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Context for those of you who haven't gotten this far into the series yet; The End & The Death is a trilogy that details the final 'famous' moments of the Horus Heresy. It begins with the Emperor gathering his remaining Primarchs to him and teleporting aboard Horus' flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, then Sanguinius fighting his way to the Lupercal's Court and getting killed, and then the Emperor walking in and fighting Horus to the death.
The first big criticism of this trilogy is; those three statements are appropriate summaries of Parts I, II and then III, respectively. Having said that and not underplayed those summaries by very much at all, Parts I and II are over 18 hours long, and Part III is over 14 hours long.
That's a monstrous amount of book, making the trilogy clock in at over 50 hours total. For reference, the infamously brick-like War & Peace novel is a 60-hour audiobook. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is 63. The entire King James Bible is a cosy 86 hours.
Way, WAY fewer significant events occur in all of The End & The Death than in The Lord of the Rings. And yet at the same time, there's room for so much more to happen that doesn't. For a series that is already over 750 hours long, somehow a lot of TE&TD is filler that doesn't touch upon the parts that I actually care about.
For example; in Part I the book ends with Garviel Loken walking away from Kirrel Sinderman. Sinderman plays no further significant part in the plot and contributes nothing to any character that does... But he has multiple-hour long sections on both Parts II and III, for some reason.
After Part I, Sigismund also has multiple-hour long sections, including a sub-plot about hunting a Death Guard champion who we've never heard of before and is of no objective significance to either Sigismund's personal development or the main plot.
There's a brand new character in Part I named Ollanius Pious. No, not that Ollanius Pious - he's just some guy who we follow around for a few Chapters and then he dies pointlessly, like so many other D-plot characters from the rest of the series, presumably because Dan Abnett thought it would be an Easter egg or some in-joke or something.
There's an entire hour-long monologue by Horus in Part III where he describes himself fighting the Emperor, stream-of-consciousness style, in what I can only think of as anime-esque contrivances; teleporting through different dimensions of the Warp that we have never heard of before, describing obscure and entirely fictitious combat 'techniques' and so on. It's basically just a list of all the words that Dan Abnett knows. ALL of them.
Meanwhile...
We don't see Guilleman's fleet arrive and do anything, except in epilogue. The escape from the Vengeful Spirit is squashed in with the installation of the Emperor onto the Golden Throne AND the Scouring AND another epilogue all in the final two hours of Part III.
In Magical Christmas Land where I edit the series, TE&TD would be only two novels about the Emperor assaulting the Vengeful Spirit, and I'd cut that down by making sure there'd be a separate novel about how the Dark Angels try to reignite the Astronomican and are saved at the last moment by Sigismund's arrival. That might even be a short-story because although the Dark Angels kind of deserve a good story in the HH series for once, it's not THAT important in the grand scheme of things. If someone had said in passing, "The Astronomican is weak but a heroic contingent of the Imperial Fists have managed to keep it ignited despite everything", then no one would have thought any more about it and we wouldn't have to be reminded of the endless, interminable drama about which side Cypher is on.
Even if you *have* to tell that story, it's B-roll to the main event and just serves to hand-wave a way for the last couple of Chapters to be tied up in a bow. Just... Put it aside where it can grow into something worth reading, refraining from bloating an already hefty chronicle beyond tolerance, and far out of reach of Mitchell Scanlon.
That all being said... I kind of get it.
It occurred to me during Part I during a third chapter about the daemon Samus, chanting his endless rhyme about being the first and the last and I am what I am, etc. It was boring me to sleep, and I realised that it was perhaps deliberately lullaby-like. There was a certain sing-song cadence to the narrative; song, as in the classic means of delivering a Saga.
TE&TD is a modern attempt at Beowulf - it's almost not intended to be sat and read as a narrative, it's a semi-in-universe recounting of key events, which are not necessarily accurate because they're being recited as mythology.
This has come up before in the HH series - everything is 'canon', but not everything is 'correct', kind of thing. TE&TD is the culmination of this; the series passes from consistent, coherent 'narrative' during the high-ideals of the Crusade, when the Remembrancer Order still exists, and devolves into 'fairy tale' just like it would appear to the surviving populace of 30k Terra.
I admire the attempt, and it's very clever. We're not really told what happens between Horus' death and the arrival of Guilleman because no one really knows what was happening during that time, and it's more special for being in our minds rather than captured in print.
It's also difficult, and at times tedious to listen to. I criticised Graham McNeill a lot for this when I was reading Fulgrim; a torrent of purple-prose in desperate need of a stern editor. TE&TD isn't quite so bad as that, but it's more than reminiscent of one of the stodgiest, least thrilling novels in the series.
I know someone who freely admitted that when they reached the part where the Emperor delivered the fatal blow to Horus, they stopped listening and didn't bother with the last 2.5 hours of the last book, because they knew it just wasn't going to be of any worth. And they were right - I listened to it because I'm just sick like that, and couldn't leave it undone after so much investment, but I can't honestly say that I've glad that I did it. The last few hours are interesting, but they're really not very entertaining.
~50 hours of audiobook, and while I was yearning for it to just be over (I skipped more than an hour of "Horus fighting the Emperor" across several chapters and it did not make an appreciable difference to my understanding of the narrative) I have to admit that I'm finding myself wanting one more book, to know what happens next. I want to see the legendary fight where Lion loses his **** and puts a sword through Leman Russ. I want to see Guilleman's epic journey through the warp - the one which apocryphally left him the last sane person on his ship and holding the tiller in his own hand (which seemingly didn't make it into this version of events). I want to watch Guilleman squirm as everyone asks him, just where the hell where you? I want to see the birth of the Codex Astartes, and Rogal Dorn donning the Pain Glove to convince himself to let it happen.
Are we going to get those stories? By all accounts that I could find, probably not and certainly not as part of the Horus Heresy or Siege of Terra. Maybe they'll rebrand for 'Horus Heresy Era 3: The Scouring' proper, or something, but I wouldn't optimistically say that it'll happen. By now a lot of the 'main' authors that made the Horus Heresy into international best sellers have begun to move on from GW, or even retire, and it'd be a big gamble to hand off the next generation of stories to the next generation of writers, praying that there's still interest in the same core set of characters that have been around since 2006.
I kind of hope they do it. This is the part that I want to know about, at long last; we've always known that Horus kills Sanguinius and then mortally wounded the Emperor, but what I want to know is what where the Nighthaunter goes in the immediate aftermath of the Siege, and what the Khan has to say when he wakes up. This is a chance to move away from boltor-porn and back to the character-driven dialogues that first made the HH series so different and drew us into the universe in the first place.
Just... Please, no more books about Tallarn. We don't care about Tallarn. No one has ever cared about Tallarn. I'm sorry John French, but at least Ordo Sinister was pretty good!