‘Hunt for Voldorius’ – Andy Hoare (Black Library)

Reading wise, if I remember 2010 for anything it’ll be the year when ‘the comfort read’ took precedence over all else. You can’t blame me really, there has been an awful lot going on what with one thing and another! ;o)
I’ll be totally honest and say that, as good as they are, Black Library books have become a bit of a comfort read for me (the 40K stuff that is, I really need to crack on and read the fantasy stuff as well). You always know what you’re going to get (full on tales of humanity’s never ending war against everything else in the galaxy) and, with very few exceptions, it’s generally very well written.
I’ve had mixed results with the ‘Space Marine Battles’ series so far (‘Helsreach’ was excellent, ‘Rynn’s World’ not so...) so the arrival of ‘Hunt for Voldorius’ had me wondering which way it would fall. As it turns out...

A war leader of the treacherous Alpha Legion, the daemon prince Kernax Voldorius has the blood of billions on his hands... and he’s after killing billions more. Captain Kor'sarro Khan of the White Scars Chapter was tasked with hunting down and killing Voldorius , it’s taken him and his men ten long years to track the daemon prince down but now the end is finally in sight...
The planet Quintus fell to the Alpha Legion a long time ago and it is here that Voldorius will either make his last stand or launch the plot that will gain him billions more mortal souls. Kor'sarro Khan and his men must make sure that Voldorius is stopped at all costs. They will have allies in this struggle but will they be enough...?

One of the things that I love the most of all about 40K novels is the sheer depth of world building that can go into a single novel. These writers love the setting and will go all out to make sure that the reader is fully immersed in the experience. This isn’t just the case with the background, military organisations get this treatment as well. Whether it’s Graham McNeill’s ‘Ultramarines’, James Swallow’s ‘Blood Angels’ or Dembski-Bowden’s ‘Night Lords’; the reader is guaranteed an insight into military history stretching back millennia and this serves to emphasise just how far into the future we’ve gone.

It’s a shame then that Andy Hoare decided not to follow this approach; at least as far as I could see.

While Hoare gives the White Scars Marines their own battle cant, and offers us the merest of glimpses into life on their home world, he doesn’t do an awful lot else other than look at their tactics during open warfare. The end result is that the reader is left with a rampaging bunch of supermen with no real clue as to who they are. We may know that they’re the White Scars but we don’t really get much of an idea of what that actually means (in comparison to any other Space Marine Chapter). Half the point of this particular series seems to be that the Marines will always win through regardless and it’s their heraldry and history that adds an interesting spin to an otherwise tedious foregone conclusion. Hoare doesn’t really go down this path so what we get is a rampaging bunch of supermen who we know are going to win through in the end. Where’s the fun in that? Especially when the tactics they employ are delivered in a rather dry manner...
Now, fans of the White Scars might have a few different words to say here as long term fans may well pick up a few things that I’ve missed. It just didn’t work for me though...

What made it all the more annoying is that Hoare managed to get things spot on with the other two main groups in this tale; namely the Raven Guard Marines and Voldorius himself. The Raven Guard were very secretive and devastating on the counter assault with enough questions left unanswered to pique my interest in what they were up to while the focus of the book was elsewhere. Voldorius’ evil was deliciously chilling in places (his plan was suitably epic and a nice nod to technology that might not be too far away from our own) and the after-effects of his demonic presence made for some nice atmospheric moments (I’m thinking about what Captain Kor'sarro Khan finds in the Baneblade tank here, a great moment!) As good as this was though, I just found myself wondering why Hoare couldn’t have put this much effort into his main cast...

The rest of ‘Hunt for Voldorius’ is as full of explosions and heroism as you would expect but it felt strangely flat and there were a couple of times where I found myself skimming pages to get to a conclusion that I had already seen coming. While I would read more of Hoare’s work, just to see where he goes next, I wouldn’t make it a priority on the strength of this book though...

Six and a Half out of Ten