Soul Hunter A Night Lords Novel

Soul Hunter is the first novel in the Night Lords trilogy, and (from what I understand) his second novel published at Black Library. It follows Talos, the titular Soul Hunter (though no one really calls him that most of the time), and the First Claw of the Night Lords 10th company. Whenever you hear someone asking for the best Warhammer 40k novels, there’s often someone who will mention the Night Lords trilogy, and being a massive fan of his works in the Horus Heresy, I finally decided to sit down and see if this really lives up to its hype. The Night Lords are evil. Even when thinking about how everyone in 40k is evil, the Night Lords are evil, and that sounds like it could make it difficult to be connected to protagonists like that. Despite this, ADB succeeds in creating a cast of genuinely interesting characters who are all enjoyable to read. Talos, the Soul Hunter, and the Prophet of the 10th Company we follow joined by his squad mates in the First Claw, Uzas, Xarl, and Cyrion, as well as by his slaves, Septimus and Octavia. Each member of the First Claw is their own unique and interesting characters. Talos is serious, and deeply cares about the Night Lords even after 10000 years and acts someone as a leader to the squad. Xarl seems to be a relatively normal Night Lords marine, being somewhat close to Talos, but not really liking any of them. Then Uzas is a crazed Khorne worshiper, and Cyrion is a somewhat humours individual who no one seems to really trust. All of these characters clearly have some level of disdain for each other, but it still feels like they are battle-brothers who would die for each other. Even the slaves are enjoyable to read, Octavis starts off as Eurydice, a navigator who is kidnaped and enslaved by the Night Lords, and Septimus, a long-time slave of Talos who tries his best to keep his masters and Octavia alive. There are several other interesting characters of note, The Exalted, 10th companies possessed captain, Malcharion, the War Sage who has been trapped in dreadnought armour for thousands of years, even Abaddon is their briefly. The Exalted is the closes thing we get to a main antagonist of the story, as he continually wastes Night Lords lives trying to do as Abaddon commands of him, which also trying to get rid of Talos as he fears he will try to take control of the company. Octavia is also a good character because of how she is used at the beginning of the book. As we see how she is taken and forced into working for the Night Lords, we get to have the outsider’s perspective of the Night Lords that we wouldn’t get from one of them or Septimus. Being a relatively normal Imperial citizen, she cares about the god emperor, and doesn’t really know much about the Night Lords, but through her interactions with Septimus, it develops a feel for how they function on their own ship, and how their slaves deal with them. As we see the First Claw and how they deal with the story, we get a good picture of who the Night Lords are as a (very divided) legion. While Talos and Xarl clearly have a great distain for Chaos and its gods, believing that the legion should be free of gods, Uzas and The Exalted, the companies captain, show that no mater how hard they try, the legion is already corrupted. We also see that while the Night Lords are kind of greedy cowards. Whenever the go into conflict on their own terms they always are in hiding, trying to inflict as much fear into their enemies as they can, which is a smart tactic, but somewhat cowardly for Space Marines. As well as this, when a large group of Blood Angels arrive at the end of the book, instead of helping Abaddon and his Black Legion forces they are fighting with, they abandon the war effort and run away. I love this, it is so much more interesting than just “we are heroic soldiers of x cause, and we know no fear”, they act somewhat logically all in desire of self-preservation. At a few points in the book, we get to see flashbacks to Talos just before Konrad Curze, the Night Lords primarch’s death, and how he and the rest of the legion dealt with that. No as much praise as I heap upon this book, there are still a few criticisms I can level at it. While I mentioned that Octavias usage at the beginning of the book helps establish the Night Lords as a group, after around the halfway point she kind of just stops showing up. We spend most of our time with Talos and First Claw, which makes sense, but her just disappearing from the story is kind of weird. Also at some points where ADB uses some weird onomatopoeia which just reads weird, not something that kills the mood, but it feels somewhat out of place. So having finally read the book, I can gladly (and unsurprisingly) say that this is a good story. I really enjoy all of the characters and how they all interact with each other, and how they deal with all the situations they get forced into by their leaders. This novel is a great start to a trilogy I look forward to continuing immediately.