The End and the Death Vol 2

By Dan Abnett

So, I’ve just finished The End and the Death Vol 2. This will be a spoiler filled review, so there’s your warning.

That was a marathon audiobook (my hard copy has been delayed a week by amazon, hopefully that’s not affecting too many people). The book got split into 3 volumes, originally supposed to be 2, but it feels like this was a mistake. Let’s start with why.

The End...in three books

This book really is symptomatic of some of the long running issues I have with the Warhammer editing, so let’s start with some of the bad points. There seems to be little distinction between necessary prose and story and plot development. That’s not to say I don’t expect a small interlude where a human is running through the battle scene of superhuman warriors shooting a blast of superheated sun at each other or a world eater eviscerates his enemy, but even these can take place as a part of key character’s or events and experiences, or have some kind of purpose.

Between the key character and plot development, there are constant distractions with seemingly no rhyme nor reason. And I say this as a huge Dan Abnett fan. In the audiobook, you seem to jump point of view every single chapter, but some of the chapters are only a few paragraphs long! Note that the audiobook is also over 18 hours long and this soon becomes tedious. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was to catch up with characters in the series. Imagine if all the scenes were to revisit people we haven’t heard from, but whom are caught up in the events on Terra. At least it would have a sense of gravitas to know the endings for these characters. Horus Heresy has often felt disjointed.

Nevetheless, this book is good. And, to talk about what happens, yes Sanguinius dies, which personally was a relief. I was concerned they would retcon it. And the end fight is written really well, Sanguinius is bludgeoned as - I quote ‘a disobedient dog’ – in quite a brutal way. Fitting and memorable, even quite sad for one so noble. You really get a sense of Horus’s arrogance and disdain when some of this fight is written from his perspective too.

I was fearful too when Ferrus Manus seemed like he was coming back to life, but instead he appears as some kind of avatar of his spirit – perhaps not really him, but really him at the same time – maybe not him in physical form bur representative of what he would say and do. This book does a good job of not tearing up the established lore, but ever so slightly straddling the line towards it.

Chaos & Order

Time has frozen due to the meeting of material and immaterial, and so events get quite jumbled. ‘The thing begun will still occur, but the result will still be different.’ Ahriman explains – history has been set, but the events of made time misaligned on Terra, so there is room for change. I guess this is to give Abnett licence to change some things. This was handled quite well, though – Oll and John find out they have to retrace their steps to ensure that the earlier versions of themselves find their way here - a mind melting time paradox that actually didn’t feel out of place.

We finally start seeing the Oll Persson and John Grammaticus arc, one which I’ve been critical of generally, start to finally unravel. Their role is to convince the Emperor to not utilise the forces of chaos in his final battle – which, originally, he intended as he feared he was not strong enough to beat Horus and Chaos. But by doing so, he would become something even more terrible – a true God himself, if he reneged on his policy of rationality and distancing himself from emotion. This is a trap, to entice him to become perhaps another, worse God himself. If such a thing is possible. I personally liked this approach to the lore. It provided a twist that was speculated by fans – that the Emperor is the Dark King that has been referred to in other books – and yet did not really retcon much of what has long been known. Similarly, it provides a good reason for the presence and importance of Oll and John, something which has to my mind often been too vague to really care that much about them. This time, they actually mattered and provided interesting perspective.

Shallow and deep at the same time

The strange thing about this book it has so much content and yet it often feels shallow. Aside from some of the key plot points that I’ve just mentioned, which for sure are deep and resounding enough – it feels like some of the minor fights don’t really matter, and also there are many loose ends from vol 1 that aren’t really tied up, but which do appear – in other words, not that much happens with them in this book. For example, we still have Basilio Fo, Ahriman searching for a book, the encounter with Corswain and the Dark Angels and the Death Guard, Guilliman and the retribution fleet, Valdor encountering Abaddon is ‘tee’d up’ but we don’t really see anything crucial happen. That’s the thing with volume 2: the crucial events are going to happen in volume 3, and I suspect that’s going to be a better, more engaging book. I just hope it devotes adequate time to the key events. Some of the key events in volume 2 did have plenty of time devoted to them, but there’s also a lot of events where nothing really happened of importance whilst a lot of seemingly spurious or non-important events also occurred. Which makes it quite an unbalanced book.

Fortunately, Abnett’s writing is still great. And it is truly complemented by Jonathan Keeble’s reading of the audiobook, especially through the action sequences. Here’s an example and I open quote:

“Open them!” Raldoron yells to Furio and his terminators. How long since their lord passed through them? Five minutes? Ten? An hour? Time has lost its form entirely. It feels to Ika Sati, that they have been fighting in this bloody chamber for the whole of his life. An endless purgatory of carnage. How long has Sanguinius been cut off and alone? Part 8 – Chapter 16 – Fragments

Final score

The End and the Death Volume 2 is not a perfect book. The repeated refrains of different characters of the title is cringey; there’s plenty of extraneous scenes, some philosophical sections vascillate between bemusing and interesting. But certain scenes capture that magic – Abaddon blaming Erebus as the latter tells him he was partly at fault for what’s happened, time shifting and distorting everything; Vulkan and Malcador’s resolute duty; the perpetuals finally figuring out what is going on and of course the epic encounter of Sanguinius and Horus. It’s not perfect, and will probably be the weakest of the three volumes, but you’ll still want to read it.

7/10