The Reverie: Warhammer Horror

This is horror in the delivery, not blood and guts. This provides a nice look at the Angles Resplendent, a BA successor chapter that is not your normal Space Marine chapter. I enjoyed that this is something different, although your normal bolter-you know what may not.I'd say give a try for an interesting Chapter, and their villeins.

New space Marine chapter very interesting! Must read this author, going to check out his other books thanks kindle love

Expertly written and a great story.

Low on combat, high on creeping dread and disturbing set-pieces. Cerebral, dreamlike and often sublimely written. Perhaps a more linear narrative (ergo accessible) than some of the other novels by this author but that would belie the deeper mysteries hidden within its pages... Marketed under BL's Horror label - it certainly fits the remit with its fair share of scary stuff and grotesquerie, however if BL had a "philosophy" label then this would be its flagship novel as it's replete with introspection and reflection that never veers to pretension. One can only imagine what the author could do outside of the constraints of the 40K universe. One can but hope...

"In music composition, a movement is a musical piece that can be performed on its own but is part of a larger composition. Movements can follow their own form, key, and mood, and often contain a complete resolution or ending. Complete musical works contain several movements, with three or four movements being the most common number of movements in a classical piece. Typically, each movement has its own name. Sometimes, the movement's name is indicated by the tempo of the movement, but other times, composers will give each movement a unique name that speaks to the larger story of the entire work." - Brandy Kraemer+++ BEGIN RECORDING +++Bear with me. This will be a long one.To understand a journey, one needs a sense for the traveller. I am Tim van Lipzig, male, nearly thirty standard years old. I have been reading Warhammer 40.000 fiction for nearly 15 years now. The first time I came into contact with the writing of Peter Fehervari was when I finally followed the whispers of a certain, hidden gem and took a look at Fire Caste in May 2017. It was a  revelation. Fehervari's approach to 40k felt like something new, like an evolvement of the familiar pattern in an unfamiliar, invigorating shape. Something dark and subtle, something that felt often more *true* to the source material than anything that came before. Now, after three novels, one novella and ten short-stories, Halloween 2020 sees Fehervari return with his long-awaited fourth novel of what is known among fans as "the Dark Coil"-mythos: The Reverie.I adhere to the adage that a work of art should be judged according to it's aspirations, therefore I shall look at what The Reverie is trying to do and comment on how I felt that it achieved it's goals: collapsed into it's most basic tenets, The Reverie is a Horror novel about the Space Marine chapter of the Angels Resplendent, that's also part of the larger Coil-mythos. To judge it's merit, I'll look at these three aspects seperately.* * *Fehervari has already shown that he fits very comfortably to the Warhammer Horror label with his excellent short-story Nightbleed, released only a few days before The Reverie, (not that his precedent work wouldn't have felt right at home there), but this is his first novel released under the new, explicitly Horror-themed imprint. So, to ask it in the most frank way: Can Fehervari do Horror-horror? Is this scary? My dear reader, it most certainly is.I think it's no exaggeration to say that Fehervari excels at all the various forms of horror, be it crafting outright horrifying sequences of mayhem and madness, creating an atmosphere with a creeping sense of wrongness and dread or exploring the terror of persons faced with ugly truths about either themselves or the bedrock of their existence. It's all expertly tuned and carefully woven together, never staying too long with one "mode of horror" that it could start to wear off. The sequences with the cursed village Vindarnas are amongst the most intense reading I've had all year.The cover of the book, while beautifully crafted, is a bit of false advertisment in that regard; to me, it promises a more...explicit kind of horror than what is present in most of the book. When I think of The Reverie, I think not of darkness and viscera, but of something bright and beautiful that's only unsettling once you stare at it for too long...or make the mistake of considering it's full implications.* * *This is also an in-depth exploration of a new Space Marine chapter that up until now we only knew through allusions and through the lens of their dark mirror, the future Angels Penitent: the warrior-artists of the Angels Resplendent.Similar to the ADBs Spears of the Emperor, the Angels Resplendent and the Angels Penitent were basically just a colour scheme in some Codex before their respective author tackled them (there were actually two different colour schemes for the Resplendent, a fact that Fehervari weaves smartly into their lore). Fehervari came up with the idea of combining the two separate Chapters into two versions of a single entity at different points in time, Resplendent and Penitent separated by a violent ideological schism (see the short-story "The Crown of Thorns").While the Penitent have already been explored in prior stories, The Reverie gives Fehervari the opportunity to really take a deep-dive into their Resplendent predecessors and create a rich tapestry of their character, ideology, organization, history and lore. On paper, the Resplendent may seem like a mix of familiar elements from the Blood Angels and the Emperor's Children, but Fehervari manages to make them feel unalike any Space Marine chapter we've seen before, a truly unique blend of Space Marine lore with the spirit of the Renaissance.The Painted World of Malpertuis (mostly seen through the Resplendent's chapter fortress/art gallery Kanvolis) continues the Coil's tradition of memorable and narratively rich planets and acts almost as a physical representation of the Resplendent's psychological landscape. We learn nearly as much, if not more, about the Resplendent by observing Kanvolis than we do by listening to dialogue or actions of the characters. A shining jewel of a city, a monument to wonder and the sublime, yet infested by bright shadows and an almost imperceptible sense that, to paraphrase a character from the book, the canvas on which it is painted might be rotten.* * *Prompted by The Reverie's use of musical terminology for its structural units (e.g. "movements" instead of "acts"), I included the quote at the beginning because it's such a perfect metaphor for how the Coil stories work as a whole. A series of pieces with different moods, tempos and melodies that yet reveal a greater whole when set next to each other, changing the individual pieces depending on what is played before or segued into. Indeed, 'music' is all over The Reverie and one of its central metaphors (one more thing to look out for on future re-(t)reads of the Coil is whether this musical motif has been there all along). Even on a meta-level, The Reverie feels like a composition that intentionally riffs, echoes, repeats and twists familiar beats of former Coil-stories, like an experienced musician that is conscious of their ouevre while recording their new album. The name of the most prominent Resplendent' company of the novel, 'Rhapsody Eternal', strikes the core of the story here, because the unending, discordand music at the heart of the universe is something that arguably ties the story even more together than the titular valley.* * *One final note. To quote one of my favorite characters from the book: "I must speak honestly here, or else this record serves no purpose". At first, i was not sure how I felt about the ending. It wasn't that I didn't like it, in fact I loved a lot about it, but I guess that I had expected to feel as exhilarated as I did after finishing Requiem Infernal, and...didn't. The ending is more low-key, kept open at some points where I expected it to give closure, conclusive at other points where I felt that I wanted more mystery to remain.After giving it time to sink in and re-reading certain parts of it, I think of The Reverie now like this: taking it all together, it feels like a dream - like a collective, fleeting nightmare, a long, dark night of the soul that the characters experience together. There's a crescendo to the nightmare, akin to that moment when the lurking horror finally shows his face, the moment when you wake up screaming, drenched in sweat. The nightmare is over. The sun begins to rise. The darkness is slowly being dispelled. Some dreamers have been swallowed by the dream. But for those waking up from the dream to greet a new day, the experience has been even more harrowing, forever bearing the question: Did I really wake up...?* * *I realize I have to reach the end of my rambling, for else I fear I shall fray and unravel for good. If you've listened to my words for this long, I've already had more than my fair share of your attention. The Reverie is another fascinating addition to Peter Fehervari's mythos of the Coil, a captivatingly written (I'd be remiss not to mention, again, how utterly beautiful the shapes are into which Fehervari crafts the English language) dream-scape that's, to quote a friend of mine, more about the journey than the destination. I'm sure I'll revisit it at some point on another travel through the Coil, with a new ear for it's melody. I'm looking forward to it.+++ END RECORDING +++Addendum: For anyone seeking guidance among or easier access into the perhaps daunting number of stories of "The Dark Coil", the book blog Track Of Words has an extensive article titled "A Traveller's Guide to the Dark Coil", including an overview over factions and places as well as a recommended reading order and links to various interviews with the author.