Primarchs: Ferrus Manus

Feels like half a story? I appreciate some of the details but this really lacked the character development of all the previous Primarchs books I’ve read.

One simple way to include to improve this story about Primarch Ferrus Manus would be to, you know, actually put Ferrus Manus into the story. Yes, he makes an appearance here and there: completely one dimensional, perpetually enraged, with no backstory, no explanation, no justification or anything.

Here's what I've come to realize about this Primarch series. Half of them are just absolutely excellent: ANGRON was terrific, RUSS was excellent, and CURZE was almost surreal it was so good.

But half of the series seem to be essentially spare stories that were laying around that have been re-purposed to fill out the series. FULGRIM told us absolutely nothing about Fulgrim, except that he likes to say "perfection" a lot. CORAX was unreadably boring. Likewise, this story has essentially nothing to do with Ferrus Manus. If you want endless pages of space combat badly-written space fighter combat and and an impenetrably dense subplot, then you may really like this book.

I have read every single one of the novels in the HORUS HERESY and SIEGE OF TERRA series as well as all of the Primarch books. You could throw half of them away and greatly improve the quality of the 40 K universe. There are three or four writers – Dan Annette comes to mind --that hit home runs every time they are at the plate. But it actually hurts the brand when you have somebody write this badly about an under-used Primarch who badly needed some filling in and fleshing out, but who emerges from this book far less interesting than he was before I read it.