Warhammer Wednesday*: The Novels That Never Were

Considering all the books I've written, there's a fair few I haven't written too. I don't mean the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Yellow Pages - I'm talking about the books that at one stage or another I was supposed to write but which, in the end, never came to be. And most of these were supposed to be set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.

Many of these made it to full synopsis stage and submission (and in some cases second synopsis stage), or, failing that, rough summaries at the end of other proposals. However, for one reason or another, you will never** get to read...

Bounty Hunter - my Necromunda-set Nathan Creed novel.

Legacy of the Damned - the follow-up to The Dead and the Damned (and various other stories besides).

Champions of Armageddon - the conclusion to the Black Templars Solemnus Crusade trilogy set at the time of the Third Armageddon War.

Corpse Taker - the second in the Books of the Dead series (and it was intended to be a series) that began with Necromancer.

Iron Hands: Ex Machina - the sequel to the recently digitised Iron Hands.

Indomitable - my Empire Army novel about the crew of a Steam Tank.

Across the Desert of the Dead - a Khemri-set Path to Victory gamebook, not unlike Shadows Over Sylvania.

Dreadnought - another Warhammer 40,000 gamebook akin to Herald of Oblivion.


* The 13th of November. Spooky and, as they say, unlucky for some.

** Or it is, at best, very unlikely...

Happy Halloween!

So it's that time of year again, and if you're looking for a spooky read for All Hallow's Eve, then look no further.

For those over 18 (or just slightly under, if they're feeling daring) there are my short stories Wraith Lights, The Doll's House, Fear to Tread and Incubus.

For those most definitely under the age of 18, why not check out one of my horror-themed adventure gamebooks, such as Spellbreaker (witches), Curse of the Mummy (mummies), Bloodbones, (zombie pirates), Howl of the Werewolf (werewolves), or Night of the Necromancer (ghosts)?

And then there are also my Warhammer novels The Dead and the Damned and Necromancer. And if you're uneasy around arachnids, then my Gamebook Adventures app Temple of the Spider God makes for a creepy read.

Oh, and of course the Pax Britannia series is often filed under 'Horror' in bookshops and has led to me being invited to be a guest at this event.

Blog update

So I finished the first draft of another chapter of my latest project today and thought it was time to update the old blog again.

First up, readers of this blog who are also readers of SFX magazine #212 or White Dwarf (Games Workshop's hobby magazine) #380, may have noticed a couple of connections with yours truly in the new issues - or maybe not...

The new White Dwarf is full to bursting with some brilliant new Undead additions to the Warhammer Fantasy milieu*. And the big Vampire Counts update goes under the title of 'The Dead and the Damned'. Well, when a title's that good, why not use it again and again...

There's also a fabulous new piece of terrain in the form of Morr's Garden, and just such a cemetery was the focus of the climax of my novel Necromancer.

And now we come to SFX. The links here are a little more subtle. At the start of the mag, each of the SFX team list their current raves and rants. Rob Power, Editorial Assistant, raves about going to the 2000AD offices in Oxford and then spending a day at the pub. Well, that was with me (SFX's Editor-in-Chief Dave Bradley and Michael Molcher, 2000AD and Abaddon's PR guy) that was. And then right at the back of the mag, the Total Recall article is all about Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Even though I don't get a mention, my book Curse of the Mummy does, as does Alan Langford, who illustrated my first published book Spellbreaker.

* Expect to see these at some point in the future in Hammer & Bolter, if I can convince the editors with my scintillating new proposal.

H is for Horror

Somewhere, in one of the many boxes that are gradually suffering the effects of damp out in our garage, I think I still have the jotters I filled with page after page of lurid horror stories when I was about fourteen or fifteen. Most of them - such as The Reef - are very short but others - like Phantom Pregnancy - were considerably longer.

I don't know what produced this sudden rush of horror-themed creativity at that time. I think a friend had introduced me to the books of James Herbert and in that rebellious teenage way, knowing - or rather, believing - that my parents wouldn't approve, I got sucked in to reading The Dark.

Anyway, this phase passed (like so many do at that age) and when I eventually tried getting something published it was within my favoured fantasy milieu. But, horror has never really gone away.

In 2009 Evolution Expects, my fourth Ulysses Quicksilver adventure, was published. I remember my editor Jon Oliver telling me at the time 'This is definitely your horror title' (or something along those lines). But, as far as I was aware, I hadn't set out to write a horror story - that was supposed to have been Human Nature (UQ3). Certainly there are horrific elements to the story and horrific things happen to a horrific number of people in the book, but at the start of the project I didn't think I was setting out to write Horror with a capital H.

Since then, however, I'm decided that I would like to try my hand at writing horror properly. There's always been a dark side to my work, something that people still regularly comment on, and I suppose my third Warhammer novel Necromancer is pretty horrific in places, but again, as far as I was concerned this was supposed to be a fantasy adventure, dressed up in a Halloween costume, as it were.

Last year M is for Monster was published, featuring my short story Incubus. Now this was always intended to be a horror story and I wrote something unlike anything I had attempted before and that took me out of my comfort zone. (If I was worried my parents wouldn't approve of The Dark, they certainly wouldn't approve of Incubus.)

However, since then I've been invited to write stories for other collections. This year I have a story appearing in the Solaris anthology House of Fear and there's another story I should be writing at the moment for a collection about phobias. And what I'm finding now is that these stories are less 'horrific' - in terms of blood and guts being chucked about all over the place - than, say, The Dead and the Damned or Anno Frankenstein.

Blood and guts don't horrify me in fiction; it's surgical or anatomical in nature and something that, thankfully, I am highly unlikely to encounter in the real world. What scares me is the subtle implication that something isn't quite right with the everyday, that the familiar has been perverted in some indefinable way. The classic fear of the unknown and the fear born of being a parent.

I remember when my son was only days old, my wife and I would lie awake at night listening to him breathing when we were all supposed to be asleep. My wife suffered the worst. Either the sound of his baby snores kept her awake or, worse then that, if she couldn't hear him breathing she began to worry that... something wasn't quite right.

So why not pick up a copy of House of Fear when it's published later this year and see for yourself if I've managed to achieve a feeling of unease permeating my story? And, as they say, don't have nightmares...