Review: Audiobook: A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeill

I, Frost, have returned from the Eye of Terror to tell you all about a “new” release from Black Library, A Thousand Sons. The fall of the 15^th Legion can now be experienced in unabridged audiobook.

At the peak of the Great Crusade, any thought that a legion of the Astartes would betray its Emperor seemed ludicrous. Yet it was the most loyal of all the legions which turned against mankind despite their primarch being closer to the Emperor than any save for Horus. Graham McNeill’s story, A Thousand Sons, chronicles the fall of Magnus the Red and his sons.

Ahriman, perhaps the most powerful Librarian of all the legions of the Astartes, works diligently to evolve humanity’s understanding of the warp with the hope that his brothers will no longer be maligned as sorcerers. Meanwhile, he struggles to catch glimpses of his legion’s fate amidst ever-growing uncertainty. What he cannot see, however, is the growing unease among the other legions for the maligned powers that the Thousand Sons employ.

Magnus, the Crimson King, is a psyker of such power that even his Thousand Sons, whose ranks teem with talented psykers, cannot comprehend his command of the warp. But a dark power conspires against Magnus, one that is too powerful for even him to challenge and too subtle for his diviners to detect. For all of his incredible mastery of the immaterium, he cannot see the trap that is set for him. When the trap is sprung, and the Crimson King’s world of Prospero is forfeit, Magnus makes a decision that, quite literally, throws his legion to the wolves while giving mankind a distant hope of saving the Imperium from the traitorous machinations of Warmaster Horus.

One of the big draws of this particular audiobook is that it and its companion story Prospero Burns are the first full-length unabridged Horus Heresy audiobooks from Black Library that aren’t download-only. Where some of the first audiobooks from the Horus Heresy were disappointingly brief and short on details, A Thousand Sons is 16 hours long with every detail masterfully brought to life by Martin Ellis, whose style of reading fits very well with Graham McNeill’s writing. So, if you have a lot of painting to do, and need some of the best lore in the 40k universe (albeit back when it was 30k) then grab yourself this audiobook and its twin, Prospero Burns.

That’s all, comrades! Feel free to comment about the new full-length format and any reminisces of the days when A Thousand Sons was only found on paper.