I have a confession to make. Despite waxing lyrical about how good Horus Rising is, I actually abandoned False Gods unfinished before moving on to other books. Christmas was busy, with little time for reading, and by the time I came to sit down with the book again after a break of a few days I just couldn't bring myself to carry on. Probably, my shortest lived attempt to read the series yet.
False Gods, you see, is a very different book to Horus Rising, and falls firmly into the Sword and Sorcery in space theme that I mentioned previously. Whereas Horus Rising has a few iron thews being girded, False Gods is full of them; alongside bulging muscles dripping with sweat, weapons and armour repeatedly being polished, and far too many mortals swooning over the perfect physique of the astartes. Horus Rising managed to give the space marines some semblance of personality, so it was quite jarring to find that they had all lost most of their depth as characters and would switch from raving sceptics, to naively trusting, as and when the plot requires.
The main plot of the book is how Horus (a superhuman demi-god) is tricked into charging head first into a situation where he can be mortally injured, then, when he is on death's door, his followers are offered devil's bargain to heal him that allows the gods of Chaos to corrupt him. Unfortunately, the way it is portrayed doesn't feel particularly convincing. Erebus, a space marine who seems to be the architect of the scheme, tricks Horus by being rude to him, then telling him how one of his old followers has betrayed him. Somehow, Horus (as well as his superhuman space marine followers) are fooled by this and goaded into a rage that consumes all their rational thinking, but a poet tasked by one of the space marines to watch proceedings (as he is already suspicious of Erebus) isn't.
Then, when Horus has been injured and lies on death's door (by a weapon that Erebus stumbled upon by chance right at the end of the last book, nonetheless), Erebus is again able to trick all of his followers by being rude to them, and then admitting that there are some sorcerers on the planet that he was ordered to kill decades ago, and are now conveniently the only people with a way of healing their master. Loken, the main protagonist of the book, has been suspicious of Erebus all along, but, when he finally finds evidence of Erebus' treachery, he decides not to show it to everyone and wanders off in a huff.
In some ways, having genetically engineered super soldiers behaving like spoilt children is actually very appropriate, and with a bit more subtlety Graham McNeil could have written something quite wonderful. Perhaps, I am being rather too harsh in my criticism, but False Gods felt like something Robert E Howard would write on an off day and just didn't have an interesting enough plot to hold my attention.
