Soul Drinkers

About the Soul Drinkers series

Soul Drinkers is Ben Counter's own contribution to Black Library's roster of Space Marine chapters -- unlike many Warhammer 40,000 series built around a chapter already established in Games Workshop's tabletop lore, the Soul Drinkers were created for the novels themselves. The chapter, led by the psychically mutated, multi-limbed Chapter Master Sarpedon, prizes art and culture as proof of the humanity it exists to defend -- an indulgence the wider Imperium regards with deep suspicion. When that suspicion hardens into an Inquisitorial denouncement, the Soul Drinkers are declared Excommunicate Traitoris and hunted as renegades by the very Imperium they spent centuries defending.

Soul Drinker (2002) opens with the chapter's fall from grace and sets the pattern for the whole series: increasingly desperate warfare against both Imperial and Chaos forces, run alongside Sarpedon's search for the truth behind his own mutation and his chapter's fractured gene-seed. Counter carries the Soul Drinkers across six novels and one novella, from The Bleeding Chalice (2003) and Crimson Tears (2005) through Chapter War (2007) and Hellforged (2009), to Phalanx (2012), which closes out the chapter's long war against Imperial suspicion and their own dark heritage.

The series was Counter's first major work for Black Library and remains his best-known creation -- a rare case of a Black Library author being handed a blank-slate chapter to build an entire identity and story arc around, rather than writing within an already-established one.