Looking to get the skinny on Guy Haley’s latest novel, Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia? Read on to get details on how this may be Haley’s greatest book yet!
Guy Haley has been a busy man. Not content with penning the first installment of the Dark Imperium series, he has taken it upon himself to document the fall of the only Primarch to ever wear a refrigerator into battle – Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors.
Perturabo sees the eponymous demi-god struggling to complete a typically barbarous task set by his father – the extermination of the time-bending Hrud – broken up with glimpses into the Primarch’s discovery and childhood on his adopted home world of Olympia. When the Lord of Iron receives word that Olympia has broken from the path of the Emperor of Mankind he sets a course for his old home to fix things like only a Primarch can – basically killing everything until the problem goes away.
By far the most interesting sections of the book deal with his childhood, with Haley once again showing that adding emotional layers to omnipotent killing machines is where he is at his most comfortable. Perturabo behaves like a stubborn brat from the moment he is discovered by an Olympian search team. Even as a boy with little memory or experience, his keen mind deduces his probable origin as the scion of something superior to the almost-feudal humans that inhabit Olympia. This puts him in a position of immediate superiority and, as he matures under the protection of Olympia’s most powerful Tyrant, he never loses that disconnection with his adopted people. He knows he is destined for better which manifests as childish outbursts and a refusal to listen to everyone in his orbit.
But this childish bravado hides deeper, more human flaws. Perturabo suffers from a desperate isolation, compounded by his inability to relate to anyone, not even his adopted sister, who makes some brief but important appearances in the novel. This toxic mix of arrogance and profound disconnection will have dire repercussions for his legion and the galaxy at large once he gains control of Iron Warriors. Haley gives us a protagonist that is intensely unlikable but who has brief moments where you will beg him to allow someone through his iron shell. Of course, he won’t, but those fleeting instances of hope, momentarily shrouding the knowledge of what is to come, are a testament to Haley’s skill.
The battle against the Hrud which accounts for about 50% of the story, isn’t quite as engrossing. The Hrud are an interesting race with a fascinating ability to bend space-time, but too much time is spent on their ageing effects on the embattled Iron Warriors. Haley valiantly finds new ways to describe Space Marines ageing rapidly while engaging the Hrud, but once you have read one of their encounters you have read them all. The narrative does serve a purpose, however, setting up the Warriors as a beleaguered bunch, emotionally and physically frayed by a conflict that seems impossible to win. It is this latent feeling of failure, combined with the sheer exhaustion of the conflict that will lead them to commit the terrible atrocities that will shape the legion during the Heresy.
Perturabo is an enjoyable entry into the Horus Heresy Primarchs series and a fascinating glimpse into the childhood (however brief) of the man who will lead the IV legion to eventual damnation. It suffers from the same affliction that many Black Library entries suffer, namely less-than interesting tertiary protagonists and some paint-by-numbers battles, but these are easily forgivable when the canon content is so engrossing. Haley has, once again, proven why he is one of the go-to guys for important entries into Games Workshop’s main novel series’.
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