I'm just not really a huge fan of Space Marines as a whole. I really enjoyed Helsreach (the audio book is absolutely 11/10) and some other Space Marine shorts, but by and large I'm much more of a fan of the regular Joe's keeping the Imperium together. The IG, the Inquisition etc.
Their courage in the face of the horrors of the setting is that much more impressive because they're just regular people.
I tried Horus Rising about a year ago and couldn't get into it. Partly the content, partly a badly formatted e-book. That said I'll probably give it another go as I'm running out of 40k books that peak my interest.
There's the new mark of omen books which is advancing the story and some primarchs come back
Gaunts ghost I hear is amazing. And Eisenhorn (ravenor and bequin series included )which you mentioned are fantastic
Can confirm - Gaunt's Ghosts is great.
Most of the 30k novels do have human characters with many chapters devoted to them.
Fulgrim was great, to see the gradual fall to Slaaneshi corruption in both the Space Marines... but more fascinatingly, watching it slowly happen to the Remembrancers (if you don't know who they were: They were human photographers, artists, writers, etc. who were sent with all of the Legions during the Great Crusade to document everything) was... disturbing.
And as you said, it was cool to see the other human characters who witnessed this corruption setting in, witnessed the horrors of Chaos, but still pressed on.
You'd probably really like the Gaunt's Ghosts series. Gaunt is an unusual Commissar, who leads his own unit of Guardsmen against a variety of threats.
If you're in for something a little more lighthearted, often funny- any book with Commissar Ciaphas Cain. He's great, he's essentially like... if you took a normal guy from year 2023, and put him in the position of a Commissar, that's him (but he is a really, really good fighter). He gets into all kinds of ridiculous situations which he somehow escapes and looks like a hero, consistently, while thinking "I should be dead after that" every single fucking time, it's hilarious.
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