It seems like forever ago that I picked up Avenging Son, the opening volume of the Dawn of Fire series. A series that, on the face of it, seemed to be a new ‘main storyline’ for the grim dark future of the forty-first millennium. I remember thinking it was good, but unremarkable. More to the point, I was unsure about a new, slightly brighter view of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I now stand with all nine volumes of this epic behind me, and I find that my thoughts are still mixed, but perhaps not in the same way.

To do away with my original misconception. This is not a series of hope. It’s there in that original book, but as soon as the Indomitus Crusade begins in earnest, it crashes headfirst into reality. In the end, all those shiny new lights just go to show how dark the grim future really is.

The good news is that Dawn of Fire is not another Horus Heresy. No endless spin-offs and sprawling plotlines. There are only nine novels in the series, and no anthologies. For all that, there are some weaknesses that this shorter saga does suffer from during its brief tenure.

Nine novels. Five authors. Guy Haley (more on him later), Marc Collins, Nick Kyme, Chris Wraight, and Gav Thorpe. Four of those are tried-and-tested Black Library novelists, Collins is a relative newcomer, but holds his own among towering peers. Honestly, I’d have liked to see a few more new faces in the series. Not that there is anything wrong with the old guard – far from it – but because letting fresh blood play in these major storylines shows just how healthy the current rising tide of Warhammer writers is. There are some authors I can think of who have excelled as part of a larger narrative like this, so hopefully the upcoming new edition of the game will give them their moment in the sunlight too.

There is not a bad book in this series. But – and you knew there was going to be a but – the series as a whole does feel like less than the sum of its parts. There is a lot of ground covered in this series, and it doesn’t always hang together as well as I might have hoped. even leaving aside personal tastes when it comes to writing styles, the series feels incredibly disjointed. More like a series of tangents than a narrative with any cohesion or momentum.

But (hey, another but) that is part of the game. Warhammer 40,000 is at its best when it’s a setting rather than a story unto itself. Every stop along the way is good, even if the journey itself is occasionally shaky. This isn’t the main story it was originally teased as. It’s more a guide to how we got to the current state of affairs. On that note, we have to return to Guy Haley. Not only did he author a third of the Dawn of Fire novels, he also wrote the Dark Imperium trilogy, which has subsequently been retconned into a sequel to this series. More importantly, to my mind at least, he is also the author of three recent novels about one Belisarius Cawl. The Great Work, Genefather, and Archmagos aren’t marketed as anything other than great novels, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the new order of Warhammer 40,000. Read these books and you’ll get two things. first, you’ll get a great story. Second, you’ll get a different interpretation to the Dawn of Fire’s voyage into the great unknown.

It’s hard to talk about about Dawn of Fire in terms of recommendations, because as a series, it has major faults. Along with all the sidesteps and tangents, it ends without really resolving anything. It’s nine novels of set-up for a tabletop game. The real future is the one we game out over the battlefield. That being said, it has some brilliant highs. There are character arcs hidden inside that can stand along with the best of what the franchise has to offer. There’s more blood, battles, and baddies than you can shake a chainsword at. Plot-wise, it’s a dead-end, but individually, actions have consequences. Characters we have come to know die. And that’s if they’re lucky. there are worse things out there than a clean death.

More than that, it’s a genuinely nice to see Black Library experiment with multi-author series beyond the Horus Heresy. With Warhammer Crime and Warhammer Horror seemingly dead, and little movement on the Renegades of Adepta Sororitas series, it’s nice to see a series accomplish its goal. Even if I wasn’t always sure what that goal was.

Would I recommend Dawn of Fire as a starting point for a new reader? No. But if you’re familiar with the universe, you can definitely fill in the blanks and get a great story out of this fractured series.