Horus Heresy: Scars: Episode V (Ebook Review)

As with the last book review this is posted in full on http://thefoundingfields.com/ and this is simply a preview. If you want to see it in full then please follow the link through to there.

Things take a turn for the worse as the Space Wolves continue to lose their fight against the Alpha Legion, the Khan faces off against a recent arrival and Yesugei discovers the nightmare the galaxy has become in his absence.

Easily broken up into three spate stories, Episode V finally feels as if this series has some fraction of understanding of how episodic formats are supposed to work. Events are visibly progressed, storylines within the episode are broken up and scattered throughout and new developments are foreshadowed. While it still lacks any kind of three act structure, it’s the first book since I that feels as if it was intended to work as an episode of something bigger. Even the stories themselves, two of them anyway, have definitive effectively isolated beginnings and endings which promise more. The other, unfortunately, ends on yet another cliffhanger.

The most promising aspect here is that it seems violence is being used sparingly. It would have been easy to have the void battle between the Space Wolves and Alpha Legion stem the entire book, but it’s coming to a close after only a couple of episodes. Not a definitive conclusion so much as a break, allowing for further development beyond the conflict and not repeat the mistake of Battle for the Abyss of seemingly relentless fighting. The only criticism of this is we only see a small fraction of this titanic engagement in space, and that’s from Bjorn’s eyes. Once he stops focusing upon it, we get little to nothing further describing the frantic battle going on. Almost all of it is told to us through very fleeting communications and little to none is actually shown. On the upside though, we do get one of the book’s best brawls thus far because of this.