"Ravenor" - YAY! "Space Wolves" - BOO!
As part of my efforts to run a good game of "Dark Heresy" I have been immersing myself in 40K literature for the last couple of months. My most recent reads have been the "Ravenor" omnibus and the second "Space Wolf" omnibus. Here's what I thought of them.
The "Ravenor" series is clearly the main inspiration for "Dark Heresy" - far moreso than "Eisenhorn". "Ravenor" spends far more time focused on the various members of Gideon Ravenor's warband than it does on Ravenor himself, though the Inquisitor is by no means absent from the plots. The three books form a nice, overarching metaplot, with backstabbing, suitably sinister forces of chaos, flawed heroes, mysterious psychic powers, and all the sorts of things that make the Warhammer 40K universe what it is. Anyone planning on running a Dark Heresy campaign should certainly give "Ravenor" at least a cursory reading to get a feel for what the campaign should be like.
The second Space Wolf omnibus, on the other hand, is a shameless and genocidal murder of perfectly innocent trees, and should be punished by the European Court for its sheer horribleness.
The first Space Wolf omnibus was pretty light reading, but it is nothing compared to what comes in this omnibus. Part of the problem may lie in the fact that the omnibus has different writers, and that almost never helps a title along. But overall the plotline is rather agonizing in it's pacing. The good news is that you can skim vast sections of the omnibus without losing the thread of the plot - rather like a soap opera you can miss a lot and pick the plot-line right back up again when decide to stop simply glancing over the pages and actually start reading all the words once more.
As with "Gaunt's Ghosts" I read the Space Wolf omnibusses (omnibusi?) primarily for color rather than inspiration for plotlines. But while there are nuggets to be mined here (the relationship between the Space Wolves and the Navigator House Belesarius being the biggest and best) they are few and far between, and the repetitious prose style makes it hard to keep digging for them. It's like reading a Conan novel without most of the good parts, as Ragnar wanders from one combat to another, swinging his sword and firing his bolt pistol at cultists, traitors, more cultists, Chaos Space Marines, cultists, traitors, additional cultists, daemons, Chaos Space Marines, and - cultists. I do nominate the second omnibus for two awards - the first for "most paragraphs started with a proper name" and the second for "most uses of the name 'Ragnar' ever".
Unless you are a Space Wolf fanatic, or desperately in need of kindling, read something else.