The first three are the essential ones: Horus Rising, False Gods, and Galaxy in Flames. Like most prequels they're better experienced after the stories they're set before, full of foreshadowing that pays off if you know what's coming. The Horus Heresy line jumps back 10,000 years to a formative point in the setting's history. While the enemies faced by the Ghosts are terrible, Gaunt struggles just as much against the orders he's given. Unfortunately for them, the war engine of the Imperium is full of glory hounds and bastards happy to throw away thousands of lives to move a trench forward half a mile. Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt is an unusually compassionate officer, dedicated to keeping alive a regiment who are the only survivors of a dead world. Suddenly it's more like the X-Men than The Big Sleep, a change that revitalizes the series and makes it worth sticking with.įor classic military sf, Gaunt's Ghosts is the series you want. Ravenor jumps genre and protagonist, following an inquisitor who works with a team of badass specialists. The third book in the Eisenhorn trilogy suffers from this, but waiting on the other side is a sequel trilogy called Ravenor. Eisenhorn's written by Dan Abnett, one of the better 40K writers but one with a weakness-endings that feel rushed.

His investigations into Chaos frequently lead to conflict with the machinery of the Imperium he's supposed to protect, which plays well with the genre's cynical view of authority. The Eisenhorn books turn 40K into hardboiled fiction, with Inquisitor Eisenhorn as a Raymond Chandler detective narrating in first-person.

Horus heresy novels timeline