Praetorian of Dorn

I’ll be upfront. I don’t like this book. If I had to pick a least favourite book of the Horus Heresy, it would probably be this one. I really wasn’t looking forward to listening to it again to write this review. I’m glad I did re-listen to it though because it was a lot better than I remembered it. Still not good, just better than I remembered it.

This book is all about the Alpha Legion’s role in the leadup to the siege of Terra, and the response of the Imperial Fists. I should warn you upfront that if you’re hoping to see some Custodes in action, defending Terra’s Solar system as is their duty, you’re going to be disappointed. There is not a single Custodian in this book. Also, if you want to see Malcador totally in his element, scheming around the Alpha Legions plans and getting his spies to spy on their spies, you’ll be equally disappointed. This book is purely focused on the Imperial Fists versus the Alpha Legion.

This book is confusing in a bad way. It’s also quite hard to follow, and I’m realising now that I say that about a lot of books and maybe some of you think I’m just dense, but if you read this book I think you’ll see what I mean. For example, there’s a portion of the book where two battles are going on at once and we’re seeing it from three different perspectives, and they all sort of blur together so that it’s really hard to tell what’s going on. As a matter of fact, it took my ages to realise that there even were two separate battles.

Now you could make the argument that the book is confusing on purpose to simulate how to Imperial Fists feel fighting against the Alpha Legion, and I think that’s part of it, but it’s poorly done and the story really suffers from it.

The main plot of the story is fairly dry, and John French tries to compensate for this by inserting flashbacks of battles that have happened in the past. It’s a fair effort, but the relevance of these flashbacks to the main story is minimal at best and it’s fairly clear that they serve a two-fold purpose.

1. To forcefully insert some action into the stream of boring intrigue.
2. To help us get to know the main character of this book (and Imperial Fist named Archamus), who has barely appeared in the series up to this point.

The character development of Archamus feels forced and unearned. It’s as if the author is trying to cram too much into a single book. It also doesn’t help that there are multiple prevalent perspectives in this book.

In my opinion, the Alpha Legion parts are cooler than the Imperial Fists parts of this book, so some Imperial Fists fans may feel disappointed. Having said that, one of the aforementioned flashbacks is really cool, and I found myself wishing I could read a book about that battle instead.

As is often the case, it’s difficult for me to articulate exactly what irks me about this book without giving too much away, but I will simply say that many of the actions taken by various characters just don’t make sense. Now you may be thinking, “That’s the Alpha Legion for you.” And I can agree to an extent, but I would also argue that a story still has to make sense. This book just goes too far with trying to confuse the reader and making the Alpha Legion seem mysterious.

I don’t want to make it sound like I hated every single page of this book though, so I’ll touch on some of the elements I enjoyed:

We get to see the human operatives of the Alpha Legion in action and it’s probably the highlight of the book for me. The Alpha Legion treat their human element a lot better than pretty much any other legion, and that’s probably because they rely on them more than any other legion. It’s cool seeing how loyal these human operatives are and how they kind of feel like they as much a part of the legions as the space marines are.

We get an interesting look into how the Alpha Legion carries out missions and also how they feel about their own methodologies.

We also get to see Rogal Dorn talking and fighting. I’m not Dorn’s biggest fan but I know some people really like him, so I thought I’d mention it. He’s in this book a good amount.

You might enjoy this book if you like:

Rogal Dorn

The Imperial Fists

The Alpha Legion

But even then, you might not. If you do decide to read this book even after reading this review, good luck, I hope you somehow enjoy it more than I did. I for one, am just glad it’s over.

The Emperor Protects