Angels of Darkness

"Angels of Darkness is, again, a book that upended a lot of my assumptions, and a lot of the readers’ assumptions as well. The Dark Angels is a fan favourite chapter of the Space Marines – the first army I collected was Dark Angels – and they’d always been presented as these very stoic medieval monks in robes, a sort of Freemasonry, inner circle, secrets-within-secrets vibe. And there’s one line in this book that has just stuck with me over the twenty-odd years since it was published, which, when I say it out loud, just makes me want to crumble to dust… It’s a two-pronged story. There’s an Interrogator-Chaplain of the Dark Angels, Chaplain Boreas, who is the main character. Interrogator-Chaplains are the ones who hunt the Fallen – and the Fallen are Dark Angels from the Horus Heresy era, ten thousand years ago, who were swept up in time and space. They were the ones who officially betrayed the Emperor and the Lion back in the day – the Lion being the Primarch of the Dark Angels. He’s their leader, their God amongst men, from back in the Horus Heresy days. So one thread is Boreas interrogating Astelan, who’s one of the Fallen he’s captured, and the other thread is Astelan recounting his story of how he came to be Boreas’ prisoner. And it’s the back and forth between them that makes this book so special to me. A lot of 40k novels back in the early 2000s were… I don’t want to say ‘simple’ as if that’s a bad thing, but they were fairly straightforward action novels in a lot of ways. Angels of Darkness is one of the books that really challenged that paradigm. There’s real storytelling and characters here, and sure there are plenty of battles, but that’s not the main thrust. The main conflict is from these two characters having this interrogation conversation over the period of one long, dark night of the soul, and the way the power dynamic changes between them with each new revelation that comes out. You’re not quite sure, as the story progresses, who’s actually in the wrong here. They’ve both made very questionable decisions over their lives. Ah… Astelan is talking about the time during the Horus Heresy when the Lion was coming towards Terra, to the siege, to break the traitor lines and save the day. One of the background pieces was that the Lion didn’t get there in time. Warp travel delayed him. And there’s a line in the book where Astelan talks about how the Lion was there, and could have got there in time. To which Boreas says, “Why didn’t he then?” And Asterlan says, “Well, it’s obvious. He was waiting to see who won.” And that just was like a bolt exploding in my head. The idea that the Lion might have waited to see ? So that if Horus had won, he could say, “I was always for you”… The doubt that sowed within the Dark Angels! Astelan, of course, could be lying. That’s his specialty, he is a master manipulator. But all through the book, all of his best lies have got that kernel of truth to them, and Boreas has to try and unpick what is true and what is false throughout this. That line effectively is the coup de grace for him, when he realizes that a lot of the truths he’s held on to all these years have now been cast into doubt. Is he lying? Is he telling the truth? Neither explanation is particularly comforting to him. It was a real wow-moment for me. By this point, I’d written maybe one or two novels; and a lot of what was driving us at the time, in terms of writing, was to try and do something more than straightforward novels of the game. We wanted to tell stories that were worth reading, whether you liked 40k or not – these were going to be just good science fiction stories that were fun to read because they had plenty of action, but had something deeper to them. Back then, the label of a tie-in novel was not thought of as a particularly good one; people thought that these novels potentially were just cash-ins. And we’re not writing them for that! Gav and I both worked in the Design Studio at that point, we were gainfully employed. This was never a cash grab from anyone’s point of view. We really wanted to broaden the mythology, and tell cool stories that were thematically richer and deeper than you might have expected from a novel based on a tabletop game of toy soldiers. And this was one of the books that I credit for really doing that well. Yes. First of all, to set the scene for Chaos: take everything about Space Marines, but evil. These are the guys who are likewise genetically engineered. They fought the Horus Heresy back in the day, fled Terra when Horus was defeated, and retreated to a place called the Eye of Terror, a gigantic warp anomaly two stars to the left of Earth. This is a place of roiling chaos and madness and demons and so on, and time is not a linear thing there – you could be in there for what you think is five minutes, and when you emerge, a thousand years has passed. So these guys now have the extra benefits, shall we say, of a chaos power infusing them with dark energy, or mutations, or blessings of the dark gods, or demon weapons – all that sort of thing. Storm of Iron came out of a frustration I had: the bad guys got short shrift in our books. At one point, the bad guys always lost. That annoyed me! These guys fought alongside their Primarchs. They marched across half the galaxy. They’ve had hundreds, potentially thousands, of years of experience to hone their craft, and have become more powerful thanks to the various Chaos powers. And they kept losing. They would turn up in a book saying, “I am the Chosen of the Dark Gods”, and then they’d be stabbed, and that’d be the end of that. I always felt they were portrayed as almost bumbling idiots, as foils, just to show how cool the Imperium was. But these guys are just as dangerous as the Imperium, if not more so. The only reason that they’re not murdering us all is that there’s way less of them than there are of the Space Marines and the Militarum. But they are deadly, deadly foes. So I really wanted to do a book where not only did we follow the bad guys, but they won . In addition to feeling that the bad guys were somewhat cartoony from time to time, I’d always felt that if the bad guys don’t win sometimes, then they cease to become a threat. You don’t ever read a book with Chaos in it wondering if they’ll win. And then that sense of peril for our heroes is much, much less. I wrote a story to show just how ruthless they are, and how organized, despite the word chaos in there. The Iron Warriors especially are an army who did not particularly dedicate themselves to any one God, so they’re not like frothing Berzerkers who follow Khorn. They’re not hedonistic weirdos who follow Slaanesh or diseased followers of Nurgle. They follow Chaos as a whole, and they’ve hung on to their discipline and their ranks and the organization that they had back in the day. They’re the lawful evil of chaos, essentially. And I really wanted to see them win . Yes. Their big schtick is sieges. They’re very good at waging them, they’re very good at surviving them. So I wanted to show them doing what it was they did best, and that sort of relentless grind of a siege, the structure of how a siege normally plays out, felt like it really neatly mapped onto the structure of a book: the rising escalation each time, the fact that a siege has a rhythm to it, periods of intensity and periods of calm in between while you’re digging the trenches or licking your wounds, and then it’s all fire and blood again. It had a real nice flow of tension and release that really worked for a story as much as it did the battle. And it allowed me to play with the audience a little bit. In a lot of books, you kind of know where it’s going; sure, the bad guys are doing this, but ultimately we’re going to end up in a heroic victory. The siege structure allowed me to pull the readers’ expectations back and forth so that most people would be reading it thinking, “Of course, the Imperium are going to hold the fort. They’re going to repel the Iron Warriors” – and then in other parts, thinking, “Oh no, maybe they’re going to break through at this point” – but then the sudden counterattack… So it was a way to keep the reader guessing until the end, hopefully, what the outcome was going to be. And like most sieges that end in blood rather than surrender, everything is very slow and grindy until it’s not, and then it all happens very, very quickly. So they’re just mashing up against one another, but when that final little bit of the dam breaks, it all comes crashing down – and then suddenly, “Oh, the bad guys won.” I remember speaking to a bunch of people around the studio when copies of the book started circulating around the building, and I had one guy stop me in the corridors as we were passing through a door and say, “I just finished Storm of Iron !” So I said, “Cool, man…. Did you enjoy it?” And he was flustered for a minute or two, but he said, “Yeah, I did. I enjoyed it, but… but the bad guys won!” And I gave the same sort of explanation I just gave to you, and he said, “But the Imperium always wins.” No they don’t! If they do, where’s the tension, where’s the threat, where’s any kind of feeling of stakes? They have to lose some time, and this just happened to be a perfect way to do that. It was a fun book to write because I think it upended a lot of people’s expectations of what our villains could do. One thing I like to do with a lot of my books is to have all sorts of strata within the story. So, yes, you are dealing with the commander of the enemy army, and the commander of the fortress; the great and the good, and the villainous and the vile. But you’ve also got the engineers, the guys in the walls, the Space Marines – and you’ve got somebody like Hawke, who is essentially a layabout workshy guy with no intentions of being a hero. He’s just there to punch the clock and hopefully get home at some point. He’s no great lover of the Imperium or patriotic duty. He just wants to live, like a lot of us. He’s a bit of a scumbag in many ways, but he ends up being the guy who saves the day, even though he doesn’t quite intend it that way… It’s just fun to tell the stories of everybody from the lowest to the highest and everybody in between. And it was the siege setting, again, that allowed me to do that. Well, he turns up in later books. He gets swept up into my Forges of Mars trilogy. And has he learned the lessons from the days of Storm of Iron ? No, not really. Continuity is one thing when it’s your own characters and your own, say, Graham-verse or Dan-verse. We have a lot of editors who are very on the ball in terms of what our continuity was, or keeping our timelines right. And we had a lot of very open lines of communication, which was encouraged; we would all talk to one another if we wanted to see if our character could fit into somebody else’s book. It was easy enough to ask for it. In 40k we all tend to more or less plough our own furrow, but in the Heresy era, there was a lot of crossover. That connective tissue was really important to sell the idea of this living, breathing universe, where yes, characters could walk from one stage to another, because it would feel weird if they didn’t. That meant a lot of email conversations, a lot of phone conversations, and every three or four months or so we would all meet up at Games Workshop and just talk through what we were planning. Books are not fast things to go through production, so we always had lots of time to share ideas. Every time we’d get together, we’d have a state-of-the-nation discussion about where things were, what pieces were moving, who was on the board, who needed to come on it, who needed to go off it; and from there we would figure out, “Ok, if I’m doing this next story, and that guy there was in your book, he’d be really useful to put in here; or she’d really fit in that book.” It was fairly easy, relatively speaking, at the beginning of the process. But once we got up to novel 25, 30, 40, 50… that’s when you started to say, “I can’t hold all this in my head. I need to talk to the others.” But it was fun – it was not an onerous task! One of my favourite things that came out of this, other than the success of the series, was that these became my brothers in arms in the trenches. We all kind of knew each other anyway, from occasional meetings at a book signing or a convention or what have you, but in the Horus Heresy writers’ rooms and communications and events that came out of that, we became really good friends. And the level of trust that came out of that really helped the books. Because all the meetings we had about it had just the right amount of ego in the room, where you felt comfortable saying, “Here’s my idea, and I think it’s bloody brilliant” – and then everybody else would jump on it, hit it with hammers, and throw ideas at it. You were willing to put your idea in the ring, but also willing to have it kicked around the room and reshaped, so it came back to you and you said, “This is way better. This is awesome.” That was a great atmosphere. I’ve seldom worked with such a wonderful bunch of human beings to craft something before. And we made lifelong friends out of that creative process."