Product Description

Horus sends the Worldbearer space marines to the planet Calth, where they are to ambush the loyalist Ultramarines.  In addition to the main fleet, Horus sends a new doomsday battleship for use againsy the Ultramarines home world of Ultramar.  A small strike force travels space and the warp to delay or destroy the doomsday ship to save the Ultramarines.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14532 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781844165490
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Author of the Souldrinkers and Grey Knights series, freelance writer Ben Counter is one of Black Library’s most popular SF authors. An Ancient History graduate and avid miniature painter, he lives near Portsmouth, England.

Customer Reviews

Not Even Doom Music...
I love the WH40K universe and the lore and fluff behind it. The Horus Heresy series has been really awesome overall -- I could even tolerate Descent of Angels (loved the part where the Mechanicum bulldozes their continent to make a stadium for the Emperor).

Despite the general quality of the HH books though, Battle for the Abyss is just bad. Ben Counter focuses far too much time on writing long-winded and flaccid "action" scenes , and lets character development twist in the wind. Even when he is describing fight scenes, the descriptions are repetitive, banal, and just... well, boring. Like some of the other reviewers here, I found myself skipping pages. At times it was like reading a power point slide describing a fight in bullet format. Yawn.

Reducing a potentially rich story arc behind the Horus Heresy down to a dry play-by-play tactical account spattered with cheesy and meaningless (albeit mercifully brief) chatter between paper doll-cutout characters really makes this novel fail it. Hard.

That being said...

This is standard-issue Ben Counter writing. It's my own fault for buying it in the first place. Buyer beware with this author.

Horrible
This book is lacking in just about everything. There is ZERO character development. Astartes start dying left and right and you will feel absolutely nothing for them because they haven't been fleshed out at all. More effort was put into a character that dies 10 pages in to the story than any of the "main" characters throughout.Even the names of the characters are completely retarded.

Worse yet the plot is just lame. It's a lead up to a lead up to a fight thats a sideline to an actual battle. This book can safely be left behind, it's an abomination in the Horus Heresy series.

I was very excited to see the Ultramarines in the Horus Heresy but more time is spent on the other legions which seem to just be thrown in randomly to begin with. It just so happens the Thousand Sons and the World Eaters are on the same dock with the Ultramarines and Space Wolfs and they all go take off after a mystery ship by themselves without ever contacting anyone else. I mean the plot is a joke. It's so horribly unbelievable that half way through you'll be wondering why the hell you bought the book.

This book is a dud, like Descent of Angels. The Black Library better start putting out better books in this series before they kill it completely. This rubbish won't cut it by a long shot.

An OK side story in the Heresy
A lot of readers of the Horus Heresy series complained about the fact that the previous two books (Descent of Angels and Legion) did not advance the epic where it left off at the end of Fulgrim.

If you felt that way, this book isn't going to help that at all.

I personally enjoyed the previous two books, (especially Legion) because they reveal a lot of things about the the Astartes Chapters they dealt with, their Primarchs, histories and various plots leading up to the Heresy. Battle for the Abyss has almost nothing like that at all.

It's plot is interesting enough and the book itself is nicely written, but it doesn't feel like a dramatic part of the Horus Heresy epic. Since the story mostly only involves relatively low ranking Astartes, it could very easily have been made into a regular "40K" novel with a few tweaks to the characters (basically by making the Chaos guys more "Chaotic").

If you are following the Horus Heresy series, you are probably going to want to end up reading it no matter what...just lower the expectations for new revelations/Heresy story advancement and enjoy some decent Space Marine action.