Publisher: Black Library (Paperback – 25 January 2005)

Series: Warhammer 40,000

Length: 413 pages

My Rating: 4.75 out of 5 stars

Amazon

Welcome back to my Throwback Thursday series, where I republish old reviews, review books I have read before or review older books I have only just had a chance to read.  This week I check out an impressive and dark older entry from the excellent Warhammer 40,000 extended universe, Lord of the Night by Simon Spurrier.

Readers of this blog will know that I have a lot of love for the always intense and fun Warhammer 40,000 fiction, having read quite a bit of it this year.  One of the better older pieces of this fiction I managed to check out this year was the awesome novel Lord of the Night by acclaimed author Simon Spurrier.  Spurrier is an excellent author who is best known for his work on various graphic novels and comics series across the major companies.  I have read a couple of his comics over the years, although my favourite is probably his run on the original Doctor Aphra series (check out my reviews for the awesome volumes Unspeakable Rebel Superweapon and A Rogue’s End).  Spurrier also wrote several Warhammer 40,000 novels back in the mid-2000s, including the highly regarded Lord of the Night.  I was lucky enough to get a copy of Lord of the Night second-hand, and I ended up reading it while away on holiday.  Unsurprisingly I loved it, as Spurrier came up with a powerful story about two complex characters caught up in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Interrogator Mita Ashyn of the Ordo Xenos is newly arrived in the service of veteran Inquisitor Kaustus after the death of her previous master.  Desperately trying to earn her place amongst the Inquisitor’s haughty acolytes and her mysterious new master, Mita is isolated due to the taint associated with her advanced psychic powers.  Seeking alien cultists on the hive-world of Equixus, Mita is tasked with rooting out minor corruption and heresy.  However, when an ancient ship crash lands on the planet, Mita receives psychic warnings of a dark and terrible foe.

Ten thousand years ago at the end of the Horus Heresy, Commander Sahaal was chosen by his crazed Primarch, Konrad Cruz, as the heir to the Night Lords legion of Space Marines.  However, before Sahaal could take command of the Legion, his Primarch’s most sacred artefact was stolen, and Sahaal’s pursuit of the thief saw him trapped out in the depths of space for millennia.  Awaking on his crashed ship on Equixus, Sahaal finds the artefact gone, stolen by thieves from the planet.  Determined to claim lordship of his legion, Sahaal will stop at nothing to reclaim what is rightfully his, no matter how many people he has to kill.

As Sahaal begins a deadly campaign of fear in the underbelly of Equixus, Mita appears to be the only person in the Inquisitor’s retinue concerned about the danger.  Working against the wishes of her master, Mita attempts to destroy the traitor Astartes that has invaded the city before it is too late.  However, Sahaal is a master of urban warfare and soon his solo campaign of destruction has the entire hive on its knees.  As the two lost souls move to confront each other, they soon discover that there are even greater secrets at work than either of them realises, and soon the fate of Equixus hangs in the balance.

This was a powerful and compelling Warhammer 40,000 story from Spurrier that had me hooked from the very beginning.  Focussed on the two unique perspective characters of Mita and Sahaal, Spurrier sets up an intriguing and vicious story with great thriller elements in a fantastic and gloomy hive-city setting.  Starting off with some effective set-up that introduces both protagonists and their complex lives, Lord of the Night soon evolves into an impressive cat and mouse scenario between the two as Mita fights to stop Sahaal before he recovers his prize and destroys the city from within.

This leads to all manner of chaos and destruction, as Sahaal initiates a brutal urban warfare campaign by enlisting the help of a curious raft of unconventional allies, while Mita manipulates the city’s official resources to her use.  While this battle rages, Spurrier also introduces some compelling and highly important side storylines which see Mita trying to gain the respect and aid of her secretive Inquisitor master, while Sahaal comes to terms with his missing years, his complex past, and what it is to be a Night Lord.  This leads up to several great confrontations before all the characters finally come together a brutal final sequence.  There are some great reveals here, especially about who is pulling all the strings surrounding the characters, and I loved some the brilliant twists that emerged.  The book ends on a pretty dark note, with both protagonists getting what they wanted, even though it nearly destroys them, and this ended up being quite an epic and captivating read.

I love how dark and intense Spurrier made this novel, and it has such an elaborate and complex narrative surrounding it.  The split between the two main characters works extremely well to tell an elaborate and multilayered story, and I enjoyed how the two separate arcs bounced off each other, with both dealing with betrayals, personal lows and the realisation that nothing is as it seems.  The grim setting of the hive city is also very impressive, and there is a reason that Warhammer 40,000 authors use it as a prime location for their stories.  The multiple layers of tunnels, caverns, and cityscapes makes for an outstanding background to this story of urban warfare and bloody revenge, and you can easily feel the confinement, corruption and fear that Spurrier envisions in this epic location.

Lord of the Night also turns out to be quite an impressive and elaborate piece of Warhammer 40,000 fiction.  Spurrier clearly has a great appreciation and love for the lore, and it really shows in his portrayal of both a secretive Inquisitor squad and the Night Lords Space Marines.  While Inquisitors are well covered in Warhammer 40,000 fiction, such as the Eisenhorn books by Dan Abnett (Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus), I personally loved seeing a book focussing on a Night Lord, especially as they are a little unrepresented in the extended universe fiction.  Spurrier really dives into what it is to be a Night Lord, especially during the Horus Heresy and before their full corruption, and his primary Night Lord character gives the reader a full course on how to terrorise and manipulate a city to get what you want.  It was so cool to see a Night Lord in all his fear-bringing glory, and it made for quite a dark and bloody read as a result.  Spurrier also does a great job of exploring some of the wider lore of the Warhammer 40,000 universe and working it into the plot of Lord of the Night.  This ensures that readers a little less familiar with the canon can enjoy this book fairly easily and not have to worry about external lore details.  That being said, fans of the franchise are always going to get a little more out this book and Lord of the Night proved to be a particularly good earlier novel in the canon, especially with its great insights into both the protagonist and antagonist.

One of the things that I most liked about Lord of the Night was the complex and impressive protagonists that the story was set around.  Despite being on different sides, Mita Ashyn and Sahaal have a lot in common with each other, having been lost and reviled in various different ways.  Mita proves to be a great example of how dark and unfair the Warhammer 40,000 universe is, as the thing that makes her a useful servant to the Imperium, her psychic abilities, also ensures that everyone sees her as unclean and tainted.  Watching her desperately trying to prove herself to the Inquisitor, his cronies, and the people of Equixus, only to be rejected and reviled, is very heartbreaking, and you can’t help but feel for Mita as she is routinely betrayed, spurned, or ignored.  Spurrier does some wonderful work with Mita as Lord of the Night continues, and it was great to see her find her confidence, fight back against those who oppress her, and start to question her superior and the teachings that bound her and her powers.  Watching her come to terms with her place in the Imperium, and still try to do the right thing was extremely powerful, and it leads to some impressive and emotionally charged scenes.

Sahaal also prove to be a surprisingly deep and complex character to follow.  Before reading Lord of the Night, I thought Sahaal would be a deranged Chaos Space Marine, and indeed the first few scenes with Sahaal show him to be a deadly and remorseless killer who uses terror as an effective weapon.  However, as the book continues, you start to realise that there is more to Sahaal than meets the eyes.  While he kills to achieve his goals, often in brutal ways, some of the interactions he has with his surprising allies, as well as a series of compelling flashbacks, paint him in a somewhat noble light defined by his loyalty to his Primarch and his ideals for control and order.  This paints a bit more as a victim of circumstance rather than a full Chaos infected traitor, and it was fascinating to see him act very differently from other antagonistic Space Marines characters.  There are some intriguing hidden depths to Sahaal that are revealed towards the end of the book, especially when certain manipulations are uncovered, and there are some good revelations regarding his actual mindset and mental status.  I also loved the scene where he is finally reunited with his beloved Legion, only to realise just how far they have fallen in his absence.  Sahaal ends up having some intriguing interactions with Mita throughout the course of the book, and the two play off each other perfectly, representing different angles of betrayal, loyalty and misunderstood misuse.  I deeply appreciated how well Spurrier utilised both of these point of view characters in Lord of the Night and the helped to turn this into quite an amazing read.

Overall, Lord of the Night was an exceptional read and a wonderful piece of Warhammer 40,000 fiction.  Simon Spurrier does an excellent job of bringing together two amazing, misunderstood characters together in a brutal battle across a terrified city and I was hooked the entire way through this plot.  Clever, intense, and loaded with some intriguing pieces of Warhammer lore, Lord of the Night is an outstanding read and it was one of the better pre-2023 Warhammer 40,000 novels I enjoyed in 2023.

Amazon