Bloody Books: Eye of Terror by Barrington J. Bayley
Review by Liberty Charissage
Eye of Terror by Barrington J. Bayley is a warhammer 40,000 book published in 1999 in the early days of Black Library (a mutable time akin to the Boxtree/ GW Books era The Inquisition War by Ian Watson), it was still early in the days of Black Library, where a lot of the lore was not cemented. However, it offers a compelling look and unique vision of the far grimdark future.
I guess some confessing should be in order, I am not the biggest warhammer 40k fiction fan, I much prefer the style, tone and mood invoked in early warhammer fiction than the ‘canon’ history, lore, or fluff, as it should rightly be called, of GameWorkshops’s Universes. I am not much of a reader of franchise tie-in books either, I think the only one of those that I finished, other than warhammer, was Shadowrun: Crossroads ( or as I call it: Shadowrun: ABS! due to the cover), which is a well-intentioned, serviceable magical cyberpunk quick read, though nowhere near the elevated quality of some Black Library stuff.
I started off warhammer by reading 40k fan fiction for the Chaos Gods’ sake! As such, though I am seasoned in the fluff of the 41st millennium, I cannot tell you how well Eye of Terror works or fits in with other bits of 40k fiction. I haven’t read any Horus Heresy books either. So I suggest taking Eye of Terror as its own thing.
Another quick confession is that I read this book several years ago and thus am doing this review from the memory of reading it.
This review isn’t going to be so much as a fair and honest critique of the work as it is more going to be a recommendation on how fun Eye of Terror is and why you should give it a look if you have the chance.
The book is best described by another reviewer as it has the structure of Love Actually, you heard me right. It is structured like Love Actually in that it follows the stories of various characters near and in the Eye of Terror and how all their stories intertwine and weave together into one great story.
The book starts out with a spy mission by the Imperium probing into the Eye of Terror, in a section which is a short story in of itself, discovers that the Forces of Chaos are building and massing a huge fleet to attack the Imperium. The Imperial Navy Admirals’ plan to stop this invasion of Chaos: perform a pre-emptive attack on the Forces of Chaos by mounting an invasion into the Eye of Terror itself! You read my right! Baby! The Imperium actually tries to invade and conquer the Eye of Terror in this novel. It goes down exactly as you expect, i.e. not well.
With that beginning, Eye of Terror the novel switches from various narratives, including the Imperial Navy Admirals’ preparation of the Eye of Terror invasion, a main plotline surrounding a hapless Rogue Trader so down on his luck that he doesn’t even have a Navigator and the even more unlucky Navigator he ropes into piloting his ship into the Eye of Terror as a last ditch effort to gain fortune and glory, a Dark Angel from before the Great Betrayal waking up from suspended animation in the Eye of Terror with a Fallen Dark Angel attempting to convert him to the foul Powers of Chaos, to finally a Lord of Change’s frenemy relationship with a BloodThirster, it turns enemy relationship by the end of the book.
In all of these narratives, which is actually a single, unified narrative that all comes together, we get scenes where a Navigator goes mad and describes the constantly changing topsy turvy visions one gets when a Navigator try and navigate through the Eye of Terror, frog-people exchanging diamonds with a Chaos merchant in order to get the pleasure of dying by the hands of a Daemonette, Space Marine on Space Marine cannibalism, a literal game of warhammer 40k by two Greater Daemons who smash two planets together to make their board table and use the separate real armies on those planets as their figures, and, at the end, the novel gives us a brief glimpse understanding of how the Great Game between the Chaos Powers is actually played, such as how the Emperor adds his own moves to it and how the Daemons plot to replace the Emperor and put into a false substitute Emperor and even earth to fool the Imperium.
What is even wackier is that this book was written by Barrington J. Bayley, who apparently was friends with British New Wave Science Fiction writers J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock. Apparently, Barrington J. Bayley and Michael Moorcock were thick as thieves back when Michael Moorcock was editing New Worlds Magazine. It makes me wonder what Michael Moorcock thought of Barrington J. Bayley writing a novel for Warhammer, if he thought anything about it, a franchise that has so nakedly and shamelessly stolen from Michael Moorcock.
I also wonder what Barrington J. Bayley’s thought process was when writing the book. He was rather old for the time, so, to wonder bluntly, was he a “fallen” sci fi writer just writing for the money? Or did he actually enjoy himself while writing? He wrote some short stories for Inferno magazine and a fan website does credit in not so many words that he did write said short stories “just for the money”. Yet there is a themed outline for a sequel to Eye of Terror which can still be found online called Warhammer: An Age of Adventure. I have no idea why this sequel never came to fruition, perhaps people at GamesWorkshop were worried about the far reaching impacts on the universe if the book was ever published. If you read the outline, it is a crazy doozy and totally rearranges things in the 40k universe, with ideas foreshadowing the shuddering of the Imperium that we have today. The outline of An Age of Adventure can be read here: https://oivas.com/bjb/ageadventure.html
Sadly, Barrington J. Bayley died in 2008, and the secrets of Eye of Terror’s writing is more or less lost at this point. Yet, if there is an afterlife, I, Liberty Blair Charissage, give you, Barrington J. Bayley, a big salute for writing this novel, even if you just wrote it for the money. If you did, oh man! I wonder what your passion projects look like?
Back to Eye of Terror, looking at it from its own merits, not as a piece in the warhammer puzzle nor the bizarre circumstances of its creation, it is an amazing and smashing fun romp in the future of the 41st millennium and if you ever get the chance of finding it, definitely buy it and give it a read to see what might have been for 40k and experience the roller-coaster ride the book is. It should be more well known by fans of the hobby, up there with the craziness of The Inquisition War yet unlike that trilogy it does not have the elements that people might consider odious.
Please, if anyone has read or does read the Eye of Terror after this, don’t hesitate to give me your thoughts on this one of a kind 40k novel.
Eye of Terror can be found at your used bookstores, bought on your internet bookstores, or found on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/eyeofterror0000bayl/page/8/mode/2up
Happy Reading!