The final Horus Heresy book, The End and the Death: Volume 3, will be available for pre-order via the Games Workshop webstore on January 13 – though pre-orders are already open with booksellers. Games Workshop announced special edition, hardback, eBook, and audiobook versions of the volume via a Warhammer Community announcement on Sunday.
The End and the Death recounts the final acts of the Horus Heresy civil war, as the Emperor of Mankind rises from the Golden Throne to board the traitor Warmaster’s flagship and finally slay his lost son, Horus Lupercal.
Warhammer 40k fans already know how this fight ends, but – as with the whole Horus Heresy book series – it’s not about what happens, it’s about how it happens.
Though the End and the Death was written as a single, continuous narrative, the manuscript is so enormous that author Dan Abnett was forced to split it into three volumes. It’s a suitably colossal ending to a thoroughly massive series.
The first Horus Heresy book, Horus Rising, was released in 2006. There are 54 mainline Horus Heresy books – a mixture of novels and anthologies – plus a graphic novel, uncollected e-book short stories, and several unnumbered books and novellas set in the time period but not part of the main continuity.
There are also seventeen short novels and one anthology in the parallel Primarchs series, and then the eight books (and three un-numbered novellas) of the Siege of Terra miniseries, which The End and the Death finally brings to a close.
The Horus Heresy books aren’t so much a large series as a fractal series – no matter where you look, there’s always more of it, more complexity and more depth. The Siege of Terra miniseries is a single, continuous narrative following one warzone, and ramps up from “the largest military force ever conceived invades the solar system” to “reality itself begins to die”.
As you can probably tell, we’re fans. But if you’re not already onboard with the series, we can recommend plenty of great Warhammer 40k books for you to read – or listen to – instead. They have just as much grimdark action, but won’t require such a commitment.