Grimdark Book Club: Recent Episodes
Ivo Lettercast
This podcast is for anyone passionate about the grimdark fiction genre! From the Horus Heresy to Winds of Winter, we're going to dissect it all! Expect a new post each month that dissects and reviews a new book. The current project? Read every book in the Horus Heresy series! Don't worry, for those of you who don't like 40k, I promise to sprinkle in books from other fandoms. Please, make suggestions! Subscribers are automatically entered in a drawing to win a free book every month sent straight to your inbox or physical mailbox!
Podcasts on Pause! The End of Season One Has Arrived. I Return in November with MUCH, MUCH More.
In this episode, episode three of the Grim Dark Book Club, which is a whole two weeks late, we talk about Flight of the Eisenstein. It is the fourth book in the Warhammer 40k Horus Heresy series, and it is also BY FAR my absolute favorite. It's the right length, the pacing is good, the characters are unique, and the writing itself is gorgeous. Best selling author James Swallow wrote this story, and it was read on Audible by Jonathan Keeble. Let's get into it!
Hi there! I’m Ivo Lettercast, also known on YouTube as JBSpeaks and this is my Grimdark Book club where I discuss and review a new grimdark book every month. Especially of late, we’ve seen a lot of shows, graphic novels, written novels, and movies coming out that could easily fit into the Grimdark subgenre of speculative fiction. Speaking of, who else is excited about the new Warhammer PC game coming out, Battlesector, and the new animated show, Angels of Death?! I know I am! So last episode we left off after a VERY long but VERY truncated synopsis of the first three books of the Horus Heresy, which introduce us to the world and characters of 40k, even though it’s not officially the 41st millenium yet, and clue us in on what exactly happened that caused the disastrous, chaotic, grim, dark state the galaxy embodies in the 41st millennium. It’s basically the well-written, very layered tale of Horus’ misguided descent into pure chaos. Yeah. Obviously the main character here is Loken, and while I don’t typically like heo-types, I really liked the way he was written, so yeah he’s my favorite in this part of the series. I was going to say Garro, but we don’t know him well enough yet to love him like that I think. Least favorite character: My least favorite character will always be Angron. Always. Anything with him in it makes me feel vastly uncomfortable. He reminds me of my bio-dad haha! My thoughts are.. Well, I understand why they didn’t go into the death guard and emperor’s children further in these books, even though I would have liked to know more about them, and I liked the tone they set for how the Luna Wolves/Sons of Horus culture looked. Though, to be honest, I was a little shocked at how intimate their relationships with their battle brothers felt? It seemed like the author wasn’t quite sure if they were meant to be romantically involved or not. That didn’t take away from the story for me, by the way, but it did add a unique inflection to that legion in particular, especially in terms of how the Mournival interacted with each other. I love books that take characters and challenge their beliefs and their realities, and that’s what these books did. It was long-winded, but the characters we met at the beginning were either not alive by the end, or very much not who they were at the start -- or maybe more who they were at the start. My favorite part of the entire series was seeing how each piece fit together. I liked getting to know the characters, I enjoyed watching some of them make it out alive and others get caught in the fray. My favorite scene in the entire trilogy? Well, I have a few. Basically anything with compelling imagery. Horus fighting the warp beast that was once Temba on that little moon, the slow destruction of the mournival, scene by scene, the skillful depiction of the different ways Chaos manifests among the legion. Needless to say, I’m a fan of prose. We already kind of covered my feelings on each of these books in the first half of this episode, but essentially I felt the first book was dry, and the second and third books kicked the action and imagery into high gear in a way that made me not want to put them down. The drawbacks? Women aren’t written very well in this universe. It gets better later on, but especially in the first few, the perspectives of the people in this universe reflect a time when women were considered the weaker sex, and the books are written in a way that accentuates that. Whether it’s the writers’ own preconceived notions or the way they were encouraged to write femme-presenting characters is something we might never actually know. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say it’s awesome to get to know the intimate details of just exactly how fucked up this universe is. The first three books are a great introduction to that, where things start off seeming reasonable but quickly descend into madness and literal chaos. I’m now working on A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeill, which is exquisitely done by the way, and I think a lot of people will enjoy the different ways Horus and Magnus interact with the warp, and the comparison between the visions each of them receive as a product of that. How was the pacing of it? I think these first three books are well paced. My disclaimer, again, is always that the first book takes ages to get through, but it’s all crucial stuff. Vital, foundational information you need in order to enjoy the rest of the series. I absolutely LOVED the ending of this trilogy. Oh. My. Gods. It was gorgeous. The way they ended the characters, the way they left us hanging, that was skillful writing. It’s the reason I’m still reading the books! If you enjoyed my review, you might enjoy my writing, too! It will be available on Amazon Vella, for free, for your grim entertainment starting August 2021. You can find the information for that and much, much more at my website iLettercast.com. Thanks for listening!
This podcast is for anyone passionate about the grimdark fiction genre! From the Horus Heresy to Winds of Winter, we’re going to dissect it all! Expect a new post each month that dissects and reviews a new book. The current project? Read every book in the Horus Heresy series! Don’t worry, for those of you who don’t like 40k, I promise to sprinkle in books from other fandoms. Please, make suggestions! Subscribers are automatically entered in a drawing to win a free book!
Today we’re actually reviewing the first three books in the Horus Heresy, which are Horus Rising, False Gods, and Galaxy in Flames. I’m doing all three together because I think they actually work better as a single book than as three separate ones, and I’ll get into that a little bit later.
Full transcript available upon request.