Angron: Slave of Nuceria: Slave of Nuceria (Volume 11) (The Horus Heresy: Primarchs)

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With Slave of Nuceria, you repeatedly run into the problem of Betrayer being treated as required reading. Martin draws back the curtain on one of the most important events in the World Eaters’ history: the adoption of the Butcher’s Nails. This is the first book from the Primarch series that I have read, since he fascinated me the most after his appearance in the first trilogy of Horus Heresy. The greatest thing which works in the book's favour stems from the chosen time period in which the story is set. Realizing what this would happen if this were to be allowed, the earlier Centurion tried to amass a force to destroy and ultimately rebel against their brothers that had the Nails implanted and their Primarch, which expectedly, ended in total bloodshed.

So while ‘Angron: Slave of Nuceria’ deals with a sliver of XII Legion history that hasn’t been dealt with in great detail before, and has more writing than you might expect about Angron’s time on Nuceria as part of the ‘Eaters of Cities’, it still doesn’t feel to me like it gives us much of anything new. The warhounds (the old name for the world eaters) once seemed the epitome of discipline, relying on each other while calmly walking into battle in thightly knit phalanxes. Yet three of them blow themselves into space in the first twenty pages while homebrewing putting nails in their heads.Angron has only been at the centre of one novel before, Betrayer, and a handful of short stories — most notably After De’Shea by Matthew Farrer, and Butcher’s Nails and Lord of the Red Sands by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (all three are collected in Angron). As I came close to finishing the book, I realized that Angron is just a lot more interesting after he falls to Chaos. Angron isn’t exactly beloved by the World Eaters but, amongst a legion of supermen, he’s the supermanliest of them all. But at the same time, there were many missed opportunities, underused characters and a cliffhanger that only makes sense if you still remember another novel from the early 20s of the HH series proper, and even then the significance may pass you by due to how tacked on it feels. And this is the tale about how the XII Legion chose the path to damnation too, embracing their father’s path and hammering the Butcher’s Nails inside their skull.

Before the Horus Heresy novels and short fiction, the World Eaters often seemed to be rather two-dimensional: they were bloodthirsty berserkers, without the Viking stylings of the Space Wolves. The war the World Eaters fight hardly resembles warfare at all, to the point the World Eaters themselves are commenting on it, and it really only serves as a frame for what true marrow of the horror: the Butcher's Nails. Change for the legion; how going from the War Hounds to the World Eaters effects the minds of the legion and change for the primarch. This book tells both the story of how the XIIth legion fell to the butchers nails, and the story of how Angron gets his own infamous implants.

As such, Angron: Slave of Nuceria was a book which was both going to face an uphill battle while also being desperately needed to flesh him out a little more. It's decent on the whole, with no small number of great moments and good ideas, along with a solid effort to flesh out Angron's personal history. This serves to compare and contrast each state of the legion, but curiously it is left up to the reader as which was truly better.