Mortarion: The Pale King (Volume 15) (The Horus Heresy: Primarchs) [Hardcover] Annandale, David

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You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Good book, good setting up what Mortarion will do in the Horus Heresy, no remarks from my part, might even have been a bit longer. These battle scenes aren’t particularly compelling in their description and they aren’t well-written enough to truly put an image into the mind of the reader. Meanwhile Mortarion meets these reinforcement head on in a brutal battle using rad weapons and phosphex, but they cant win against millions of tanks.

Fresh from blowing the character studies of Vulkan and Guilliman, Annandale takes the chance to reflect. I'll avoid giving spoilers but he really ties in themes and arcs from all parts of Mortarion's story and synthesises them expertly into a relatively short runtime while still managing to reframe Mortarion's overall lacking narrative in the Great Crusade and early Heresy. The fifteenth instalment in The Horus Heresy Primarchs series, The Pale King tells of the atrocities committed by the Reaper in the name of justice—and the consequences of challenging his methods.

Mortarion who is usually quite a predictable character, was cast in more of a favourable and complex light which I found interesting considering his usually cold calculating nature and the villain he later becomes. He has a deep desire to use his station as the commander of an army to liberate, which is rare in the world of Warhammer. It is, quite like the death guard themselves, brutally to the point and embodying the "arriving precisely when it needs too when it comes to pace. Their cruel, wealthy overlords work them to death like human batteries and keep them docile with a steady stream of drugs (it’s worth noting the same drugs make the overlords more aggressive, kind of like the “pax” from Firefly). Mortarian is a Primarch that has been given thw thin edge of the wedge in recent years, all too often the villain that gets shown up, foiled and humiliated.

Overall not a bad effort, but with too many fairly drab action scenes this one is probably only of real interest to Death Guard mega-fans. This allows The Fourth Horseman to crash into the main spire and deploy 10k marines while the fleet disengages. Mortarion, newly uplifted to commander of the Death Guard, descended upon the world, and with him came a slaughter of untold proportions.I’ve been consistently let down by this series as the books seldom offer insights into the characters that I really enjoy or want to see. It's kind of funny that this homicidal maniac Primarch is entirely justified in intent, and had he reduced collateral damage, would be laudable for it. Annandale does incredibly well is the introspection and reflection on the motives of his characters and the events that unfold. I only mention this because I don’t know if these issues with his writing are present in everything that he’s penned, or if they’re unique to Mortarion. The parallels between the enemy that he fights in this book, the tyranny that he fought on his homeworld in the past, and the monstrous entity that the Imperium later becomes is a clever plot device which works really well in this book.

In the parts where we get a glimpse into the thought processes of the characters, both good and bad, we see a depth and a complexity that the author is capable of reaching. It’s a particularly bad lapse in the prose because what little descriptions we get describe the arcology as an incredibly tight space, which stands in direct contrast to the moments where Mortarion and the Death Guard fight against vehicles inside of the city.While I’ve read The Buried Dagger, I’ll be honest that I don’t love the “he had no choice” answer offered.

David Annandale is the author of the Warhammer Horror novel The House of Night and Chain and the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. In a lot of ways, Mortarion is to Corax as Konrad is to Corax—a dark mirror lacking the optimism of the Raven Guard. These moments of quality become harder to find in the portions of the book that do not directly involve character writing, and unfortunately that represents most of the story. This is covered in Forge World books and Annandale already covered the aftermath of this in his short story so this is just expanding on these events. With The Buried Dagger and several shorts being dedicated to Mortarion’s life on Barbarus The Pale King inevitably falls into the latter camp.I adore my real-life Mortarion miniature and really wanted to like this one but sadly, the few good moments of character growth and introspection were buried beneath tons of edgy gore, atrocious worldbuilding and battle scenes that drag on for too long. The development of this story felt visceral and intense, and the city itself being used as an antagonist was reminiscent of a TTRPG dungeon crawl. Whereas Corax seeks to liberate and uplift, Mortarion sees little hope and opts to flip the game board over, as it were. However, these things alone were not enough to completely make up for the incredibly edgy at times narrative that I find hard to believe anyone above the age of 15 would be able to take seriously. Also this "The Imperium, but even more swarm-like and worse" is in a few of the novels in this series so maybe they all have the same origin.