Fear To Tread Review

SPOILER ALERT

The Horus Heresy only continues to ramp up in action. Most recently we had the excellent Know No Fear and the insightful The Primarchs, and now we take a trip back to the beginning of the Heresy in Fear To Tread, detailing the Blood Angels' first actions in the bloody civil war. Now James Swallow is here to describe their first blooding in the Heresy. 

The action starts on a world where aliens known as the Nephilim have enslaved the human population, and are crushed by a combined force of Blood Angels and Luna Wolves. In the aftermath of the battle Sanguinius finds one of his sons, Brother Alotros, consumed by the Red Thirst, whom players of 40k will recognise (being the major gene-flaw in the Blood Angels' coding). He dispatches the warrior, but Horus has seen this, and promises that he will do his utmost best to fix it. Ha, ha, ha. Years later and Horus has now risen from Davin as a treacherous snake, and is putting his plans into motion. With the guidance of his daemonic masters, Kyriss (a Keeper of Secrets), Ka'Bandha (Khorne's mightiest Bloodthirster) and Samus (who has now appeared in Horus Rising, Know No Fear and Fear To Tread), Horus devises a plan that will bring the Blood Angels to the Signus Cluster where Sanguinius will be killed and his legion brought to the traitor side. Aiding this is Erebus, the biggest bastard of the entire Warhammer universe, taking the body of Captain Tagas who fell at Murder from Fabius, whom we discover posesses bodies from all of the legions. Most Heresy buffs would have seen the Red Angel in the Collected Visions book, and Swallow nods to that here, in a big way. 

And so the Signus Cluster gets absolutely annihilated, a shady soldier from Davin known as Bruja promising to deliver the Cluster's people from harm only to summon daemons into their flesh. The Blood Angels are summoned to the system and immediately all hell breaks loose, with crewmen committing suicide, blood leaking from every panel, ships being overrun by spectral demons and even a planet cracking open to form the eight-pointed star of Chaos. Creepy. One memorable moment is when the planet of Holst comes alive, flinging chunks of debris at nearby ships and even managing to break one open with a lucky shot. It's interesting to finally get an exact number of Sanguinius' sons, hovering around the 120,000 mark, making them bigger than many others. During the course of the book many thousands are slain by the daemon hordes though it's nothing like the incredible losses suffered by the Ultramarines at Calth (more than half the fleet and up to 100,000 marines).

At this point the fighting develops/devolves into a grueling punch-up where the massed Blood Angels meet a huge daemon army on the open plains of Signus Prime. I didn't like this, and it's happened too much in the series already. Its the 31st Millenium, with giant nukes and lasers and whatnot, though these eight-foot superhumans still want to run at each other in close combat with swords, fists and axes? Why? I would have seen Signus being a ruined city criss-crossed with lava and treacherous chasms whilst lightning rips the sky and tornadoes tear through the streets. Not some random plain too much like the battle at the beginning of the book. Know No Fear was unique in the fact that the Ultramarines were either dying, running or defending, or a mixture of the three. Not charging out into a field with banners flying and swords gleaming. 

Towards the end we begin to see the beginnings of the flaw within the Blood Angels, as Ka'Bandha strikes down five hundred marines with one blow, the psychic shockwave putting Sanguinius into a trance. Then, the Blood Angels get hit big-time with the Black Rage and go ape on the daemons, literally ripping them apart with their bare hands and over-running them in hours. Raldoron and Meros, an apothecary make a journey to the lair of Kyriss whilst Kano, a former Librarian, summons the other ex-Librarians to try and revive their Primarch. Sanguinius awakens, then kicks the crap out of both Kyriss and Ka'Bandha before seeing the ragefire, which is a potent daemon 'mist' that inspires fury in all that surround it. He has a choice whether to take the ragefire and become a traitor like Horus, leaving his sons without the flaw for eternity, or to watch them devolve into berserkers just like the World Eaters. Meros goes "nope" and takes in it, becoming the Red Angel of old lore. 

The characters in this are interesting. Azkaellon and Raldoron are your typical tight-arse and good-guy respectively, Warden Annellus is your up-tight chaplain, Captain Amit (the Flesh Tearer) is the honest yet fierce butcher, and Meros your compassionate hero. However the best characters are Sanguinius and Kano. Sangunius tortured psyche is shown many times in this book, however not to the emo extent of Corax in Deliverance Lost. Kano is an honest marine and fiercely devoted to his father, and I'm sure we'll see some more of him at the Siege of Terra. There are some other characters in this book, namely Space Wolves and Word Bearers; the first are there to keep an eye on Sanguinus after the events of Prospero, and the latter are there to do what all Word Bearers do; mess things up in a bad way. Don't bother too much thinking about them, they're secondary and like trillions of other people in the Heresy meet their gruesome end quickly.

This is a great book, and its fantastic to finally see the Blood Angels get some time to shine. 

9/10