And this is how nearly 18 hours of the Lupercal's War collection ends, not with a bang, but with a great concept somehow realised impressively boring.

The simple tranquility of a backwater agriworld is shattered by an announcement of the unthinkable.

I remember reading this in the Age of Darkness anthology and thinking it was really clever and different, but listening now after everything else in this collection, it certainly is a neat idea and it is markedly different to any other Horus Heresy story I've come across, but it is also interminably dull. It's an hour and half or however many pages, which is a completely reasonable length of time if you use it, but so little happens or even develops (albeit a lot is happening in the grand scheme of things). I can't help feeling this would actually benefit from being more like the bitesize advent calendar stories or actually make use of the time by really seeing the paranoia and panic spread with characters that aren't cardboard cut out yokels. The audiobook did not help sigh the stereotypes that's for sure.

***Spoilers mentioned below***

The idea of Alpha Legion propaganda and fuckery is great and has so much potential. I would love to see more interesting things done with it, but he drops an absolute banger of a fake news report, hangs around a bit, emails his boss, and fucks off. He's been living there properly embedded and stealth. That could have been used so much more effectively from a storytelling perspective, links to the community that come with guilt and questions. Some emotional weight would be nice, we are setting up a planet to go purge each other in despair.

Please sir, can we have some pathos, as a treat?

I really have gotten mean as this collection has gone on and particularly with me not sleeping last night, but there are absolute gems in this collection that probe they can be great, among so much chaff. I will say the prose is better than I have come to expect from Swallow and actually thought this was McNeil for a hot minute, but he would have had some dramatic scenes, hopefully without his occasional bouts of virulent misogyny and bioessentialism (No, I am never going to let it go).

Time and time again, these Horus Heresy shorts have ideas that are great, but no pay off. It's sad. Treachery and Betrayal appears to be wall to wall full audio dramas so that will be an interesting change after the predominance of short stories in Lupercal's War. ( )