Bloody Books - SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR – AARON DEMBSKI-BOWDEN

Fluffen-favourite Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Spear of the Emperor takes us on an exploration of the 40k Universe post-rift. We follow Kaias Incarius of the Mentor Legion as he comes to the worlds of Elara's Veil to assess the status of the system. With one chapter decimated and another crippled, it falls of the Spears of The Emperor to hold these worlds without reinforcement. The Imperium Nihlus is a place of entropic decay after all. The Spears give Amadeus a cold welcome but he is bidden to his duty and so he stays to support the Spears in any manner possible.

We follow the tale through Anuradha Daaz, a helot of the Mentor Legion with a strange relationship to to Chapter. She carries a lot of bitter feeling towards her station but also sees the privileges she is entitled to, and understands how rare and important they are. Through her, we experience some questions and thoughts we don;t often see in the setting and her perspective gives us a very different way to experience these two Space Marine chapters, and how the base-line humans match up to them.

ADB does character beautifully and this is no exception. There is no action in the first third of the book, with character conflict taking centre stage. It's a compelling and calm pace as the characters learn about life in the Imperium Nihlus, as well as an examination of the Spears. That being said, action does sweep in brutally and on it's arrival it escalates in a breathless butchery. The Chaos forces arrive, led by The Pure, and crash through the protective layering the narrative spent time building. This is not action for it's own sake however, deployed in a manner to further examine and develop the characters yet further.

The location for this novel is a far cry from what we normally see, and is bleakly catastrophic in it's detailing. The complexity of the Chapters stands out as we come to understand what just is happening at the core of the narrative. The plot is disguised and only hints at the wider picture which comes into view with the understanding of the wider context and history delivered in the pages.

This is ADB firing on all cylinders and does for the modern setting what his Black Legion series did for the same setting all those years ago.

A Must-Read