Returning to Old Universes: On Reading Eisenhorn
When I was young, I read an unreasonable amount of media tie-in fiction. Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, the occasional Planescape paperback—those slim mass-market volumes with wonderfully lurid covers.
They were inexpensive, plentiful and set in worlds I already knew through games and daydreaming. At the time, I was not especially concerned with literary merit. A tolerable plot, a few interesting characters and another journey into a familiar universe were quite enough.
Then, sometime in my late teens, the habit simply evaporated. Other genres crowded in. I drifted towards more “serious” literature, then nonfiction, then whatever happened to cross my path. Somehow, decades passed without my picking up anything resembling the shared-universe fiction of my childhood.
I had half expected any return to feel like nostalgia. Instead, it became a small correction of my own snobbery.
Tie-in fiction is a publishing category, not a judgement of quality. An inherited setting can encourage lazy writing, but it can also give an author a dense foundation on which to build something distinctive. The world may be borrowed; the characters, voice and moral argument do not have to be.
For years, I had heard people—smart people, readers whose taste I trust—speak highly of Dan Abnett. One friend in particular had been quietly persistent, nudging me towards his work with the confidence of someone recommending a book they knew would land.
Earlier in 2025, I finally gave in and picked up Xenos, the first of the Eisenhorn novels. The original trilogy—Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus—still forms a clean arc, although The Magos later extended Eisenhorn’s story.
It is strange to think that, despite my childhood fascination with tabletop games, I never actually played Warhammer 40,000. I tried everything from Advanced Squad Leader to Warhammer Fantasy Battles, painstakingly painting a regiment or two before my attention wandered, but 40k remained a distant planet that I orbited without ever landing on.
My main contact with the universe came later through the real-time strategy games, particularly Dawn of War. Bolters, chainswords and Space Marines were familiar to me as atmosphere and visual language, but I knew very little about the history, institutions or theology behind them.
The persistent background hum around Amazon’s planned Warhammer screen adaptations may also have nudged me towards the books. At the time of writing, Games Workshop and Amazon had finalised their creative guidelines and decided the broad order of the stories they intended to develop, with Henry Cavill attached as an executive producer. The first project was still at an early stage, and no particular story had been announced.
Cavill’s public enthusiasm for the setting offered some reason for optimism, although enthusiasm alone cannot solve the central difficulty of adapting Warhammer: deciding how much of its enormous accumulated lore an audience must understand before the story can begin.
As for the books themselves, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed them. Eisenhorn was far better written than I had expected: tense, atmospheric, occasionally introspective and populated by characters who felt more layered than my assumptions about tie-in fiction had allowed.
Gregor Eisenhorn is particularly compelling as a study in erosion. He begins as a principled man and is gradually worn down by necessity, secrecy and compromise. Each transgression can be defended in isolation. Together, they transform him.
That moral descent is where Abnett makes the borrowed universe his own. The oppressive institutions and baroque theology of Warhammer 40,000 provide the machinery, but Eisenhorn’s attempt to remain righteous while adopting increasingly questionable methods supplies the tragedy.
If the trilogy has a weakness, it is one shared by much action-oriented fiction: the hero’s improbable survival in the face of overwhelming odds. There were moments when my suspension of disbelief wobbled and I wondered whether the Emperor Himself had quietly added Eisenhorn to the psychic equivalent of a protected-species list.
Those moments did not ruin my enjoyment. At worst, they briefly pulled me out of the story before the narrative gathered enough momentum to carry me back in.
The real surprise is that I would recommend the original trilogy even to someone with only a passing interest in Warhammer 40,000, provided they have some tolerance for gothic excess, moral corrosion and pulp momentum. Familiarity with the setting adds texture, but Eisenhorn’s gradual transformation provides a story strong enough to stand without it.
My return to tie-in fiction did not prove that all shared-universe novels deserve reconsideration. It did remind me that dismissing an entire category because its setting is licensed confuses the conditions under which a book was written with the quality of the book that resulted.
With my first substantial drink from the vast well of the Black Library, I found myself considering another. It was unexpectedly rewarding to revisit a form of fiction I had abandoned decades earlier and discover that returning to an old universe could feel less like nostalgia than rediscovery.
Follow-up: I later continued Eisenhorn’s story in The Magos — Dan Abnett and the Long Shadow of Eisenhorn.
Comments
Post a Comment