We were supposed to evenly divide these books, but since Jen has let her hatred of the Horus Heresy be known and Rogal Dorn: The Emperor’s Crusader is over 2 years old, I’m taking over for the last two books. Rogal Dorn is far from a favorite primarch of mine. I find him to be overly practical, pragmatic, and as such, a little boring. The only time I found him interesting was when he lashed out at Garro for accusing Horus of treachery, and when he killed Alpharius on Pluto, refusing to hear him out. (Really, Alpharius, did you think you talk your way out of Rogal Dorn’s wrath?) I love Gav Thorpe and all, but seriously, how can he make Dorn interesting?
Well, he almost didn’t. Until the very end.
The book opens with Rann, Sigismund, and a couple of other notable Imperial Fists overseeing the Palace renovations of war and wondering aloud why the Emperor chose Dorn to return to Terra to defend it and deal with the administration while Papa E hangs out in his basement. The conversation progresses to what moment made the Emperor choose Dorn, when Malcador suddenly appears and tells them it was a specific campaign 160 years ago. So before the civil war, back when Sigismund was just a sergeant in the templars, and back before Horus was Warmaster, the Imperial Fists, the Emperor’s Children, the Dark Angels, and the Luna Wolves ventured out into the Occluda Noctis to bring the worlds to compliance.
I have this feeling that Gav Thorpe presented his editors at BL the second half of the book as the full novel, and they returned it to him demanding another 100 pages. The first half of the book is how Dorn’s brusqueness and brutal honesty ruffles the feathers of his brothers, especially the Lion. It’s painfully slow, and the real meat of the story doesn’t pick up until they all separate. Even with the dulcet tones of Jonathan Keeble serenading me, I nearly bailed on the book here. Not even the interactions between the brothers entertained me, outside of one quote from Dorn when he tore down their war strategies: “You each choose to interpret what the Emperor said to fit your plans, rather than building your plans to heed the Emperor.”
Although I do admit the interjections of the recordings of a remembrancer kept me entertained. The audiobook made these parts a lot of fun as well, for the record.
But scolding his brothers about their strategies is not he became the Praetorian of the Emperor. (Thank the Throne for that, or this would have been the most boring book in the entire series, and that’s saying something.)
When the Legions split up to cover more ground across the Occluda Noctis and try to hunt down an elusive enemy they call “the Unseen.” The Unseen have destroyed all of the scout expeditions in to the region, and even more frustratingly so, they move through the warp quite differently from the Imperials or even the aeldari. What’s worse is that they appear to be pariahs, completely unseen to the Librarius and the Navis Nobilite.
I was on board for all of this. It was half horror, half mystery, and it kept me wholly on the edge of my seat as the Imperial Fists unwove the threads tying the Unseen together. And then I laughed pretty hard when they discovered the best strategy was spawn-camp the Unseen at their warp gates.
However, I did not see the ending with the Unseen coming at all. I figured the story was about Dorn’s stalwart patience with tracking down the Unseen and ending their threat to the Occluda Noctis, that this is what made him worthy of defending Terra. Hoo boy was I dead wrong. I was on a morning walk when I got to the end of the story, and my jaw literally dropped open. I don’t think I closed it again until Rann asked Sigismund in the present if he thought Malcador was hovering by them, knowing what they were going to say, and waiting to interject himself into the conversation. Then I giggled.
Even though I enjoyed how it ended, the book was way too slow of a go. I wonder if Gav Thorpe was really the right author to write about Dorn. But he didn’t write the primarch novel for the Lion, which did shock me, so perhaps the authors in this series were tasked to write about primarchs they wouldn’t normally write about? Either way, this short novel could have easily been slashed in half for a short and sweet novella. But at least it was still short.
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