The Honoured: The Horus Heresy Series

With how the majority of the Horus Heresy books have gone I expected great things from this book as well. As the saying goes in Warhammer 40k: "Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment".The book is half the size of the other books while holding the same price point, while this is not necessarily a bad thing as quality can more than make up for length of story... it did not. Which brings me to the second issue: the characters are flat. It is hard to differentiate one Ultramarine from another as they are all written exactly the same with no inspiration put into the characters one bit. The writing itself is fine and clear but the lack of passion put into the pages made it an excruciating read to get through.If you have kept up with all of the main Horus Heresy books and have loved the story so far I would have to advise on not reading this one. If you are a collector then go ahead and buy it, just don't waste time reading it for your own sake.

Another Great Warhammer Book

I really enjoyed the story and the writing is very well done. But, I am sure glad Amazon dropped the price first, Black library should be ashamed for putting a 17 dollar price tag on such a short story. I have read all of the Horus Heresy to date but if I get another one like this one it will be my last, it's not even 250 pages long and about 30 of those are title pages and a preview of the next book.

Great book for someone who has been reading WarHammer for many many years.

There is a wide variance in how weapons affect one target vs another. A joyless slog.

I really need to stop wasting my money on these books. I have every Horus Heresy book ever written some as far back as 2006 sitting on my shelf. Lately they just plain SUCK! I'm tired of rehashes of the same story and the same characters. I'm tired of stories that don't move the series ahead. I'm tired of paying money for novels and getting short stories that can easily be read in a few hours. Black Library seems to be dragging this out just to keep milking money out of its loyal customers. The Warhammer fantasy series has become more engaging and more entertaining by far.

Non stop action. A delightful read after being subjected to "The damnation of pythos" or whatever it's called. Also known as "the author has no idea how to write space marines and will subject you to Twilight levels of self absorbing crap."

Product arrived on time and as described

I understand why a couple of reviewers - one on each of the UK and the US sites – were a bit disappointed with this book. This was also my initial reaction why I started reading it. It is a relatively short story, barely longer than a novella. The topic (Calth once again!), the traitorous attack of the Word Bearers against the Ultramarines and their destruction of the planet, is hardly original. Added to this, the book does not make the Horus Heresy “saga” progress at all. So this looked like it would be just a rehash of “dejà vu” themes and campaigns which may have been initially developed from a new Games Workshop box set. All of this is true, but there is also something more to this book, and even several things in fact, which made it into a rather “nice surprise” for me, because I was expecting to be disappointed.The first point is the story itself. The action is a continuation of Abnett’s “Know No Fear” and can also be linked to “Mark of Calth”. The first of these books tells the story of the assault on Calth, but mostly seen from space and through the Ultramarines situation reports. The second is a collection of short stories about the continuous and endless war below the planet’s ground, once Calth’s surface has been made inhabitable. This book starts at the point where the Word Bearers damage the system’s sun and irradiate the whole planet and shows the first struggles between the surviving Ultramarines and the stranded Word Bearers as both try to reorganise themselves and defeat their enemy underground.The story is told from the perspective of three Ultramarines of which only one will survive this terrible ordeal. These are Captain Steloc Aethon, veteran sergeant Orestrian Urcus and newly promoted acting sergeant Arkan Dardanus. All three are affected by the catastrophe that has hit them, their brother Legionnaires and the whole planet and its population, but react to it in different ways although they share both immense grief and fury. The characterisation shows clearly and rather well some of the outstanding features of the Ultramarine Legion. There is perhaps one feature which slightly grated and did not seem terribly plausible. This is the Ultramarines Captain’s behaviour over his lost friendship with a powerful Word Bearer’s Chaplain who saved his life some sixty plus years earlier – a debt that he will not be able to repay anymore because of his former friend’s treason.The characterisation of the Word Bearers, however, is much sketchier. This, however, is entirely deliberate because the whole story is seen and told through the eyes of the three Ultramarines, and those of Steloc and Orestrian who had been fighting together and alongside this Word Bearer’s Chaplain during the Great Crusade, in particular. Another reason for this one-sided picture is that this short book is to be followed by another (the Unburdened, from David Annandale) which will tell the same story (or a very similar one) but from Kurtha Sedd’s perspective, this time.You also get a useful glimpse of this story with the book containing an extract of it. The marketing ploy is rather obvious but the insertion of this extract helps a lot to understand how Kurtha Sedd got to this point. It shows rather well the sense of betrayal that he, his Primarch Aurelian and all of the Word Bearers experienced when they were denied from worshipping the Emperor, humiliated by them at Monarchia and had to witness the destruction of the cities that they had brought into compliance and worship of the Emperor. This destruction was achieved by the Ultramarines, their Primarch and Steloc, Orestrian and their Honoured 19th Company, and the great betrayal of Calth is therefore shown to be retribution to a large extent. One final point here is that the two authors – Rob Sanders with this book and David Annandale – seem set to achieve something similar to what Graham McNeill (A Thousand Sons) and Dan Abnett (Prospero Burns) have done. The same event will be told by two different authors from both sides and two very different perspectives.Then there are the fighting scenes, some of which are quite original and rather superb and exciting. One of these starts the book off. It is about the mad rush to safety of both Ultramarines and Word Bearers after the later have damaged the planet’s sun. Another set of great scenes describe some of the underground fighting. Among others, there is an ambush in a storage facility, the use of teleportation outfits, the attack of a command centre and yet another ambush where Terminator armoured Space Marines get pitted against a rather terrible Dreadnought.Given that the book includes all this, and though I partly agree with the other reviewers’ criticisms, I could not help thinking that it was worth more than three stars so I will go for four even if this might feel a bit generous to some.

horus heresy battle for calth novel

Great gift

while the book seems a bit light compared to the average Warhammer 40k tome, it does not disappoint,fast paced with good characters.I quite enjoyed it.