After more than 60 books spread out over 18 years the Horus Heresy series is finally over, so please be kind to the Warhammer 40,000 tragics in your life

GamesActionWarhammer 40kAfter more than 60 books spread out over 18 years the Horus Heresy series is finally over, so please be kind to the Warhammer 40,000 tragics in your lifeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: Black Library)

The Emperor and Horus�s final duel

For the foundational myth of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Horus Heresy had an extremely prosaic origin. The reason it exists, this massive fallen-paradise fairytale taking place 10,000 years in the setting’s past, is that Games Workshop couldn’t afford to put miniatures representing two different factions in a box back in 1988.

Rewind to the ’80s. Adeptus Titanicus is Warhammer 40,000 with mechs, presumably developed in an attempt to come at BattleTech’s crown. But a boxed set with 12 miniature Titans is expensive to produce, and to cut costs the two opposing forces of six giant robots have to be identical. A civil war is written into the setting’s history to explain why the Imperium was fighting a mirror match against palette-swapped versions of its own mechs, and that civil war is called the Horus Heresy.

To be fair those 54 Horus Heresy books aren’t all novels, with a substantial number being anthologies of extremely skippable short stories tangential to the main story, and we only get to 10 Siege of Terra books because the finale, The End and the Death, was so long it had to be released as three separate volumes. Still, whichever way you count it, and even if you ignore the comic book and audio dramas, the thing as a whole is an extraordinarily long piece of work. Now that I’ve finally finished the last book I suddenly have all this free time and no idea what to do with it.

Just kidding, I’m going to play even more videogames.

(Image credit: Games Workshop)

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As for the action, the climax that was once a two-page short story now takes up a substantial chunk of the final volume, and is drawn out like a TV show based on an ongoing manga that’s running out of stories to adapt. Actually, given the way attacks are described as being too fast to see and the duel takes on a metaphysical form explained with tarot cards, anime’s not a bad comparison. I’m not saying Horus activates the Emperor’s trap card, but it’s close and that absolutely rules. If you weren’t here for superhuman men biffing each other across time, space, and causality in excruciating detail you’d have given up on the series long ago.

(Image credit: Games Workshop)

The Emperor faces off against Horus during the Horus Heresy

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