I
'm reading another Warhammer novel right now (or at any rate, having it read to me), and it's fine I guess. Aaron Dembski-Bowden gets a lot of kudos in the Black Library as one of their better authors, but I've yet to see the spark of genius, really. He's certainly head and shoulders above Graham McNeill, but so far the novel is played awfully straight, and is a somewhat derivative echo of a lot of what happens in Horus Rising. The dialogue scenes are pretty repetitive, but more crucially, Dembski-Bowden doesn't seem particularly interested in surprising his audience. The scenes in general have a certain roteness to them -- you know the tropes, and once the stage is set, nothing particularly unexpected happens, which is a frustrating experience in a setting that's supposed to be so expansive and ridiculous. I want to say that, as a writer, if the audience already knows the scene, why write it? Just gesture at it, and move on to something we don't already know.
On a more personal level, I do really wish that an author who has any kind of religious sensibility or theological knowledge could write one of these dang books. While I appreciate that these authors are trying to "give religion a good shake" in these novels set in a world dealing with incarnate Gods and spiritual bureuacracy, they really don't do a very good job of it. In their regular lives, I'm sure most of them are areligious, if not anti-religious, and their stabs at a science-fiction theology are dull and unimaginative, which is a shame for the 40k universe.
As a brief example, one of the characters is about to become a "confessor" -- who, apparently, is one who hears the sins the soldiery, and forgives them. Obviously, this is inspired directly from the Catholic priesthood, but subtly misunderstands it, and in so doing, flattens it. For Catholics, it is not the case that just some man, even a man invested with religious authority, can forgive sins. The whole point of forgiveness is that only the one who is offended can forgive; no one can forgive what was not done to them. The point of the act of Confession is that the priest is acting in personis Christi, literally taking on the actions of God himself. For, every time we sin, we are principally offending God, maker of all things, and only secondarily the people involved. It is strictly because of Apostolic Succession that priests are able to act in this way, delivering God's forgiveness, having received to power to act in God's name that He Himself delivered unto the Apostles.
Now that's a compelling explanation for a religious ritual. The shadow of the role that shows up in The First Heretic has no such spine to it -- it's just there because the Imperium is kinda like the Catholic Church, I guess. I would love to someone who's read anything at all about theology try to give an account about spiritual power and its relation to the Emperor of Mankind, but unfortunately, we just get puppets. Ah well, I'll have to write it myself.