DESCENT OF ANGELS By Mitchel Scanlon – Reviewed

This is not your normal Horus Heresy novel. It doesn’t read like a Horus Heresy novel at all, and by the end I was wondering how this fitted into the massive tale of betrayal and treachery. Having read all the other books in the series so far this came as a bit of a shock. I realise that since the original trilogy many of the books have told related but connected only marginally tales of the Heresy.

This book tells the tale of Caliban, a feudal-like world, and former Terra colony that has been out of touch with Earth for hundreds of years.

This feudal land is a dangerous place of deadly flora and fauna, and the knights of the orders that run the world have had enough and set out to rid the world of the beasts. Lion El’Jonson, a strange and mighty warrior, mysteriously found deep in the jungles of Caliban, takes charge of the largest order and sets his sights on removing the danger of the beasts.

Then the Imperial fleet arrives, after almost two hundred pages and the world of Caliban is gradually reconverted to the Empire, whether they like it or not.

This is a tale of friendship and brotherhood, and is a riveting. It shows a different side of the Empire we are familiar with. For the most part this doesn’t feel like an 40K universe book at all. The feudal world of Caliban is remarkably well portrayed, and two young trainee-knights are our protagonists, and we follow them as they struggled with becoming knights, and becoming men. It’s a quite fascinating tale, a fantasy that actually slides perfectly into the 40K universe. Brilliantly inventive for the series, but does it actually fit into the Horus Heresy sequence? And the next book in the series, Legion by Dan Abnett, doesn’t follow on the story of the Dark Angels either… It’s a perfectly good book, exciting, adventurous, cleverly plotted and inventive, and as a stand-alone novel is works well within the 40K universe and offers something different. My problems rests entirely on it’s fit into the Horus Heresy. Otherwise its one of the best 40K novels.

The Hunger Games – Reviewed

Normally when a big budget adaptation of a best-selling novel comes out I would read the book first and then watch the film and not enjoy it as much as I did the book. I think that if the book is the original then you should read that before seeing the film based on it. The original is always better in my opinion, although the Harry Potter films were almost as good as the books. Almost.

So we come to another successful franchise based on a YA novel.

I don’t watch trailers of films I know I will watch, and so came to this film completely open minded.

To say that I was disappointed is an overstatement. Underwhelmed is more like.

Having a good knowledge of The Running Man (the film and the story it was based on), Lord of the Flies (the storyline rather than either the book or the film), Nineteen Eighty-Four (the book) and Predator (the film), it seemed there was nothing, absolutely nothing new for me here.

The film starts in a kind of post-apocalyptic rural community where, each year, a boy and a girl from each of the twelve community that make up this world (Panem), is chosen by lottery to enter the Hunger Games, a televised survival-of-the-fittest contest to the death where there can only be one winner. Katniss Everdeen volunteers when her younger sister is chosen, and goes through the training and popularity process (sponsors can help while you are in the jungle fighting for your life, but only if they like you). Then we have the games, which is basically a cross between The Running Man and Lord of the Flies (Battle Royale has also been touted as heavily influencing the story, but that’s basically Lord of the Flies with bullets and on a brutal scale), with some Predator (the jungle setting) thrown in for good measure, with fighting, gangs, hunting, traps and cheating. It gets quite exciting, and the characters are pretty good, Jennifer Lawrence does a solid job as our lead. The story manages to include quite a lot of back story and explanation without getting bogged back, but there is nothing original. We’ve seen all of this before, and apart from putting it all together in a nicely presented package nothing is new.

The Hunger Games would not have been a success if not for the best-selling book series. If the film had a lower budget and wasn’t connected to the books at all no one would have noticed its release. When the next film comes out I won’t be queuing to see it, but I might download a copy and check it out. More than likely I’ll pick up the first book in the series to see if that’s any better. Slightly disappointed.