Black Library
When I was in my teens I loved Warhammer 40K. Painting models, fighting imaginary battles, hanging out with my friends as we waged grim and dark bloody wars twenty thousand years in the future.
In the end the excitement of painting Space Wolf space marines and rolling hand fulls of dice only got me so far. I always wanted to read about these soldiers, men, and aliens. I wanted to see with my mind’s eye how Horus mortally wounded the Emperor. I wanted to picture Leman Russ punching on with Lion El’Johnson and starting the ten thousand year rivalry between the Wolves and the Dark Angels. I wanted to know what Ezekyle Abaddon was like before he became the Despoiler and led the chaos hosts for ten milennia.
I wanted all the gory detail of when the Great Crusade was brutally brought to an end with the death scream of Enlightenment. The scraps the rule books and gaming magazines offered up were like a teasingly delicious entree in a three course meal.
It wasn’t until I moved in with a friend when I was 24, and had almost forgotten the world Games Workshop created, that I found myself rifling through his bookshelf one rainy day.
That’s when I hit the jackpot. The first six books of the Horus Heresy Series from the Black Library. The most enjoyable work in Sci-Fi I have read to date. It’s brutal, it’s bloody, its protagonists and villains cherish brotherhood and bloodshed in equally glorious measures. It’s characters grow and change and turn on their brethren with chainswords and bolt pistols and fell dark powers.
Essentially it is exactly all that I love in reading, and therefore what I love to write about. They had Dan Abnett and Graham McNiell, who have grown to be two of my favourite authors, writing for them. The type of authors where you don’t even read a book’s synopsis before buying a paperback. The type of authors I find myself lining up pre-orders for when I hear even the whisper of a rumour of something being released in the future.
One day, my friends, one day I will get published by the Black Library. Even if it takes me a lifetime of annual open submission windows, one day I’ll get into one of their releases.
Until then I’ll keep posting my attempts on here for you all to enjoy!
