The Avenging Son Book review spoiler free...ish

 

Avenging Son by Guy Haley.

After the battle for Holy Terra was won, at a cost almost too huge to grasp, the Great Scouring began. This was the Imperium’s massive counter‑offensive against the traitor legions and the mortal followers of Chaos who had turned on everything they once stood for. When the fighting finally pushed the Chaos forces back into the warp rift known as the Eye of Terror, humanity could finally pause, count its losses, and start putting the Imperium back together, Roboute Guilliman took charge of this effort, leading from the front and reshaping the Emperor’s realm after His entombment within the Golden Throne. That momentum carried on until Guilliman faced his corrupted brother Fulgrim on the world of Thessala. Fulgrim’s twisted blade dealt him a mortal wound, its poison slowly killing him. On the brink of death, Guilliman was sealed inside a temporal stasis field and placed upon the throne in the Temple of Correction on Macragge. Since then, the temple has become a pilgrimage site for the faithful. And through all those years, one rumour has never quite faded: that Guilliman’s wound is actually healing inside the stasis field, and he’s simply waiting, biding his time until the right person with the right gifts arrives to bring him back. 

I found myself warming to this novel as it went on. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what direction it wanted to take, and that hesitation made the opening feel a little uncertain. But once the story found its footing, the pacing settled into something much more natural, and I realised I was genuinely invested. What really stood out to me was the character work. Guilliman feels familiar, but not static; there’s a real sense of a man trying to reconcile who he was with the Imperium he’s woken up to. His reaction to the twisted state of the Emperor’s vision is handled with a lot of weight, and it’s easy to imagine how overwhelming that must be for him. It’s one of the parts of the book that lingered with me after I put it down. The material involving Belisarius Cawl adds another interesting layer. His “interpretations” of the Emperor’s work push right up against the edge of heresy in the eyes of his peers, yet Guilliman’s stance is almost the inverse. That contrast says a lot about how far the Imperium has drifted, and how differently the Primarchs might see things if they were all suddenly returned to the present. As the story moved forward, it became clear that the book is doing a lot of groundwork. It’s good, but you can feel it holding back in places, almost as if it knows it’s the opening act of something larger. There’s a sense of promise there, like the real weight of the narrative is still gathering just out of sight.