Warhammer, Hell Divers, and Dark Descent… In Brief

Dropsite Massacre (Warhammer: The Horus Heresy)

If you’ve already read the first five books in The Horus Heresy or have properly steeped yourself in the grand and ever-growing mythology of the Warhammer universe, you’ll likely have no problem diving right into Dropsite Massacre. If you have no background at all regarding Horus, the traitor legions, the holocaust unleashed upon Isstvan III, and followed up with the staggering amount of damage done to the Empire on Isstvan V - as detailed here - then you’re probably going to be lost, confounded, and perhaps annoyed.

I’ve only recently gotten into the Warhammer books and video games, following Henry Cavill’s announcement that he was bringing this corner of geekdom to Amazon Prime video in the coming years. My introduction to it all was with the first installment in the incredibly expansive series of The Horus Heresy books (and no, I will not be reading all fifty million books on this subject) a couple years ago, and I’ve read through the first six or seven books. The Dropsite Massacre was given pretty short shrift in Fulgrim, so it’s nice to see John French expanding on that battlefront and letting such a consequential moment in Horus’s treachery get the breathing room it deserves. But, again, it’s not a terribly good starting place and given the large number of characters and shifting perspectives, it can be a tough read for the uninitiated. For those who have made it through Fulgrim, at the very least, it’s a pretty worthy sci-fi actioneer with some shades of horror, and French does a terrific job capturing the grittiness and hellacious aspects of war. I had a good time with it and am looking forward to making more progress with the Heresy as a whole soon… even if it will take me about 20 years to get through the list of books I’ve drafted based on research and the suggestions of more knowledgeable Warhammer fan(atic)s.

Hell Divers VII: Warriors by Nicholas Sansbury Smith (Narrated by R.C. Bray)

Get yourself somebody who loves you as much as Nicholas Sansbury Smith loves giving his characters battle-field amputations. Or at least as much as R.C. Bray loves to deliberately mispronounce real-world locations for no particular reason.

Warriors is the seventh — out of 12?! — books in the much-too-long Hell Divers series and is basically the same as previous entries. I love Nick, but I cannot fathom why this series needs another five books to wrap things up. By now, everything just feels same-old, same-old and Nick is basically just rewriting the same book over and over. The series has lost whatever freshness it had brought to the table with book one (a freshness which has thankfully been rediscovered with the excellent prequel novel Into the Storms) and feels like it should have concluded up here, rather than set things up for even more not-so-new adventures to come. Apparently these sold incredibly well for him and Blackstone Publishing that this particular horse had to be not just beaten to death but mashed into pulp.

That’s not to say Warriors is bad, just that it doesn’t feel particularly necessary in the grand scheme of things. It’s a serviceable time waster to be sure. There’s just nothing new or innovative here, and it follows the same patterns and tropes the previous books in this series established to a fault. There came a point late in the story where King Xavier’s life is in jeopardy, as usual, and I found myself wishing Smith would just kill him off in order to inject a certain measure of the unexpectedness.

Listening to it in audiobook is a mixed blessing, too. R.C. Bray, by and large, does a terrific job reading overall, but his decision to mispronounce so many geographical sites is certainly a choice. One that I don’t think is a particularly good one. I was jarred right out of the narrative every time he mangled the pronunciation of Florida, Aruba or Mount Kilimanjaro, and wished somebody on the production end would have smacked him upside the head and told him to read it properly. Alas, we get 16 hours of essentially the same Hell Divers stories we’ve gotten for the duration of the series thus far, and more of Bray’s forced-upon-us silliness.

Event Horizon: Dark Descent #3

One might think that there is absolutely no reason for a tie-in comic book prequel to a movie that was a critically lambasted box office failure to be this good. Granted, Event Horizon has become a cult classic in horror circles since its release 28 years ago, and it's pretty damn clear that writer Christian Ward and artist Tristan Jones are among its fans, myself included. Three issues in and this series keeps getting better and better. To be clear, the book started off pretty damn good. Now, I find myself lusting for an eventual deluxe, oversized hardcover edition with a slew of extras and an extensive cover art gallery.

Being a prequel book, we have a pretty clear idea where things are headed for this crew. It's kind of like Titanic in that way. We already know how it ends, so the point of the story lies in building toward that with an interesting cast to keep us entertained us while we wait for tragedy to strike. We certainly don't have to wait long for that tragedy, as the massive Event Horizon starship finds itself stuck in a literal interdimensional hell and a demonic king stalking its hallways, playing mind games amongst the scientists and engineers behind this experiment gone awry.

Issue 3 focuses on the ship's doctor, Peter, who was diagnosed with cancer two years earlier. He wants to die somewhere with a view "worthy of a thousand lifetimes." We know from the outset he's doomed, so it's just a matter of how he gets there. I won't spoil the particulars, but Jones's artwork is certainly worth the view, with some truly marvelous and horrifying splash pages and one particularly disturbing panel involving a conjoining of two crewmen that's spectacularly horrendous.

The opening splash page of the Event Horizon lost in the chaos realm is pin-up worthy, and the monstrosities of the chaos realm that have come to lay claim to the ship and crew are suitably gnarly. Looking at Jones's work, it's hard to not to feel as assaulted as the Horizon's passengers. There's so much atmosphere in these pages, with Ward's script and Jones's pencils working perfectly in synch with one another, that it's hard not to get lost inside the story. You certainly don't want to be there, but it's impossible to look away from. You have to turn those pages to see what awfulness comes next.

Ward's writing is endearing, too, immediately putting us on Paul's side and giving us somebody to root for. He also mixes in a certain bit of wry humor, like when one conjuration of a murdered colleague, who has a head riddled with glass shrapnel in a slight homage to Hellraiser, ensures their murderer to trust them because they still have "a very sharp mind." It's funny and grotesque in equal measure. But given that this is an Event Horizon book, it's the grotesque that ultimately wins out, and rightly so.