Gamertell

Title: The Horus Heresy: Battle for the Abyss
Author: Ben Counter
Publisher: The Black Library
Release Date: September 2008
Price: $7.99
Rating: One thumb up and one thumb sideways, 80/100, B-, *** out of five.
Pros: It’s the first book that all events happen after Horus’s betrayal of the Imperium so it’s all new. The story never stops moving. The feel of the book is incredibly faithful to the feel of Dawn of War and Dark Heresy.
Cons: Character development could be done better. It could also take more time to develop the events more.
Overall: This book in a way is lackluster but it’s still pretty good and a lot of fun to read.

Battle for the Abyss in a way is an incredible installment of The Horus Heresy series. In other ways it could have been so much better.

Ben Counter could have made this book the gem that it was capable of being. However, he pulled his punches while building up the story. With other books that he’s written, his style has been completely uncompromising and brutal like the books following the Soul Drinkers legion. This book, following the Word Bearers and Ultramarines as well as some of the Thousand Sons, Space Wolves and World Eaters legions, just doesn’t hit quite as hard.

However, even though Counter is pulling his punches, he is throwing many more than he usually does. This means that the action rarely lets up and the story is always going somewhere. He makes strong, believable warriors out of these immense inhuman beings.

He’s always building bigger, better and more interesting conflicts between your standard enemies. He is also pulling at inherent conflicts between each legion and each rank within legions. So Battle for the Abyss is a strong book with a lot of physical conflict as well as emotional and mental conflicts. However, if you’ve read other books by Ben Counter, you realize that you’ve read better from him.

Where some of the later books in the Heresy series (Descent of Angels namely) lacked the Warhammer and Warhammer 40k feel though, this is where the biggest blessing for this book is. Due to the fact that there is always suspicion and something is always happening, Battle for the Abyss keeps faithful to the uneasy, hectic feel of Dawn of War or Dark Heresy. So the faithfulness of the book to the game’s source material and feel is dead on.

This book is a gem. It’s just a very lackluster one that does what it does the right way. It’s minimalist in a way that works and actually multiplies the possibilities. Honestly, unless you haven’t got this far in the series, there is no reason why you shouldn’t read this book. Don’t let the painfully mediocre Descent of Angels or the oddities Legion push you away from the series because now the story is advancing beyond Horus’s initial rebellion and into the galactic civil war that threatens the very existence of the Imperium and anyone who drifts into it.

Other books in The Horus Heresy series:

• Part 1: The Horus Heresy: Horus Rising by Dan Abnett
• Part 2: The Horus Heresy: False Gods by Graham McNeill
• Part 3: The Horus Heresy: Galaxy in Flames by Ben Counter
• Part 4: The Horus Heresy: Flight of the Eisenstein by James Swallow
• Part 5: The Horus Heresy: Fulgrim by Graham McNeill
• Part 6: The Horus Heresy: Descent of Angels by Mitchel Scanlon
• Part 7: The Horus Heresy: Legion by Dan Abnet
• Part 8: The Horus Heresy: Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter
• Part 9: Horus Heresy: Mechanicum by Graham McNeill (coming December 2008)

Site [Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter] Read [Bell of Lost Souls] Also Read [weRead]

Note: This is the most recent book and sometime in December 2008, the ninth book, Mechanicum, will be added to the series by Graham McNeill. Look for the review.