Monday 14 March 2011

Books in Brief : The Blood Angels Omnibus by James Swallow

Taking a break from the 'almost' faultless Heresy series and I thought I would stick with James Swallow following my enjoyment of The Flight of the Eisenstein.

This Omnibus consists of two novels Deus Encarmine, Deus Sanguinius and one short origin story, Blood Debt; they are fairly uninspiring. A little too much GW product placement in the first book leads to overcrowded battles with stilted action scenes; you can almost feel the author being pressured into getting as many vehicles into one engagement and rather than bringing the scenes to life I found myself picturing a little 6 x 4 gaming table crammed with miniatures.

The plots are ok at a push but hardly Terra shatteringly original, there are no real twists and most of the characters are mere sketches. These certainly weren't the strong, intense and thoughtful marines of the pre heresy world.

I thought Swallow did the Blood Angels a great injustice, portraying them as very gullible, laughably inept and easily killed warriors, who at the first sign of battle started ripping anyone and everyone’s throats out. I’m sure even the blood thirsty sons of Sanguinius wouldn't corrupt themselves with tainted chaos blood.

Possibly worth a read for those Blood Angels completionists, but be warned, you will probably not like what you find; I hope for better with his follow up Red Fury.

4 comments:

The Angry Lurker said...

Good heads up, reading the one on the assassination attempt on Horus at the moment.

Bix said...

Cheers Angry, you'll have to let me know how that goes, hopefully Mr Swallow will get his Mojo back.

MC Tic Tac said...

Outside of G.S. Goto these are THE worse 40k books I have ever read.

Still and went and read Red Fury..... and by god the series gets even worse!

Bix said...

Ouch! Thats pretty damning lol, I haven't read any of Goto's work, I've steered clear thus far because of the bad press.

Navigating the Black Library can be a very bumpy road sometimes.

Thanks for the post and dropping by :D

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