If you’re a regular, you might know that over the past couple years, I’ve been working on a special project about the Horus Heresy, a long-running science fiction series set in the world of Warhammer 40,000. I’ve written a few essays on some of the early novels (the one on agency and storytelling is pretty good), but I guess I’ve not really defined the boundaries of the project, or how I’m going about it. In assessing a series like the Heresy, it’s best to start with a timeline of release dates. When was each book published? It might seem basic, but the publication schedule impacts our understanding of how the narrative developed, as the stories that came first will have influenced later titles. It’s not sexy, but timelines impact creative decisions. Writers will have conversations where their publisher says hey, do you really want to write this story? Isn’t it a little too much like this title? How will you distinguish it from that other title? New works are created in the light of everything that’s come before. Understanding the publication history serves as the foundation for any serious narrative analysis.

Although the books in the Heresy are numbered, establishing the proper publication order is actually surprisingly difficult, owing to the large number of reprints and cross-media products. For instance, ‘The Dark King’ is a 2007 short story written by Graham McNeill, first published in a 32-page chapbook for the gaming convention Games Day UK. It’s republished in 2012, five years later, in the anthology Shadows of Treachery (#22). The Shadows of Treachery audiobook is released in 2017, and then ‘The Dark King’ is republished separately as part of two audiobook collections in 2020 and 2021, The Horus Heresy Audio Collection Volume 4 and Endless War. That’s five different formats or collections over fourteen years. We technically have a first publication date, but it’s a limited run exclusive to attendees at Games Day. It wouldn’t have seen widespread distribution or entered deeply into the community of readers. The mainstream publication in 2012 then lacks the historical perspective of other titles released in that year. It wasn’t written with knowledge of the Heresy titles published between 2007 and 2012. It exists without the benefit of hindsight. That’s a tough environment for tracing lines of development and influence – and that’s just one short story.

Talking about chapbooks and supplementary collections also raises problems of scope. If you want to talk about the Heresy as a complete unit, what exactly does that mean? How do you define completion? What’s included, or not included? The Horus Heresy isn’t as simple as a single numbered series. It’s a setting that contains discrete narrative units. There are the fifty-four numbered titles, which run from Horus Rising in 2006 to The Buried Dagger in 2019. The Siege of Terra is the formal conclusion to the Heresy, but also technically a stand-alone series, numbering either books 55-64 or 1-10, depending on how you count. Then there’s the ‘Primarchs’ series, the Siege of Terra prequels, and floating stories like Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus, which happen at set points in the timeline but which aren’t included in the numbered volumes. Add in all the various repackagings and alternate formats, not to mention the narrative scraps littered throughout rulebooks and codexes over the past forty years, and the question rapidly spirals out of control. You can see why exploring the publication schedule is so important. It forces you to ask pointed questions about what you’re doing. If you want to discuss the Horus Heresy, how do you know you haven’t missed anything important? How do you make those decisions? With this series, I’d argue we’re best to start by thinking about the underlying narrative structure.

I’ve found it helpful to think about the Heresy in terms of comic books, rather than traditional novels. Like with comics, the Heresy has a number of core narrative threads built around key characters, each of whom exists in their own hermetically sealed bubble – almost as if they lived in a separate universe. It’s the kind of thing you see all the time in comics. There are Batman comics and Flash comics, and even though their lead characters technically exist in the same fictional reality, we don’t expect them to interact except on special occasions. The Heresy is the same. Each primarch occupies their own space. They follow their own threads, which have strictly limited significance for the wider narrative. When the Raven Guard capture the Perfect Fortress in Deliverance Lost (#18), the repercussions don’t flow through into other books. It doesn’t have narrative consequence later down the line; it’s not a staging point for some later conflict. It’s a battle in a Raven Guard book, and it doesn’t go any further than that. Even when characters do come together or cross over, their stories retain that limited consequence. The Thousand Sons and Space Wolves, for example, are posed as mortal enemies. They’re often found fighting each other. But their conflict exists within an independent narrative bubble that they both share. It doesn’t often spill over into other texts. It doesn’t really feature in the books about, say, Salamanders, or the Iron Warriors. The underlying narrative structure still hinges on the independence of each narrative thread.

So the Heresy works like comics. It’s a collection of distinct product lines that occasionally use interlinked narratives as cross-promotional events. That’s good for the reader, who’s freed up to pick out specific parts. They don’t have to read everything: they can follow the stuff they like. They still need a rough idea of the big picture, but they can dip in and out fairly easily. Framing the series in terms of comics publishing also brings into focus a number of the team’s creative decisions. The Heresy is a group project, written by nineteen authors over eighteen years. Characters do not belong to any one person. Some writers have clear preferences (Nick Kyme and Chris Wraight each focus respectively on the Salamanders and White Scars), but most characters are shared. The Dark Angels trilogy, for instance, has a different writer for each instalment. That sort of thing constrains how the Heresy deals with things like character and personality.

Characters in the Heresy tend to exist as fixed points. They have a template of set characteristics. Angron is angry, Fulgrim is decadent and vain. As in superhero comics, a character’s actions and experiences don’t necessarily catalyse change or personal development: they are expressions of a set template. On the rare occasion that characters do change, they tend to move from one fixed point to another. Their template will be modified. Crucially, that transition usually happens within the course of a single book, so that if the character is subsequently borrowed by anyone else, there will be a stable template saying how they’re supposed to behave. This pattern is most obvious with a character like Vulkan, who we’ve discussed before. In Vulkan Lives, Vulkan is captured, and at the end he gets free. In The Unremembered Empire, he goes crazy and then he dies. In Deathfire, he’s dead, and then he comes back to life. He exists at a string of fixed points, and the transition from one to another is treated as a narrative climax. For comparison, in Angel Exterminatus (#23), the primarch Fulgrim is shot in the head, and it’s not really a big deal. It seems like it should be a big deal, but it’s not. He doesn’t become cautious or vengeful. It doesn’t catalyse a shift out of one template and into another. It happens, he survives, and the story moves on, more or less unbothered.

That sticky type of character design has its drawbacks, but it also makes it much easier to determine the scope of a narrative analysis. Personally, I’m only reading the numbered volumes. I’m not going to read everything. I don’t need to. Books in the Heresy are designed to be modular parts. They are largely self-contained units, with limited spillover or interactions. Similarly, the events that happen in the Heresy are tools for characterisation rather than plot events that drive the story forward. The creative task for each writer is to articulate those characteristics in an interesting or compelling way, and only sometimes to propel the plot towards its terminus. In that sense, it’s not necessary to read everything in order to understand the story as a whole – because it’s less a story, so to speak, and more a series of portraits. If you understand those portraits, some of the story events can pass you by without creating massive gaps in your comprehension.