Book Review – Know No Fear

Warhammer 40K – I just finished reading the two latest books from the Horus Heresy series. Deliverance Lost and Know No Fear. Both were excellent reads and continue the detailed exploration of the pivotal events that shaped the Warhammer 40K universe as we know it today.

Deliverance Lost explores the actions of Corax, primarch of the Raven Guard Legion after the dropsite massacre. While I enjoyed the book, it left me feeling a bit let down. Most of the other Legion specific books go into great detail about the practices and culture of the Legion. This book focused almost solely on Corax's single minded quest to rebuild his legion to get back into the fight.

While it was nice to have the two paragraphs from the Raven Guard Index Astrates covered in more detail, I still feel like the story falls into the trap of these are the sneaky marines that do hit and run, they don't talk about what goes on.

In my mind the the real stars of the show are the Alpha Legion, the villians of this tale. We get to see more of their inner working in this book and see what drives them. I don't want to go into to much detail to spoil the surprises and plot twists. 

Know No Fear details the attack on Cath by the Word Bearers Legion. This is my favorite book in the series so far. Dan Abnett does a great job refecting the confusion caused by the attack with his writing style. The snippets of information remind me of the news casts during the 9/11 attacks and make the book very hard to put down.

Rather then focusing on one character throughout as most of the other books have done, Know No Fear jumps around telling the tale from multiple viewpoints and focuing on the scale of the conflict. 

This book filled in the gaps for me on why GW's poster boy marines weren't directly involved in most of the Heresy background material. From what I can remember there was a small blurb or two about the Ultramarines being sent to the far reaches of the galaxy and unable to reach Terra. This book explains exactly why they couldn't make it, and hints at the beginings of the Codex Astrates.