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“Death is nothing compared to vindication.”
I might as well get this out of the way. This book is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It contains physical and psychological torture, and graphic descriptions of mutilated bodies. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, this probably isn’t the book for you. I myself, managed to get through it, but did find it upsetting at times. What do you expect from a book about Konrad Curze.
Despite the torture I managed to quite enjoy this book. It’s a really succinct montage of Konrad Curze’s decent into madness. Not that he was ever sane to begin with but we do certainly see a decline. The way this story is written is quite interesting.
The main arc of the story takes place in Curze’s dread palace on Tsagualsa (and after listening to the audio book, I finally know how to pronounce it). The Night Haunter has always know how he would die and tonight, his time is finally up. The wait is intercut with short stories about Curze’s decline and the decline of the eighth legion. The stories are being told by Curze but they’re not all from his perspective. The unreliability of Curze as a narrator adds the element of ambiguity that I love in Warhammer lore. The stories are picked by Curze to make a point and if you know Curze then you’ll guess what that point is. Justice is important, nothing is his fault.
The story is essentially a grand tour of the Night Haunter’s head. Needless to say it’s a scary and messy place. In this book, as always, Curze walks the line between being a straight up monster, and being a sympathetic character who’s a product of his poor circumstances. This was abit of an emotional roller coaster and about halfway through the book I decided that Curze was irredeemable and completely undeserving of sympathy, but by the end, I found myself feeling unsure again.
Seeing Konrad Curze’s then new model in the White Dwarf got me into 40k and for that he’ll always have a special place in my heart. I don’t like him as a person obviously, but as a character I find him fascinating and I was like a kid in a candy store with this book.
As of writing this review, the only other book from the ‘Primarchs’ series that I’ve read was, ‘Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix’ and I expected this book to more or less follow the same formula. I really enjoyed the look into the Great Crusade that ‘Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix’ gave us and I was initially disappointed when I discovered that ‘Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter’ was set decades after the heresy, when I was really interested in an earlier Curze, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the short stories Curze tell date quite far back. So if you’re interested in Curze’s origins, I think you’ll like this book.
There was a strange sort of black comedy all through this book, which I think was really useful in lightening the mood and helped me get through it.
I thought that the human POVs in this book were really well utilised. I feel that if this book had been solely from Curze’s perspective, we would have lost out on just how scary he is to others. I won’t say too much more, only that this book was a great reminder of just how terrifying Curze was to other people.
This is also a fairly decent book for Night Lords fans. The focus is of course, on the Lord of Night himself, but a few fan favourites do appear. Sevatar especially gets a focus. I also learned a lot more than I expected to learn about Shang of all people.
So, if you like the primarchs, I’d recommend this book. If you’re a hardcore Night Lords fan, I’d also recommend this book. Even if you’re neither of these things, this is still a really good book, it’s just a question of whether or not you’re willing to sit through the torture.
The Emperor Protects