Deliverance Lost War Within The Shadows

Deliverance Lost follows the Raven Guard legion following the events at Isstvan V, and their attempts to rebuild the legion. As someone who decided to start playing the Horus Heresy with a Raven Guard army, I hoped this would be a good story to get an understanding of the legion and its characters, unfortunately I was mistaken. I’ll be honest, I don’t think there is anything I really liked about this book. None of the characters are particularly interesting, I don’t think I can actually describe a personality for most of them, and with who I can there is very little I can say. Alpharius is secretive, Omegon is duplicitous, Branne is somewhat investigative, and Corax is a bit emo, that’s all I can say about any of them though. Also, Alpharius isn’t actually Alpharius, he’s an Alpha Legion marine infiltrated into the Raven Guard and we don’t even find out the name of the person he replaced until the end of the novel. He is referred to as Alpharius throughout the book and no character says his name, until almost the end, from which point on he is called the other name, so I just question the point of calling him Alpharius in the first place. Now of course you should have characters with a bit of depth to them, but even if you don’t the novel could be alright if the plot was decent, but sadly it isn’t really. Very little happens in the first half of the book. We get a brief description of the Ravens Flight, the Raven Guards 98 day campaign on Isstvan V after the dropsite massacre, which is immediately followed by them all hanging out on space ships for multiple chapters not doing anything interesting. They make it back to Terra where nothing particularly interesting happens, we get a brief action scene there of marines fighting a labyrinth, and they win pretty easily. The go back to Deliverance, make more marines, fight some people we’ve not seen yet somewhere else, comeback to Deliverance, fight the antagonists we’ve been following the whole novel, win in one chapter, and then fight more enemies somewhere else we haven’t seen before and win in one chapter. Essentially, nothing happens for most of the novel, and at the end we get 3 separate action scenes, only one of which had any actual build up as we followed Omegon and the Mechanicum for maybe half of the novel. We could have just gotten 1 large action scene with them and end it there, instead we briefly see that, and get another brief fight with the Emperors Children protecting the Perfect Fortress, characters we only meet in the last chapter. This is quite a negative review, but I will say I do think that Gav is talented, just not especially as a writer, based on this and The First Wall. From what I have seen, he can come up with interesting events, I thought the concepts of rebuilding the Raven Guard, the Mechanicum uprising on Deliverance, and the battle for the Perfect Fortress were good. It would have been nice to see it written well, with build-up action and enjoyable characters, but in here it honestly reads like a Lexicanum article with dialogue occasionally.