Mortis

Slow at first but worth persevering as the climax of the different stories are quite good.
Some of the plot threads are definitely filler to expand on a main plot of another Titan battle, but the battle scenes are well written overall.
There are a few golden moments and reveals towards the end that are good but a few bits of the story are definitely to fill up the 500 pages.

I really enjoy John French’s additions to the canon. He really gets the setting and can weave very detailed stories without sacrificing character along the way. This wasn’t quite as jaw-droppingly epic as Saturnine, Dan Abnett is the king of this kind of writing, still - it comes close, considering it had a huge chunk of plot to bring up and deal with.

The only point that really felt like a flaw, however, was the end of Perturabo’s play. Amidst 30,000+ words dedicated solely to characters we don’t know and are mostly there to die in the Grimdark horror of war, we get about 2 pages where Perturabo and the Iron Warriors have a quick look outside, have a four line soliloquy, and - bam - they’re off, never mentioned again. Badly judged. I know we need to see some of the combatants and views from the line, but honestly - Perturabo! Just downs tools on his masterpiece and says “hey-ho, never mind…” and we, the readers, get nothing. It reminded me of tv shows where an actor asks to be written out and gets the boot in a duff, perfunctory manner. I’m not sure who Perturabo’s agent is, but I think she can legitimately complain about her clients rather pathetic end.

5 stars for the breadth and depth and finding ways to keep talk about mega explosions and blood rain from growing dull.

1 star for totally forgetting to write Perturabo’s exit and apparently publishing the rough notes version with the starred coda: must finish writing this bit…

The Siege of Terra series has so far been rather disappointing compared to the Horus Heresy series. The Praetorian of Dorn was the last truly excellent entry, with the normally dependable Abnett’s Saturnine and the Solar War being passable entries. So we arrive at Mortis - purportedly the story of titan warfare on Terra. Sounds thrilling, right? Well, sadly, it isn’t. Somehow, there is little drama to the limited tactical vocabulary of these machine confrontations, with potential game changers like vortex missiles and psy-titans somehow wittled away for little impact. Where are the Banelords set up in Titan death? Instead we have something which was not set up previously - it is as if this writer had not even read the earlier entries except in summary. But this is not the novel’s biggest problem, not at all. In fact the titan battles were bearable. No, what comes betwixt is so bad I found myself skim reading. There are subplots going on with time-travelling or dreaming (I had no idea which) perpetuals who seem to have stolen the Subtle Knife from Pullma which were confusing to the point of being infuriating. The writer was attempting to pull of clever literary allusion to Paradise Lost, Greek myth etc but as a writer and literary student myself, who should LOVE this stuff, I feel it did not work at the levels it was trying to do. The overall effect is boring and confusing (yes I said that already) and nothing has any consequence at all. But I persevered to the end - because it would end with some kind of conclusion right? But no, we were denied even that. The novel does not reach the conclusion even of its premise, and there is no more cardinal sin. This novel is filler and u can skip it with likely no loss of comprehension. My advice is do so.