The Raven Guard are Space Marines like no other. The sons of Corax fight their battles with stealth and speed rather than fury and flame. As shadows of death, they appear behind enemy lines and strike without mercy or restraint. Chaos engulfs the Sargassion Reach, and Captain Koryn’s Raven Guard lead the fight against the pestilent forces of Nurgle. But they are not alone, the Brazen Minotaurs – led by the headstrong Captain Daed – aiding them in their mission. Can the two Chapters bring their wildly different tactics together to defeat the foe and save the Sargassion Reach from damnation?
It gets into the heads of the Raven Guard like never before – and contrasts their sneaky, shadow-shrouded tactics with the bull-headed Brazen Minotaurs, especially in the novella 'The Unkindness of Ravens'. where both Chapters need to do their thing if they're going to break open a Chaos fortress and annihilate the gooey centre (literally: it's full of Nurgle worshippers and they tend to ooze...).
Sons of Corax contains the following stories by George Mann:
Prey (previously available as an eBook) Helion Rain (previously available as an audio drama) With Baited Breath (previously available as an audio drama) Old Scars (previously available in an event-exclusive book) Labyrinth of Sorrows (previously available as an audio drama) The Unkindness of Ravens (previously available in a limited edition format) By Artifice, Alone (previously available in an event-exclusive book)
George Mann is an author and editor, primarily in genre fiction. He was born in Darlington, County Durham in 1978. A former editor of Outland, Mann is the author of The Human Abstract, and more recently The Affinity Bridge and The Osiris Ritual in his Newbury and Hobbes detective series, set in an alternate Britain, and Ghosts of Manhattan, set in the same universe some decades later. He wrote the Time Hunter novella "The Severed Man", and co-wrote the series finale, Child of Time. He has also written numerous short stories, plus Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes audiobooks for Big Finish Productions. He has edited a number of anthologies including The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, The Solaris Book of New Fantasy and a retrospective collection of Sexton Blake stories, Sexton Blake, Detective, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.
While the writing was good it sadly lacked some of the impact that I expected, oh it was some nice callbacks to previous stories, small stuff and big stuff, the problem is that it had few stories with the chapter as a whole, the latter half of the book concerns an ally of the Raven Guard, we get to see POV from a captain of the chapter, sadly this persists across the book, yes they stand by their allies to help pay back a debt they owe to that chapter however I had hoped for more stories of them fighting the enemies of the Imperium, no orks, eldar, drukhari, we have tyranids in only one story, seeing flashbacks to their homeworld was nice, I liked it, one spent the whole story there, I had hoped for more of that.
Worse as we told about a villain that is responable for the events of the last stories however we don;t actually see them fighting him, it's teased, the last story ends with them going to find him.
Apparently the biggest story is a novlette that got added to the anthology which kind of shows, this looks like a cash grab, I would have given it 3 stars if it weren;t for that ending.
Took me longer to finish this than I first imagined, considering the Raven Guard are my favorite legion/chapter. Happy to have read it. Keen on more of the 19th
A competent space marines book but also something of a disappointment.
In a book called the Sons of Corax you would expect more if the raven guard in its pages. In the end you get the time divided between the Ravens, the Minotaurs and Chaos. There are no real reveals and I fear that any sense of the Raven Guard's culture and fighting style that Mann develops here is so weak to be ignored by subsequent authors whose attention falls to this legion.