‘The Fall of Cadia’ – Robert Rath (Black Library)

Page Count: 651 Pages

I feel like I’ve turned a little corner by reading this book :o) The ways have been just recently, I’ve only been good for books that are just over a couple of hundred pages at the most (and sometimes, they’ve beaten me too). ‘The Fall of Cadia’ comes from a chunkier breed of books though, and I finished it :o) Go me, but also go Robert Rath and ‘The Fall of Cadia’ for getting me through another tough week and a bit. Warhammer 40K reads have been good to me, just recently, and ‘The Fall of Cadia’ can hold its head up high with all the others…

Cadia licks its wounds in the wake of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. The heretic forces retreat on all fronts. The day is won. But Lord Castellan Creed cannot rest easy. Something tells him the assault was a mere prelude to something greater, something more final. He is right.

Out of the Eye of Terror comes Abaddon the Despoiler, at the head of a warhost unmatched in scale since the dread days of the Horus Heresy, and in possession of the Blackstone Fortress ‘Will of Eternity’, an arcane behemoth capable of shattering planets.

In the face of the looming apocalypse, Creed must weld the dysfunctional champions of Cadia into a bulwark capable of withstanding Abaddon’s fury. And in orbit, the Despoiler himself finds his own alliance teetering on a knife edge…

When I was a kid, Sunday afternoons would (more often than not) involve watching a war movie that just seemed to go on forever. You know the ones I mean, something like ‘Midway’, ‘Battle of the Bulge’ or ‘The Longest Day’; movies that started just after Sunday lunch and went all the way through to the end of Sunday tea-time. At least that’s the way it felt, time flows a little differently when you’re young :o)

Well, ‘The Fall of Cadia’ is Warhammer 40k’s ‘The Longest Day’ and it was bloody good; life is as hectic as ever but I found ‘The Fall of Cadia’ very hard to put down. Which, thinking about it, may have been why everything else was so hectic… But anyway :o)

Robert Rath has written a compelling tale that absolutely captures the epic scope of a battle for the fate of the most strategically important planet, in the Imperium of Man, after Terra itself. I’m not just talking about the battles either. Don’t get me wrong, they’re cool and Rath isn’t afraid to throw everything he has at them; the end result being moments of sheer spectacle befitting a war of this size. He really nails the ebb and flow of warfare as well, things may quieten down but Rath makes sure that the tension is still there, no matter what side you are rooting for. If you know your lore then you already know how the story will end but ‘The Fall of Cadia’ is a real page-turner despite that.

I’m also talking about ‘epic’ in terms of the sheer size of the cast as well . Rath is great at bulking out a manageable leading cast with a supporting cast of hundreds of thousands and somehow, making them all relatable at the same time. Every time I put the book down, it was with a real sense of what the fight for Cadia meant, whether it was for the Despoiler himself or a random Cadian trooper pouring laser fire into a howling mass of cultists.

I’ll be honest, parts of the story engaged me more than others; I wasn’t too bothered by the Sororitas, for example, but pretty much lived for the moments when Yann Rovetske would pop up and cause some mayhem. Oh yes, ‘Trazyn on safari’ had me chuckling as well. That’s the nature of a book this size though, what works for one reader won’t necessarily hit the spot for another. What I’d say is that Rath does an amazing job of keeping all these plates spinning at the same time and making sure that even if not every plot strand is a winner, there is definitely something here for everyone.

I’m going to have to end it here (heavy day looming on the horizon etc) but in case I didn’t make myself clear… ;o) ‘The Fall of Cadia’ is a superb read. I’d swear that there were moments where I could feel the planet crumble beneath me, that’s how into it I was.