Revisiting Nemesis by James Swallow (Guest Review)

Hello and welcome to this, the first ever guest review on Track of Words, where my good friend Tim is going to talk about revisiting Nemesis by James Swallow, book 13 in Black Library’s epic Horus Heresy series. When I read Tim’s thoughtful, insightful review I knew straight away that I wanted to publish it here on Track of Words – it’s a brilliant piece of analysis in its own right, and I think it works beautifully as a companion piece to my own Revisiting Battle for the Abyss article. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Without further ado then, over to Tim.

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Hi there! I’m Tim, a German psychologist and long-time fan of Warhammer 40.000 and the stories coming out of Black Library. I recently had a prolonged discussion with Michael about the Horus Heresy series as a whole, especially the thematic through-lines, interesting pairings of books and the age-old question of what order the series is best read in. Something we talked quite in depth about were the outliers (what we called ‘orphan books’) of the series’ various arcs, books like Nemesis, The Damnation Of Pythos or Battle for the Abyss, which are frequently found on the bad side of ‘Best and Worst’ lists of Heresy books.

While Michael decided to pick up Battle for the Abyss to see how it holds up, I grabbed my dusty copy of Nemesis and gave it another go. When Michael invited me to post my review of Nemesis as a companion piece to his own article about revisiting Battle for the Abyss I jumped at the opportunity to become Track Of Words’ first guest reviewer, and I feel quite honoured to be able to do so. Thanks, Michael!

“Exitus acta probat: the outcome justifies the deed.”

The first time I read James Swallow’s Nemesis was when it was originally released in 2010, so over 10 years ago. One thing I remember quite clearly about Nemesis – beside the core story and some particular scenes and quotes that stuck with me (“I am the weapon”) – was the fact that I was frustrated by it because I wasn’t very experienced with reading novels in English, so I used to struggle with Swallow’s prose. So this was a welcome opportunity to give the book another chance now that I could enjoy the prose for its flourishes and skill.

Revisiting Nemesis was definitely a worthwhile experience. It’s quite different from most of the rest of the Heresy series: it’s set quite early in the conflict, so most of the Imperium is still oblivious to what’s going on. Some of the recurring characters aren’t as well defined as they would become later on, but it’s interesting to see Dorn or Valdor in their ‘infant state’ when the first strokes of their series-long arcs are being set down, even if this novel is not about them (unexpectedly, Valdor gets one of the funniest scenes in the book – I’m just saying “finger guns”). The novel is not overly bound to continuity and can be comfortably read out of order, as it’s mostly a self-contained story without the baggage of tons of recurring characters or coverage of an important historical event (more on that later on).

Nemesis is also very much a ‘domestic 40k’ novel and feels much more closely related to an Eisenhorn novel than to, say, Angel Exterminatus. Space Marines are few and far between: this is a story about spies and assassins and those caught in the crossfire between them. The story is structured around two core arcs running parallel to each other, to collide at a later point of the novel. The word-count is cut down the middle into two Parts: Execution and Attrition. My impression after the first half of the book was “Hey, this is really fun”. After the final half, this had turned into “Wow, this is bleak. I feel bad for pretty much everyone involved”.

The first of the two major story threads that make up Nemesis is about a plot of the Imperial Master Of Assassins to end the civil war in its infancy by tasking a group of assassins with murdering the Warmaster Horus. Swallow takes his time with both story threads, and almost the whole first half of the page count of the Assassins’ story is spent assembling this six-headed ‘Execution Force’ from selected members of every Assassin Clade – which are, to simplify, 40k-sci-fi-versions of a sniper, a hacker, a pariah, a berserker, a poisoner and a shapeshifter. This is the fun part – every killer gets picked up basically while doing what they’re best at, and it’s thoroughly entertaining to see the assassins employing their various skill sets on their woeful targets. Once assembled, the rag-tag band of killers moves out to the planet marked to be the stage for Horus’ death.

Vindicare Assassin by David Gallagher (click on the image to see it full size)

The other story thread is about Yosef Sabrat, a civilian detective investigating a string of murders on the backwater world that he lives on. Without realizing it, he’s on the trail of a sinister plot by none other than Erebus himself to employ a daemonic creature called ‘Spear’ to…well, that would be telling. This is the section of the book that’s even more ‘domestic’ than the rest and reads almost like a Warhammer Crime procedural. I don’t actually remember, but I can imagine that Me From Ten Years Ago, eager for violence, action and Primarchs, was bored with this part. Now, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Yosef is your classic murder investigator – bit run down, with a wife and kid that he sees not often enough and an “I’ve seen too much of this s**t” attitude, working under the pressure of negligent superiors and local politics. His world is far away from the battlelines and word from the civil war is still stuck between a growing threat on the horizon, ridiculous hearsay and quiet whispers of who to side with. While not actually ‘fun’ like the ‘Assassins Assemble!’ scenes from the other thread, this part is quite entertaining for its noir aspects, the procedural nature and the mystery that’s being investigated.

Spear itself is one of the highpoints of the novel, in my opinion. He is icky, vile, cruel, gruesome and relentless in the pursuit of his mission. It definitely felt as if Swallow had a lot of fun writing him and is treating himself with what can only be described as lots of gore and a host of daemonic super-powers that Spear employs quite creatively. He is truly, unequivocally evil and basically a whole Execution Force rolled into one, but still is kind of compelling to read about while he is facing his own struggles and challenges along the way.

I won’t talk about the later part of the book plot-wise, because Swallow makes a few smart choices and has compelling surprises up his sleeve that I don’t want to spoil here, even if the book is over ten years old at this point. Just let it be said that at some point, the stories of the Execution Force, Yosef and Spear obviously have to collide. From then on…things escalate. And, as I already mentioned, not for the better.

Nemesis is, after all is said and done, a book about failure. Just as Anakin Skywalker will not be shot by a Droid in Episode I and the One Ring will not be destroyed when Frodo reaches Rivendell, the Execution Force cannot, must not and will not succeed in killing Warmaster Horus in Book 13 of the 54-book series. Similarly, once it is clear what Spear’s ultimate goal is, it’s also clear that if he would be successful in his mission, the Heresy and the universe at large would be a vastly different place, so even the daemonic villain is marked for failure from the get-go. And poor Yosef has found himself in a game in which he is so vastly, unimaginably far out of his depth that a happy ending for him is equally doubtful.

An important aspect of this theme is also the question of “acceptable collateral damage” and the question of which price is high enough to be worth paying for a given end. This thematic focus in itself isn’t a novum for a 40k or Heresy novel, of course, but it gets a much more bitter taste when a story so consequently stays apart from the battle-lines: it’s not trained, hypno-indoctrinated super-soldiers that are being sacrificed in the pursuit of some higher goal, but fathers, mothers and children, regular people that would just like to get on with their lives, if they had the choice. The domestic setting removes death from the martial mindset that’s so prevalent in other Heresy stories, returning it to its simple, ugly truth.

In this story, gruesome ends await most, and small victories are only possible by making the most dire of choices and soaking one’s hands in blood. Maybe I’m just getting softer, being ten years older and a father myself these days, but Nemesis’ second half almost struck me as depressing in the consistency of the consequences and outcomes for all those unfortunate enough to be strung up in the whole affair. This is not a criticism, by the way. 40k, at its core, is a bleak, disturbing setting, and Swallow embraces this here while also clearly having fun with its out-there elements and potential for action and horror.

Eversor Assassin by David Gallagher (click on the image to see it full size)

A criticism I would like to mention is regarding some annoying elements of…let’s call it “male-gaze-y-ness” that stood out to me in places. The Execution Force consists of three male, two female and one literally gender-fluid member. Both the first female and the shapeshifting assassin (while posing as female) are introduced by using seduction as the lure for their plots, the former even – you guessed it – working undercover as a prostitute. And the last female operative’s most notable feature when being introduced is her familial relationship to a male member of the team, again ensuring the first focus on the character is what she means to men instead of the singular aspects of her own craft or personality.

This gets much better along the way, mind you – all six assassins have moments to shine by employing their skills or personality to further the mission and the plot of the novel, and all six get enough depth to be interesting as characters of their own (it’s probably too late to ask for a six-part-anthology with previous missions of Execution Force members, right?). The shapeshifting assassin also gets some transphobic slurs (“sexless freak”) thrown at them, which while being justified in the story by coming from a vulgar and aggressive character, still stuck out to me. Maybe I’m nowadays just sensitive to stuff like this, but those moments just struck me as old-fashioned and eye-rolling at best, and I couldn’t shake the thought that they would (hopefully) be written differently and with more care if written today.

With that out of the way, a note on ‘skippable’ books. While Nemesis is not one of those books that will cause you trouble plot-wise later on because you’re unaware of certain information, events or characters, I’d argue that thematically it’s actually an important story. Rogal Dorn only appears in maybe two scenes, and yet I think it’s fair to say that Nemesis shows an important part of the series-spanning arc of Dorn and the Imperium in general. The finale of Flight of the Eisenstein shows Dorn being confronted with the ugly truth of his brother’s betrayal, a fact that he’s barely able to integrate into his frame of understanding of how the universe works. He is stoic, steadfast and uncompromising, yes, but also inflexible and prone to anger, close to literally killing the messenger that confronts him with the truth.

Nemesis then shows Dorn for the first time interacting with the Silent War of subterfuge and counter-intelligence, again appearing as the avatar of stoicism, honour and idealism. While he has only a few scenes in either book, those two nevertheless basically form Act 1 for the long-spanning arc of the Emperor’s Praetorian. Those books also establish the continuing tension between Dorn, Malcador and Valdor, as well as the growing friction between Horus and Erebus. Dorn’s arc will continue with stories like The Last Remembrancer, in which the Primarch is forced to make hard choices of compromise to adapt to this new kind of war that he’s being forced to wage, all leading along a road that will see him evolve into the Dorn that is be able to take on the Alpha Legion at their own game in Praetorian of Dorn.

This expands beyond the character of Dorn to include, more importantly, the “character” of the Imperium as a whole, which over the length of the series changes, step by step, from its (seemingly) idealistic Great Crusade-self into something that’s ripe to turn into the (even more) dystopian Imperium of the 41st Millenium. So while you won’t miss a lot regarding the overarching meta-plot if you skip it, a book like Nemesis nevertheless lays important thematic groundwork for the series as a whole.

I have to say that I really enjoyed my revisit of Nemesis. I appreciate the ways in which it’s different from the rest of the Heresy, and that it works so well as a standalone story. Don’t get me wrong, I was relieved when, after 54 (!) books, it was announced that the Siege would finally be starting, but it’s still kind of a shame that we didn’t get more books like Nemesis along the way. Books that look past the Space Marines and the Primarchs and focus on the ramifications of the war: the people caught in the crossfire, the small-scale rebellions that were still the end of the world for those whose homes were caught in it, not to mention all the cool aspects, characters and concepts of the 30k setting besides the Emperor and his extended, dysfunctional family.

Revisiting Nemesis also wetted my appetite to seek out more of Swallow’s work from the Heresy, like the whole Garro arc which I basically slept on. One thing I immediately revisited after finishing the book was the short story Gunsight, originally released five years after Nemesis (collected in the anthology War Without End), which picks up a thread from the novel in an unexpected way and tells a very compelling, well-rounded horror story that sets the stage for that thread to be continued, as I’ve heard, in an even later piece of Heresy fiction written by Swallow. I like it when parts of these small-scale, self-contained books like Nemesis or Damnation of Pythos get epilogues or suprise sequels in later novels, and I’m definitely down to see where this goes.

And all pretenses of sophistication aside: assassins are just pretty cool, you know?

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I’d like to say a huge thanks to Tim for writing such a great review and agreeing to publish it here on Track of Words! If you don’t already, I’d recommend you follow Tim on Goodreads and on Twitter, and check out his incredible analysis of Josh Reynolds’ Fabius Bile and Lukas the Trickster novels through the lens of Narrative Therapy!

Also check out my article on Revisiting Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter

See also: the main Horus Heresy reviews page on Track of Words

Check out the links below if you’d like to order a copy* of Nemesis and make up your own mind about it!

*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.

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