The review of the Night Lords series is easy – a seminal work, one of the founding texts of the modern Black Library. It announced Aaron Dembski-Bowden as a force to be reckoned with, all the hallmarks of his style present and correct. Hyper-kinetic action, character development, distinct voices, creeping warp horror and a strangely – startlingly – emotional narrative core. It’s that last one I want to talk about, because while there are a few authors who match the mighty ADB when it comes to the shooty-shooty, there’s fewer who manage not just to make you, the reader, care about their characters, but to have them care about each other. That’s important, because in our spaces – nerd spaces, often male dominated spaces, we’re not good at caring about each other openly. We can learn, surprisingly, from the Night Lords.
Soul Hunter
The Black Library is good at comradeship, bonds forged in fire, obedience and honour, companionship and regard, forever celebrating St Crispin’s Day, M.39.999. Friendship – even love – is usually earned, one of the most convenient plot hooks in a military scifi novel being the outsider has to prove themselves to the insiders. They do so, and are brought into the loving grasp of the fraternity or sorority (or both). We see this in humans, tau, orks, necrons, eldar, an endless troupe of love earned through struggle and death, the stranger with a thousand faces becoming something more, and less, than the sum of their parts. It is one of the foundational myths of our society, if not humanity as a whole, so it’s no wonder that it comes up in the stories we tell of the far future. It is love, of a kind – philia, Aristotle’s mutual love between equals, partially defined in explicit reference to soldiers and travellers, the outsider brought inside.
The Black Library is less good at other kinds of love. It shies away from Eros, romantic and sexual love, keeping the books as teenager-friendly as possible, though the moving overton fuck-window of sex in teen fiction has long since left the frictionless, largely sexless world of 40k long behind (preposterous megaviolence is, of course, child-appropriate). For all that the lingering, throbbing, haunting, male gaze of erotas hovers around the Space Marines, it is nearly always used in the platonic sense – the body beautiful points towards the primacy of mankind, rippling muscle and (usually) alabaster skin pulling straight towards Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night.
The remaining forms of love – agape, storge, philautia – unconditional, instinctual, and especially parental, are where ADB excels and the Night Lords trilogy stands, almost unbelievably, apart. Increasingly, 40k is about people, and all to the good that it is, but before that it was about sons. The foundational myth of 40k is a nested set of sons and fathers, the emperor, custodes, primarchs and legionaries, and we’ve spent thousands upon thousands of hours exploring that dynamic as a community. There are literal, metaphoric, and heroic fathers and paternal figures aplenty in Age of Sigmar, the Dark Millennium and the World that Was, the single strongest thematic thread in the corpus betraying both the preoccupations of the majority of the Black Library’s authors and our own cultural biases in a patriarchal society. What sons will do for their fathers, and what do fathers do to their sons is, in many ways, the story of Warhammer 40k and whether intentional or not, enough of Games Workshop’s output focuses in on this dynamic that it’s probably time to send the company to therapy (it’s certainly helped me).
The Legions and their Primarchs have served as the vanguard wave of Black Library novels exploring and complicating that idea of parental love. Fathers love their sons, or they don’t, and we see the effects of that choice. The baseline assumption that sons love their fathers is tested, stretched and rarely broken, only cast aside through love for another, more distant, father. ADB’s sons near always love their fathers, no matter how the father acts or feels towards them. Kharn loves Angron, despite his outright disregard and deliberate perpetuation of cycles of abuse. Argel Tal loves, at least at first, his succession of proximate fathers. Seth loves Sanguinius, who loves him in return with a grace and sorrow that sears the heart to read. Talos loves Curze, loves his brothers, loves Septimus, acts as child/father/elder brother, working through a succession of relationships bound within performative hypermasculinity.
Blood Reaver
This story of First Claw, a band of renegade murderers not above skinning their foes and daubing themselves with blood to scare the literal shit out of their enemies, is a story about love. It’s a story about, if not obsessed with, the sins of the father, action and reaction feeding off each other to establish and police the boundaries of acceptable love in male relationships, how the emotions raised by love and its absence, can – and are – channelled into violence, rebellion and compliance.
Talos’ ability to love is ostensibly neutered by his transhumanity, abruptly and terminally in one of many sections of the trilogy that returns First Claw back to their home world. It’s the rare interaction in Warhammer fiction between mother and child and one indicative of 40k’s focus on fathers – Talos’ mother brutally and horribly killed for the crime of loving her child regardless of his transformation into monster. There’s a constant sense of severance in Space Marine literature, the scalpels of the apothecarium working to create literal and metaphorical transformation, and the first cut is always child-from-family. Space Marines are removed from their family settings and entered into a new one through a surgical process of lore, biology and backstory. Their new fathers are literally implanted into them, the bonds of maternal affection thoroughly and irreversibly overridden by the deposition of geneseed, transformative ejaculate punched through blood and bone – the invasive paternal rendering maternity irrelevant. Talos becomes a Marine ultimately through the love of his mother, which is, in return, excised and replaced with a series of surrogate fathers.
The Night Lords Trilogy, with an almost equal balance of flashback and present narrative, sees Talos run through this series, always looking for validation, for parental love. He receives it only in his mother, the sole written source of comfort and safety in three books – but he looks for it amongst his fathers nonetheless. He slides through and off paternal figures – his gene-father, Curze, his proximate surrogates of Malcharion and Vandred, even himself – in a process of transference, endlessly rejected or rejecting, each time seeking something that will be outright refused. He refuses to be told that they do not love him – in whatever form that takes for each. His love for Curze transmutes into rage powerful enough to defy his father’s last, and only command, rejecting the single lesson – that death is nothing compared to vindication – that he has earnestly tried to impart to his sons. Vandred goes from Sergeant to Daemon, with Talos-as-Child hating and mourning the transformation before his eventual, redemptive, demise. Malcharion, wise War-Sage, imparts wisdom and advice as last remaining authority that Talos recognises as one he can turn to for support, a broken idol who wishes nothing more than to be left alone, and Talos wars between his need for a literal iron-hard presence and his desire to obey.
Talos searches while living as his father’s son, in a way that the other Night Lords are not. He has internalised the lessons of fear, terror and warfare as much as any, but shares both curses and blessings that chain him to the image of his father. He is a prophet, given the sight of worlds to come, just as his father was, the ability to do so created by the toxic and ever-painful interaction of his genome with the spermatophores forced into his body to recreate him in Curze’ image. Talos seeks to restore the legion to the imagined, idealised vision of his father, wielding the Night Lords as a weapon against the ultimate father, the Emperor-Betrayer who chastised his Son for obedience. The Emperor as depicted in the Trilogy is an interesting case in and of himself – the God-Father revealed as a man, a lying man, a man who told Curze off for doing what he was told, a seemingly petty reason for grand revenge, but one striking at the heart of the parent/child tension – you told me to do this, and now you are punishing me for it. Talos takes that lesson from his father and makes it the core of his being – death to the false emperor and all that – while strictly staying within what he imagines his father’s vision to be, purity without chaos, death, murder and destruction, but never corruption. Talos is the closest to the nature of his father, and yet is still denied the closeness he yearns for. He seeks in action and plan what he cannot achieve in memory.
Those memories are painful. The vision of Curze reappears throughout the trilogy, becoming ever more strident in rejection of the paternal role. It takes another father to bring him down of the throne/pedestal that Talos has enshrined him on. Malcharion reveals, with surprisingly touching care for a man entombed in a Dreadnought, that, just like Talos, Curze’s visions were not perfect. It’s a very literal realisation for the son that his father was at heart – for all his gene-wrought perfection – fallible. Of course, this is a Space Marine learning it about a primarch, so the echo of “my father is just a man” is closer to “my god is just god-like”.
Void Stalker
With his role as a son outright and repeatedly rejected, his flailing tentacles of emotional need failing to sucker on to a single slab of midnight-clad armour, Talos turns them inward, and transforms himself into the patriarch, brooding, prophesying, teaching, in the imagined mould of his fathers. His brothers, themselves working through the trauma of transference in their own ways, variably accept, scorn and reject his attempts to parent them. That dynamic forms the majority of the outward-tension in the series, and leads to most of the humour, wit and dialogue that fans of the series cherish. Whether it’s in watching First Claw bicker, cut, die or even offer comfort, Talos’ continual attempts to assume the mantle of leader-and-father structure offer a lot of the texture ADB brings to his marines, as well as driving much of the narrative. His brothers find their niches and voices through how they react or exist within the envelope of Talos’ performance, whether lost to dark gods, cynical and violent, or as a true believer.
Talos himself grows in stature, confidence and vision throughout, orchestrating the grand narrative and slowly pulling others in his wake. For all that there’s a lot of dismissal, laughing when someone else gets hurt, or imagined fratricide, it’s still all comfortably within that idealised hypermasculine dynamic, cloaking – consciously or not – the vulnerability of love under socially acceptable cruelty and indifference. This spirals “down” the hierarchy of the remnant legion, from Captain to Sergeant to Brother and eventually to slave, with Talos shepherding his own warped and horrifying born-in-violence facsimile of a family through the only method of love he consciously understands – vengeance, violence and superiority, for Septimus, the void-born, Octavia.
Regardless of their intent, the Night Lords are carried by, or perhaps in spite of, the mantle of their new-father for another book and a quarter, ultimately to total destruction. In the final stages, they are thematically and literally hunted, as Curze was hunted, to ultimate extinction. Talos moves from father figure, searching for the meaning his primarch denied, into embodying him wholly and totally, standing in the same dust and ash and making the same, masturbatory oration to the indifferent imperium – a pointless stand in “death is nothing compared to vindication”. Despite the promise of something else, some different pattern, he is trapped in recreating the past. None of the characters escape the sins of the father, because no one reckons with them. They are acknowledged, discussed, lampshaded to an incredible degree, but the yawning void of their father’s love is inescapable, a black hole of the madness of men broken by men, passing their curse on through the all-too-obvious metaphor of the geneseed.
Echoes of Paternity
While they are a ton of bloody, grim, fun to read, I think that the Night Lords trilogies endure because they lay bare much of the gender and family fuckery that everyone’s favourite transhuman miniatures represent. Whether you see this very obviously or it gnaws at your subconscious is immaterial. They are a version of masculinity stretched and warped to the extreme, the feminine stripped from them and overridden by wave upon wave of paternity, every misogynist concept of female emotion removed via a battery of genetics, surgery and indoctrination and every dial of hyper aggressive masculinity turned to 11. It’s not surgery that creates the horror and violence of the Imperium’s ceramite-clad bulwark, or its most deadly enemy, but 20th and 21st century concepts of the male. They perform a masculinity, and are chemically, genetically, culturally, incapable of doing otherwise. A mask some of us don has been nailed onto them, leaving our “heroes” broken versions of humanity, incapable of taking another role in the grand play. The monsters are among us, and they’re monsters because all they have is a single face.
All Space Marine books do this to an extent, but where the Night Lords is almost unique is in the remains of love, not just filial love, bro-ternal and inviolate, but in familial, erotic, unconditional, that are all broken to the wheel. They are the furthest legion from love – not in hatred, which is similar in so many ways, but in the creation and celebration of fear. They exist not to hurt, but to terrorise – nevertheless the human need for love cannot be destroyed by the Imperium, or Chaos, or surgery. It can be shackled to or against it – love motivates hatred and war, love leads to betrayal upon betrayal, love kills, hurts, maims, while it redeems, grows, teaches and preserves, but, most importantly, love remains.
On rereading the Night Lords trilogy, it’s clear that this is the beginning of a thread ADB would continue to pull, one that – as of the moment – has found its clearest and most strident expression in Echoes of Eternity. It’s no secret that I think Echoes is hands down the best book written about Warhammer (though as I get older, not to say weirder, Inquisition War creeps up behind it) – an absolutely exceptional mix of meaning and meaningless, fun and sorrow, metaplot and texture, but when rereading Night Lords I couldn’t stop seeing it as the continuation of the same story. Where Talos searches for meaning in his father, or attempts to reject his lessons altogether in search of the nebulous “right thing to do”, you see the beginning of Kargos howling at the uncaring slaughter-god, of the World Eaters’ tragic attempts to emulate the broken toy, driving to ever greater acts of abasement and self-harm in order to capture a single moment of paternal validation. Angron, like Curze, will never give his sons what they are looking for – but they will always try, taught that there is a single way to act to virtue.
Where Angron’s emotional violence – far more significant in its setting than the physical – is to ignore, Curze’s is to dismiss. Talos offers help, a way out, a different set of actions, but his father isn’t listening. In Angron there is nothing left to listen, seeing his sons act out their failing attempts to fill a yawning void. You see it in Sanguinius too, though there the unstoppable love of the father is matched by the impossibility of his sons to reach his state of perfection. The father on pedestal – loving, caring, but unreachable – performs its own mental trickery, limiting and shaming sons for the failings in contrast to the impossible ideal. For all that Sanguinius attempts to shield his sons from the comparison, he cannot stop them from casting themselves in his painfully bright image. In Sanguinus we can see the culmination of Talos-as-father-brother, a ceaseless call to protect, care for, lead, and benefit sons for no reason other than they are. Sanguinius’ sons and Talos’ brothers do not need to, indeed, cannot earn love. It is simply there, no matter. It hurts all the more when they fail, or break, or betray, because the love they felt was never dependent on actions and does not ebb. It was. It is.
That, in the end, is the tragedy of Talos. He loves – unearnable, instinctual, parental love, ripped from his mother and transferred from father to father to brothers and children. He continues to try to enkindle something – anything – to hold on to a lost shadow of love, of a relationship that gave his life meaning, attempting to create it where it is absent, transfer it to others and force it into long forgotten shapes, utilising both the sins and the gifts of his fathers to do so. If you’ve read this and thought “fuck”, there is hope, of a kind. There is one different choice made, which speaks of something learnt at least. In the end, Talos, through and with all his cruelty and insane, brutal, violence, loves until, hounded back to his birth, he recapitulates his father’s journey and comes to his own conclusion.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
