The Damnation Of Pythos


It’s been a little while since last I read a book about Space Marines, but finally I got around to this, the last in the sixth anthology of Horus Heresy books. This one was pretty bleak; a bunch of very angry, traumatised Space Marines who really want to be robots instead of men, get haunted by demons on a planet full of evil dinosaurs.
There’s a cyclopean building buried in the evil dinosaur planet, and eventually a bunch of cultists turn up to sacrifice themselves to the dinosaurs and activate the building, which is a Giant Evil Machine for doing, well, giant evil.

The Space Marines, being very angry but also super rational, don’t believe in demons, which is too bad for them. To be fair, they didn’t realise they were characters in a Games Workshop setting, where it’s rational to believe in giant evil demons. And to be fair, if the Space Marines had spent more time on biology lessons they might have realised the ecology of a totally carnivorous planet was a bit suspect, and they should have thought a bit more carefully about what they were doing.

Oh well. The book grinds on, and by the end everyone is dead (except for one poor chap dragged off for eternal torture) and every attempt to warn others of this are met with disbelief, so that’s sad too. After all the grinding misery, the final battle is rather rushed and confused, but this was the sort of book you want to finish off as quick as you can.

So not one of the highlights of the series.


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