is that it demonstrates how easy a fall from moral and ethical heights is–justified by a pursuit, a dream, a vision, those who should remain most loyal to the Emperor instead continue to fall away and into the worst of corruptions. It’s an excellent entry in the series.

Links

Horus Heresy and Warhammer/40K Hub– All my posts on the Horus Heresy, as well as books throughout the Warhammer and 40K universe can be found here.

J.W. Wartick- Always Have a Reason– Check out my “main site” which talks about philosophy of religion, theology, and Christian apologetics (among other random topics). I love science fiction so that comes up integrated with theology fairly frequently as well. I’d love to have you follow there, too!

Be sure to follow me on Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies/scifi/sports and more!

SDG.