Bloody Books Reviews - The Beast Arises Book Seven: The Hunt for Vulkan by David Annandale

And so, we come to the end of The Beast Arises. Guy Hayley returns with The Beheading, and with it manages to gather all the hanging threads. The Imperium is still standing, but is on it's knees after so many blows. The Inquisitors are battling the internal machinations of the Grand Master, The Iron Warriors and loyal Marines they are supporting continue to harry the Orks. It's a lot of plates to have spinning, and a large amount of the novel has to slow to deal with the High Lords, the Inquisitors and the fractious Imperium as a whole. The Orks are for the most part dealt with, and the mopping up continues, but seeing how the Imperium is barely holding together in this moment is genuinely fascinating.

It ends not with a bang, but a sad look at the Imperium and the foundations of what leads to the rotting monument it becomes in 40k. Hayley manages to ties up a lot of the threads mentioned earlier, with some strangely off-beat surprises to many a question left unanswered so far. It may be the best paced book of the series, is easily devoured.

It's a great, if somewhat bleak ending for the series, and it would have been nice to finish on a larger page count, but it's been a welcome experience to go through. It has been a varied, character driven tale told over the last twelve books with a lot more highs than lows, and proves that whilst full of great action sequences, a 40k series can be more than that. The Beast Arises is somehow more than it's parts, and something of an experiment I wish to see repeated.

The book, and the series comes very, very recommended.