Deliverance Lost: Ghosts of Terra (The Horus Heresy)

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Ever since book three I have been obsessed with Corax and now finally fifteen books later he has his own novel. The Raven Guard prepare for a last stand but at the last minute are rescued by Commander Branne, the commander of the garrison left behind on their homeworld of Deliverance. Deliverance Lost, by Gav Thorpe, is about the rebuilding of Corvus Corax’s legion, the XIX Legion Raven Guard, after the betrayal from his brother Horus and a number of his other brothers at, what is known as, The Dropsite Massacre. I'd put off reading this entry in the Horus Heresy series for a long while and it is in fact the book that stalled the series for me.

After his badass, but ultimately having to retreat, showing at the Dropsite Massacre there have only been scattered bits of Corax here and there about who he is and what is going on with his Legion, and most of that stuff was just rehashings of what we already knew. Otherwise, the book is quite frustrating - while there is the classic hubris meeting nemesis, Corax starts with barely a Legion left and ends with barely a Legion left, with no peak in between. The Raptors are tested in battle in an assault on a Word Bearers station on Cruciax and prove effective if somewhat over-eager. The characters just don't quite drive the story enough, nor are they memorable on their own, though there is one in particular I should cover. Sometimes the only thing that sets these books apart is the level of descriptive talent that evokes the mood and brings the horror to an eye-peeling visceral level.

Unfortunately, the "read every thought the character is having as they're having it" isn't so successful with most of the Ravenguard or Imperium characters.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Fortunately there are no whining, attention-grabbing remembrancers here, they're all dead, along with SEVENTY-FIVE THOUSAND Raven Guard. They don't know what their mission is and they don't even recognise each other, and at least one of them becomes more sympathetic to the Ravens as he shares death and fear with them. He keeps making demands of the apothecary and magos working on the gene-tech that are unreasonable and too much, too quickly, and when Branne confronts him about the rash, overzealous nature of the first batches of Raptors, Corax gets significantly angry and shrugs it all off - instead of listening to the sound advice of his senior staff, he wants to expand the recruitment instead of doing a thorough job, to hit some arbitrary goals he set for his Legion. Gav Thorpe's stuff is always worth a read, at least in my opinion and he manages to humanize Space Marines in a way that some authors struggle with.

Tending to their wounds, the bloodied Space Marines endeavour to replenish their numbers and take the fight to the traitor Warmaster. Bref, le plus important dans tout cela, c'est qu'aucun ne se doute qu'ils sont infiltrés, trop concentrer à fuir puis à retourner rapidement sur Terra pour demander conseil auprès de l'Empereur. However the Alpha Legion infiltrators who pose as Raven Guard bring a far more interesting level of intrigue.