awesome

my new favourite in the series. story is interesting and there's plenty of action

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Good book, bad narrator

The book itself is fantastic. However, I really struggled listening to it because of the Narrator. There are far too many lip smacking and mouth sounds and they don’t really change their voice much for some of the different characters which makes the story hard to follow sometimes. The character I struggle to follow most is Loken who is one of the main characters in the story, this could just be because of previous narrators doing a far deeper, gruffer voice though. I just wish this Narrator tried to follow this trend

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A little inconsistent with a good finale

An important part of the story of thr Horus Heresy, good performance throughout. Story has some very strong moments but suffers from a couple of pivotal character points not being built up as much as they felt they could have been. McNeil's descriptions and timing is on point, feels like listening to a TV show with well timed cut aways that make you want to keep listening!

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Unfortunate narration

This is a really interesting story exploring the dynamic between Horus and his fellow traitor brothers as they try to discern what happened at Molech. The relationships explored show a previously under-explored element of the fragile alliance between traitor Primarchs, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about what actually happens.

The narration on this is just poor. He clearly tries, so I’m not going to give it 1 star, but every dialogue sounds like a quip to the point that you’d be forgiven for thinking the narrator approached this as a slapstick. He stumbles over sentences a little too often, in the same way our brains often miss a word or don’t realise the sentence has carried on - but a professional narrator should have at least exercised/practiced what they are narrating.

I have a slight feeling I am biased because I came straight off Master of Mankind and Wolfsbane (I know, I’m listening in the wrong order) and the narrations on those were exceptional. The comparison with Wolfsbane is especially unfortunate as the narrator on that gets the voice of Leman Russ *perfectly* whilst on this the narrator seems to want to give Russ a fairly standard English accent, but then his legionaries have really hammed up Norwegian or Swedish accents.

There’s also just the unfortunate inability to distinguish between who’s talking, at times. Obviously it’s easier on a page, but this narrator seems to give very little effort into giving the characters distinctive voices, and I think it’s largely because of, both, the quip-style dialogue he goes for, and the speed at which he narrates speech.

It’s a shame. I enjoyed the story but just couldn’t listen beyond a few hours.

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1 person found this helpful

So many pieces of the Heresy jigsaw!

We learn a great deal about Horus and several other major characters in this tale. it's really well narrated as you would expect.
highly recommended.

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Not bad but not great

While advancing the Hours Heresy story, this book feels like it was rushed, or it was meant as a trilogy like the first three books. There are so many characters and character arcs that I had a hard time caring for any one of them. And by the time the story returned to an arc I was previously interested in, I had already lost interest in that arc (like for example Horus's journey to the endgame). Also I feel that too much attention was given to the description of warfare and battles, so much so that by the time any battles finish I had a hard time remembering what was the battle fought for. This also means less time for character dialogue and development. One last gripe I have with this book is that it's climax was a bit disappointing in the way it was constructed, despite its major significance to the Heresy. It felt as if it was glanced over and then the story moved on.
All in all it's a good Heresy story but with a mediocre execution.

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1 person found this helpful

Fitting follow-on for Galaxy in Flames.

Few HH books leave such a lasting impact as the first 3. Vengeful Spirit is a good carry on for characters you know and love with just enough fresh faces to work. It starts off feeling a little disjointed as it builds the big picture but once all the pieces are layed out everything fits.

My only critique is that it feels like 2 different stories, one with the battle for Molech and a second following the Pathfinder team. How the two stories interject makes the timeline skew slightly as one minute a character is on Moloch the next they are aboard the Vengeful Spirit with very little happening between.

To fully appreciate this novel, a little prior reading is recommended. The first 3 HH novels are a given aswell as Flight of the Eisenstein and some of the Garro novels (Oath of Moment and Legion of One) to properly understand each character and where they have come from up to now. Despite the pre reading it is definitely a good journey for each chacter from across several novels.

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Get Garro before this one!

it's a fantastic book but there's major spoilers in this one for Garro...I know it's 15 books later but trust me on this one, you'll be completely confused

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must listen if reading the HH!

Great novel, some.of the pronouncations were a bit off with names but the story as a whole was great!!

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Just fine

Perfectly palatable however nothing special despite the relative significance of the events to the overall story

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