Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels by Mike Lee is the eleventh installment in the Horus Heresy series and the sequel to Descent of Angels. It follows two storylines involving the Dark Angels Legion, one on the forge-world Diamat as Lion El'Jonson learns of the heresy and attempts to prevent Horus's forces from obtaining powerful weapons, and another on Caliban as the Dark Angels garrison led by Luther face a rebellion among the populace and learn a dark secret about their homeworld.

Breaking this novel into two plotlines worked well. Suspense is maintained throughout as the setting alternates on a chapter-by-chapter basis, the high points of the Caliban plotline counteracting the slower phases of the Diamat story and vice versa. Zahariel and Nemiel provide strong and distinct viewpoints for their relative narratives and provide a sense of continuity for those who have read Descent of Angels. Unlike Descent of Angels, Fallen Angels is indisputably a Horus Heresy story, showing us the Lion's early reaction to the news of Horus's betrayal. The battle on Diamat isn't jaw-droppingly epic or vast in ramifications like the Dropsite Massacre, Calth or Tallarn, (the Dark Angels spend most of their time owning rebel humans and only fight traitor Astartes at the very end), but its level of action counteracts the slow build of the Caliban story and there's still plenty of betrayal and tragedy to go round, not in the least at the battle's end when the Lion's own hubris renders the heroic actions of his strike team entirely pointless.

The battle on Diamat is relatively straightforward, but the same cannot be said for events on Caliban where an entire manufacturing plant's workforce goes missing in the midst of a highly-organised uprising and the investigating Astartes uncover a twisted ritual designed to unleash the dark taint at the core of the planet. Mike Lee's gut-twistingly horrid depictions of humans reduced to grub-like incubators for parasitic worms, kept warm by a pile of corpses and guarded by the queen worm, make the battle beneath Sigma Five-One-Seven the most visceral and memorable part of the novel. The revelation that the Terran sorcerers who engineered the ritual were not acting for the reasons Luther assumes throws the entire plotline into a new light, but is easy to miss in the novel's final pages as Zahariel awakens from his coma a changed marine. By its end the Caliban plotline is far more engaging and significant than the events on Diamat, and those paying attention will find within it the revelation of Cypher's identity.

Fallen Angels is an improvement on its predecessor and a solid entry into the annals of the Horus Heresy, but it came around at a point just before the series made it big and so tends to get overlooked. The Lion's Angels have featured prominently in the rest of the series and their story continues in The Primarchs anthology and The Unremembered Empire, but the series does not return to Luther and the garrison on Caliban until Angels of Caliban. Thankfully, it was worth the wait.