The thing about the Horus Heresy, as a series, is that a lot of it’s just really average writing. It’s not great. I’ve read around twenty of these books this year, and there’s maybe two that I’d read again. If you’re not familiar, the Horus Heresy is a massive, sixty-plus series of books set in the universe of Warhammer 40,000. I’m currently working on a special project where I’m reading them all and writing a series of related essays, and this is the end of my second year of reading. And I feel qualified at this point to tell you that these books are routinely very average. I am probably a little jaded – you’re not really supposed to read the Heresy from start to end. You’re meant to pick out the groups you’re interested in. If you read it in full, you spend a lot of time with groups you don’t really care for – like the Dark Angels, a terrible legion with a dumbass primarch and awful book titles (Descent of Angels, Fallen Angels, Angels of Caliban, plus the short story Grey Angel – yikes).

The titles are actually something of a problem across the series as a whole. A bunch of them are just the name of the main character. You’ve got Fulgrim, Corax, Garro, Warhawk, which is at least a nickname, The Master of Mankind, which is one of the Emperor’s official titles, and The Crimson King, which is another name for Magnus. There’s also a collection of short stories about some of the primarchs – it’s called The Primarchs, imaginatively. Other titles tell you the name of the book’s key battle, or the legion or group at hand. Tallarn is about the battle of Tallarn. Mechanicum is about the Mechanicum. Scars is about the White Scars, Legion is about the Alpha Legion, Pharos is about the battle over the Pharos. You know what happens in Battle for the Abyss? A bunch of dudes fight over a ship called the Furious Abyss. This frustratingly dogged literalism does actually have an important function for the Heresy. It’s a method of filtering. It’s meant to pull in readers who already know what’s being referred to. The title of Vulkan Lives isn’t a spoiler, it’s an advertisement; it’s there for the nerdy Salamanders fans so they can scream ‘Vulkan lives!’ and get trespassed from the store. These books are not about surprises. They’re about mythologising well-known characters with an established fan base. That’s part of the weakness with the short story collections, which we’ve discussed previously – they’re not really about any specific thing. They’re a grab-bag of different things that are poorly telegraphed. You get these vague titles like Tales of Heresy, Shadows of Treachery, Legacies of Betrayal – which tells you nothing. Which collection does ‘Butcher’s Nails’ come from? Or ‘Scions of the Storm’? There’s no visible through-line.

As far as the titles go, then, the literal approach helps ground the narrative in the specifics of a given character or major battle. It’s important to have a strong sense of place in a series with a cast of thousands. It’s also important because the Warhammer 40,000 wargame, which the Heresy is based on, is built around conflicting factions. People want to read about their favourite army. The writers want to facilitate that. Sometimes, again, that turns into a pretty dogged literalism. In its poorer moments, the Heresy can read like someone narrating the events of a tabletop game. It’s natural for the books and game to have overlapping content, but at times the books feel imaginatively straitjacketed into the tabletop context. For example, the passage below (from the novella ‘Corax: Soulforge’) feels like a dramatic reading of one player’s turn:

“A minute later, the Raven Guard stationed around the enemy line of advance opened fire, tearing into the infantry with their bolters. Several dozen were cut down in the opening salvo. Not willing to stay in the open, the Mechanicum soldiers broke ranks and moved into the cover of the shattered buildings. And it was then that Agapito made his move. Splitting his force, the commander led the charge into the enemy, power sword in one hand, plasma pistol in the other. Though their bonded plasteel breastplates and bionic limbs made the skitarii superior to the unaugmented soldiers of the Imperial Army, they were no match for thirty-one warriors of the Legiones Astartes. Agapito did not use his pistol, instead hewing down a handful of foes in the first few seconds of the combat. Fragmentation grenades exploded ahead of him as another squad charged into the fray, shrapnel from the charges combining with splinters from the littered masonry in a deadly firestorm. In a hail of bolter shots, chainsword swings, and savage punches, the Raven Guard cleaved into the foe without pause.”

That’s a fairly literal translation of a turn in the tabletop game. The series has always been concerned with details drawn from the game – you expect to see steady mention of particular weapons or equipment – but in this passage, the details are almost entirely restricted to elements carried over from the tabletop. The shooting, charge, and fight phases all happen in their correct order. The text specifies that Agapito doesn’t use his plasma pistol during the melee: the rules say he’s allowed to use it, as pistols are a type of gun that can be used in melee combat, so the text stops to specify that on this occasion, he only uses his power sword. There’s also an obsessive detailing of weapons, equipment, and unit types. This extract of less than two hundred words names eight separate weapons or items and five types of unit. It goes beyond texture and into the realm of army list. Finally, if you don’t play the game, you might not be aware that building Space Marine models involves equipping them with specific weapons – they literally have a row of arms holding different weapons, and you pick one to cut out and glue onto the model. See, for instance, the Space Marine Captain with Jump Pack model: “you can equip him with a chainsword, relic blade, or power fist, alongside a heavy bolt pistol, hand flamer, or plasma pistol.” Agapito holding a power sword and plasma pistol is a detail drawn not from character or personality but from the process of building models.

Really, all of this is just to say that the strong point of the Horus Heresy is not its prose. The writing is workmanlike, in places overlooking creativity in favour of plodding adherence to the wargame. It advertises its different volumes by just saying the name of the person or group involved. It’s not a literary achievement. In fact, there’s a sense in which the Heresy is more aligned with an oral tradition of storytelling. It’s less about the book as a textual artefact and more about how the events it relays are transmitted and stored within the community. The Horus Heresy books make up part of the game’s lore. That’s a term often used in gaming to refer to backstory or background narrative elements that aren’t essential to the gameplay experience, but I think there are also overlooked resonances with lore in its original sense – as folklore, as the collective wisdom and knowledge of a community, built up over generations. The books aren’t really archival records: they are better understood as instigating events, scattering knowledge out into the community. They are fictional accounts that function, culturally, in the same way as lived experience. In a sense they don’t really exist in themselves. They exist in the memory of the player who read them, and then in the communal experience of one player relaying the events to another across a table packed with dice and plastic models. During the Siege of Terra, the traitor primarch Angron has devolved into an insane rage monster. He jumps out of a spaceship that’s literally in orbit, plummets down through the atmosphere, and craters onto the planet surface. And then he just climbs on out and does his berserker thing. It’s a sequence you can read for yourself, but me telling you about it here is more aligned with the essence of the Heresy as folklore.

Like Magic: the Gathering or Pokemon, or other seasonal products with an evolving storyline, Warhammer 40,000 is interesting because it presents a constructed fictional universe that functions like a folkloric history. The fictional history goes hand in hand with the history of the game, with its changing rulesets and updated systems (now in their tenth edition). People talk about how the game used to work in the same way that they relay the legends of their favourite characters and legions. In that sense, the Horus Heresy writers aren’t really writing novels. They’re creating folklore. It’s fine that the prose is a little dull, because that’s not really what you’re taking away from it. You’re taking the memory of events more than how they were specifically narrated. Similarly, the list of names and battles functions like a genealogy. It reminds me of the opening of the Gospel of Matthew, with its genealogy listing the generations from Abraham to Christ. “And Solomon begat Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia; and Abia begat Asa” – a list of names, sure, but also a list of people, carrying with them the history of their lives. It’s a history made personal by its connection to the present, in the way that it’s held and remembered by the community. The Heresy functions in much the same way.