In the first part of my interview with prolific, dark-humoured author Josh Reynolds we discussed his early career, and looked at his work for Black Library in the Age of Sigmar setting as well as a little bit about old-school Warhammer. If you haven’t yet checked that out, click here to go back and have a read of part one.
In this, the second part of the interview, Josh talks about his Warhammer 40,000 and Horus Heresy writing, including Fabius Bile, Lukas the Trickster and the primarch of the Emperor’s Children – Fulgrim. If you’ve read any of his Fabius stories then you’ll know just how good they are, and hopefully this will provide a little extra insight, but if you haven’t…firstly, what are you waiting for?! Read on to learn what influenced Fabius’ tone of voice, and get a bit of a sense of what you might be able to expect.
Without further ado, let’s get back to the Age of Reynolds.
Track of Words: I can’t remember reading a 40k book of yours featuring the Inquisition, but given what you said last time about being a fan of detective stories could you see yourself writing a straight-up detective story, or drawing upon those influences when writing about an inquisitor?
Josh Reynolds: Oh absolutely, I’d love to do both of those. I actually did write a crime novel, but it’s never been published. It’s something I wrote and submitted a couple of times but it never got any traction, so it’s sitting in a drawer somewhere. I have written a couple of mystery stories, detective stories, and I actually would quite like to write a ‘cosy’ detective novel – one of those books where nobody ever dies, and where everybody gets together in the drawing room at the end!
But I’ve written one short story with an inquisitor, for the Sanctus Reach series. I was asked to write a short story about an inquisitor in a hive – they basically just said ‘we need a story about an inquisitor doing something…’ so I wrote The Fall of Hive Jensen [which you can find in the Space Marine Battles book Sanctus Reach]. It was fun – I think it’s the shortest story in the collection, but I got to invent an inquisitor and his kill team and do some neat stuff!
ToW: You mentioned previously that you tend to write whatever you’re asked to write. Do you see yourself getting to a point, perhaps with something like the Fabius Bile books, where instead you look to extend and develop a single story, or series?
JR: Oh yeah, that’s natural when you’ve been stuck inside somebody’s head for that long. It’s just a matter of whether or not that’s worth the time to do it, both creatively and financially. For Fabius Bile I’ve got a handful of ideas, so it wouldn’t be a Gaunt’s Ghost situation where every couple of years there’s a new Gaunt’s Ghosts novel…or a new trilogy of novels! Fabius Bile is at most three or four books, and some short stories, and that’s all you really need. Other people might be able to pick up the baton and do something with the character after I’m finished with it though…
That character in particular I don’t foresee wanting to write more than a few books about, just because it’s a really dangerous tightrope to walk. I think Aaron Dembski-Bowden has talked about how you’re trying to do your own thing but you’re also trying to dance around the [Games Workshop] design team and how they’re taking a character. In two or three years they might take Fabius Bile in a direction that I’m not particularly interested in, for example.
ToW: Speaking of Fabius, what made you choose him to write about?
JR: I wanted to write about a Chaos character, so I picked the one that I realised was probably never going to get a book! Aaron was working on Abaddon, I knew that someone was working on Khârn the Betrayer, I knew that John French was writing Ahriman…that’s three. Who’s left? Typhus, Lucius and Fabius…and Huron Blackheart, who at the time I kind of figured Sarah Cawkwell was going to write a book about, so I decided not to mess with that.
I’d never really been interested in Lucius. I’ve read the new book by Ian St. Martin [Lucius: The Faultless Blade], which is brilliant by the way – I read that and now I’m interested! Typhus was cropping up in Chris Wraight’s Space Wolf books at the time, so I figured either Chris was going to write about him or somebody was going to write about him connected to the Horus Heresy, and that was going to be that.
So I said ‘who’s left? Oh, Fabius Bile – the guy who looks like Peter Cushing.’ Basically I figured nobody was going to write about him, and I did ask – I asked one of the editors if there was any interest from anybody in writing about this character, and he said ‘no, he’s not going to be in the next Abaddon novel as far as we know…nobody really likes him. He’s in the Heresy a lot but if you set it after the Heresy it’s fine…’
ToW: How did you pitch your approach to Fabius Bile to your editor?
JR: My selling point was that Fabius Bile is the last atheist in the 40k universe. That’s the slugline – he’s the last atheist in a universe full of daemons and gods. I said ‘I’m going to take Peter Cushing’s character from the Hammer Frankenstein films and combine him with Ernest Thesiger from Bride of Frankenstein, so he’s going to be a slightly camp older gentleman who doesn’t have time for all the shenanigans that these other Space Marines are getting up to. He just wants to make his people; he’s this old, angry grandpa mad scientist who doesn’t have time for all the crap going on. He doesn’t believe in gods, he doesn’t believe in daemons, he just wants to finish the Great Crusade in peace.
ToW: When you wrote the audio drama Repairer of Ruin, were you already planning a novel series or was that originally intended as a one-off?
JR: That was the test to see whether I could see whether I could write the character in a way that would connect with audiences. It was only my second time writing an audio, and basically they [Black Library] wanted to see what tone of voice I would use for the character. They then said ‘hey, you can write a Fabius Bile novel!’ and then the End Times and Age of Sigmar happened…and I didn’t. I’d got out of Fantasy and was going to start writing 40k but then that all happened so it got pushed back for a year or so.
ToW: Fabius’ tone of voice just seems to suit your style perfectly – how did you approach writing him, and what did you draw from to get that tone of voice? Was it purely a case of tapping into those Hammer influences?
JR: It was that, and it was also tapping into the Vincent Price Doctor Phibes movies – just Vincent Price in general, really! What I wanted was a character who could look askance at the universe. Most of the other characters are very sold on the universe they’re in, they’re fully into it and invested in the world and what’s going on around them. Invested in the Long War, in protecting their planet, or whatever.
For Bile, war is not his driving concern. He’s a character who can stand back from the main thrust of events and kind of point out the weak places, like Ciaphas Cain in a sense. He’s a character who can pull a Blackadder a little bit, be a little funny and tongue-in-cheek about the universe, which is what I was hoping to do.
ToW: With Clonelord on the way, what’s next for Fabius?
JR: That depends entirely on sales! I would love to do a third book – the plan has always been to do a third one. I’ve said this before, the third book has always been Fabius Bile going to the dark eldar, and his first encounter with the haemonculus covens and the Dark City. Even back when I wrote Repairer of Ruin that was the capper that I envisioned. The series would be the build up to that point, because that’s the big thing he did in the lore. He’s the one person that got to go to the Dark City and then leave.
ToW: Do you think Fabius as a character, and the stories you’ve written about him so far, would have been possible to write before things like the Heresy, and the books written about other well-known Chaos characters like Ahriman and Abaddon?
JR: Actually no, I don’t. I think Ahriman and The Talon of Horus opened the door for those stories. I think you could always have had a short story or two, but those books – and the Heresy as well – really showed what it was possible to do with these characters. That you could find nuance with them, that you could make them more than their entry in a codex, and add layers of personality and emotion to them. Without those books, and Graham McNeill’s stuff in the Heresy, these books – the Fabius Bile books – would not have been possible at all.
ToW: Do you give much thought to those other big characters when writing Fabius? He mentions Abaddon in Primogenitor – is it important for you to have little references like that, or are you keen to keep things as separate as possible?
JR: I’m all in on a shared universe! It would be churlish not to note other characters and the work other people have done with those characters. Especially when it interacts with what I’ve done, or am planning to do. So of course I have to talk about [the events of] The Talon of Horus, because Aaron worked on it, and Fabius is in it, and it’s a plot point so I have to include it. The same with Ahriman. He’s a big name, he’s a pivotal plot point in numerous things that are going on, so of course Fabius is going to mention him once or twice.
They’re not old friends, but they’re characters who once ran in the same circles. To try and keep them separate kind of defeats the purpose of a shared universe. I like to build upon what other people have written, mostly because they’re more creative than I am and I can steal ideas [he says with tongue firmly in cheek]! I like including all that stuff and making mention of it, I like layering plotlines over each other and connecting things that weren’t necessarily connected before.
ToW: Let’s move onto Lukas the Trickster. For anyone who’s not familiar with him, could you give a quick overview of Lukas as you see the character?
JR: Lukas the Trickster, as I see him, is essentially a clown, but not a circus clown. He’s a clown in the folkloric sense, which means he’s a figure of upheaval. He’s a character who exists to take the traditions and cultural underpinnings of a tribe or group of people, and throw them into the air to cause them to question themselves, and question what they’ve always believed. And to lose their patience with how things are and how things work.
He’s a clown in the sense that Coyote was a clown, or any of the trickster figures like Loki. He exists to sort of make the Space Wolves very uncomfortable with everything that they assumed about themselves. He’s the unpleasant shadow. The Space Wolves see themselves as the heroes from the sagas, but Lukas is there to remind them that ‘you’re not actually a hero, you’re a genetically augmented wolf man who kills people…’ If there are Space Wolves who think that they’re genetically augmented wolf men, Lukas is there to convince them that they’re heroes!
ToW: 40k isn’t exactly known for its humour, Ciaphas Cain notwithstanding. How did you get Black Library to sign off on an audio drama (The Art of Provocation) which is basically twenty minutes of Lukas winding his commanding officer up?
JR: Well, because the editor of that audio drama was Laurie Goulding, and I pitched it to him as ‘basically it’s going to be twenty minutes of Lukas winding up his commanding officer’! He thought that was hilarious! I said ‘it’s just going to be Lukas telling knock-knock jokes and saying that he slept with the commanding officer’s mother’, and Laurie was like ‘…ok, let’s do that, let’s see what happens!’
I think it was more an experiment than anything else, just to see if that could be done. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, everyone seems enthusiastic about possibly doing more of them, which is a good thing. I think everyone was waiting to see whether or not I could make the joke funny…and I did, so there we go!
ToW: Why Lukas? Where did that idea come from in the first place?
JR: I really chose him for the same reason I chose Fabius Bile, in that he hadn’t really had a lot of attention. There was one other short story about him, from an earlier Advent Calendar [Jackalwolf by CZ Dunn] but other than that he hadn’t had a lot of attention. He’s one of those characters that just doesn’t quite fit the 40k picture. You can almost tell that he’s a character that was maybe conceived in an older edition of 40k and then ported over into newer 40k.
Older 40k stuff is a little more funny, a little more tongue-in-cheek, with a little more black humour, but as the editions have progressed that’s kind of slipped away. Things have become a little more serious, a little more deep and meaningful. I’ve always got the sense that both he and Fabius Bile were characters conceived for an older edition and shoehorned into a new edition, and now nobody really knows what to do with them. So I said ‘nobody knows what to do with me either, so I’ll take the characters that nobody wants and see what I can do with them!’
ToW: The short story A Trick of the Light has less of the overt humour. We’ve recently seen the cover for the upcoming novel Lukas the Trickster – can you talk about how the novel is going to approach that?
JR: Well…writing the audio with jokes is fine, because it’s an audio – it’s mostly dialogue, so you can have jokes and that kind of thing. When it came to writing short stories and a novel about Lukas, the humour wasn’t as appropriate. The novel is actually quite grim, it’s a lot more like A Trick of the Light than The Art of Provocation. Essentially the reason why I went with a darker tone is that Lukas is the sort of clown that isn’t necessarily funny. Clowns exist to make you uncomfortable with the way things are, and Lukas as an initiate to the Space Wolves doesn’t see his transformation into a Space Wolf as a thing of great honour.
He sees it as a mistake. He sees everything that’s wrong with the process. Everything about the process that by our standard is horrendous, he sees that and he points it out. He’s not honoured to be a Space Wolf. It’s not an honour to him, it’s a burden, it’s something that he didn’t really have a choice in. He’s not happy about it, and he’s going to let you know that he’s not happy about it by making fun of all of your cherished traditions and essentially just making you very uncomfortable with him around.
I attempted to do something different with it, and I’m interested to see how people will react to it when it comes out. Like I said, it’s not really very funny. There are jokes in it, there’s funny stuff in it, but a lot of it is very much Lukas doing these things to kind of point out how crap the Space Wolves are. It’s essentially a Space Wolf book written by somebody who doesn’t really like Space Wolves – I didn’t realise it until I started writing the book but man, I really don’t like those guys!
[That’s going to provide a really interesting, unusual perspective I think!]
ToW: Sounds like we’re still not going to get another full-on funny Black Library novel. If Sandy Mitchell never writes another Ciaphas Cain novel, I’ll lobby Black Library for you to write one!
JR: Oh I would love to! I don’t know that I could do as good a job as him, though. See, I think you have to be British to get that dry, Blackadder-esque, Flashman kind of humour, that almost Terry Pratchett-lite thing. What I’d love is to write a Blood Bowl novel, honestly. I have pitched a Blood Bowl novel and Blood Bowl audios…I think it’s one of those things where everyone wants to do more Blood Bowl stuff but they weren’t sure how well the game was going to do.
It turns out the game is actually doing quite well, so I’m hopeful! Nick [Kyme] asked me to come up with a 40k series but I said ‘can I just do a Blood Bowl series? Let me do Age of Sigmar and Blood Bowl, that’s all I want to do! Maybe a Necromunda novel…’
ToW: Onto the Horus Heresy next. Your first contribution to the Heresy has just been released – Blackshields: The False War. What inspired you to choose that story, of Endryd Haar?
JR: I wanted to contribute to the Horus Heresy, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to write a book because they’ve already all been parcelled out. Unless something goes terribly wrong and Graham McNeill falls down a flight of stairs, or Chris Wraight falls asleep in a closet somewhere, I’m not getting to write one of those. So I had to figure out something that I could do in audio or short story form, and I decided to go for audios because the Garro series had ended and I hoped that they would be looking for something to replace it.
I picked the Blackshields because I wasn’t really interested in exploring the Heresy from one side or the other, what I wanted to do was explore the people who were caught on the fringes. People who wouldn’t necessarily have sided with anybody or would not be sold on the side that they had joined. So you could have characters who could go ‘…yeah, the Emperor’s kind of a jackass. My primarch’s a jackass, the Emperor’s a jackass, everybody’s a jackass, I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to leave, but I can’t leave, so I have to pick a side.’
Endryd Haar is just an interesting character. In Forge World’s Retribution, he’s one of those guys who’s almost a bag of clichés – he’s a World Eater but he doesn’t have the Butcher’s Nails, he’s the guy who came back and his legion was gone to ruin and he goes mad. That was a specific thing it says, that he goes mad. What do you mean he goes mad? How does that happen? And he somehow manages to form an army and go off and do stuff? Somehow a crazy World Eater gets imprisoned on Terra, then manages to form an army and go fight in the Solar War?
That’s really what interested me, the idea that he fought in the Solar War. I figured this is a guy who’s on the fringe of the big events but probably not directly involved. He’s probably not going to duel one of the major bad guys, he’s just going to be there for big events but he’s not like Garro or anyone else where he’s actually doing the big stuff. He’s not the big guy, he’s just off doing his own thing and I can probably get a couple of stories out of him.
Usually when I pick a character to write about one of the first things I’m thinking about is ‘how many stories can I get out of this character?’ With Haar I figured I could do however many was needed, if they accepted it, and apparently everyone likes the first of what will hopefully be several! I’ve written another one, and Nick has said that he wants at least one more…
ToW: Were there any particular challenges writing a Heresy story, as opposed to 40k?
JR: It’s actually the same challenges as 40k, it’s about remembering the terminology for things. My big weakness is that I’m really bad at remembering what stuff does and how it functions in 40k. I know how a Steam Tank would function, for example, but I’ve never been able to get an idea of how the ships in 40k would work, or just what the parts of the ship are called. It’s the same with the Heresy – what is an Arch-Magos, and what are his assistants called? You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find what his assistants would be called!
It’s mostly just terminology, I’m bad at all of the sci-fi terminology. Blackshields was actually a little easier because all of it was actually there [in Retribution], so I just copied what that said!
ToW: Let’s touch on Fulgrim, as your Primarchs novel is out now – was he your first choice of Primarch to write about? Why Fulgrim?
JR: He was actually the one that was offered to me. I said that I would like to write a Primarchs book and the editors said ‘yes, do you want to write Fulgrim?’ I said ‘ok, anything in particular?’ and they said ‘yeah, it has to have Fabius Bile in it. You cannot put any other primarchs in it’, because there were two primarchs in Leman Russ, and in Magnus. So it was a case of ‘no other primarchs, set it early in the Crusade, and have it be Fulgrim doing something Fulgrim-y’.
ToW: So what sort of story is it? What can people expect from this book?
JR: Well I’ll tell you what it’s not…it’s not The Magnificent Seven. It’s essentially a story about Fulgrim’s pride. It’s set very soon after the Emperor’s Children have parted ways with the Sons of Horus to stand on their own as their own legion. The Blight has not been fixed…but it’s under control. They’re still under-strength but they’re slowly starting to gain with the other legions. It’s Fulgrim wanting to prove that they can stand on their own and do their own thing, that they are the Emperor’s Children.
So basically the first planet that he’s taking as part of the Twenty-Eighth Expedition sees him saying ‘I’m going to take this with the bare minimum of resources, just to prove I can’. Which is why he only goes down to this planet to conquer it with a handful of men. A lot of it’s about…not necessarily how the members of the legion interact with each other, but about how Fulgrim approaches problems and how a primarch is basically the most dangerous thing on a planet.
And not even a primarch that’s fighting. Fulgrim actually doesn’t do very much fighting in the book, it’s mostly just him talking people into making mistakes, then ruthlessly and efficiently exploiting those mistakes. There’s also a dinner party in it!
ToW: Is there anything else you’d really love to cover in the Heresy?
JR: To be honest I would love to explore what happens to Arik Taranis. I really like The Outcast Dead, that and Nemesis are probably two of my favourite Heresy novels. I understand that might be an unpopular opinion, but I like those books and I really want to explore what happens to that remaining Thunder Warrior on Terra when Horus gets there. I’m fairly certain that I will not get to do that, though.
ToW: Even in Age of Sigmar where you’ve written a lot of ‘good guy’ characters in Stormcast Eternals, you seem to lean towards the less straight-up characters in favour of darker, more ambiguous characters. What draws you to one character over others, or prompts you to write one in a certain way?
JR: It’s mostly down to chance. Essentially I really figure out the characters while I’m writing the book, and some characters will call to me more strongly than others. Those tend to be the characters that I spend a lot more time with. More ambiguous characters have a greater range of options, in regards to what can happen to them and what they can do, because they can make mistakes a lot more easily. Characters like the Stormcast can make mistakes, but their mistakes are generally going to be more tactical and strategic than emotional, whereas a more ambiguous character can make an emotional mistake.
Like the character of Anhur, the warlord in Black Rift. All of his mistakes are emotional mistakes, because he’s trying to do a thing a certain way even though it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s what he thinks he has to do, so he’s making these decisions based on something that if he were a more straightforward character he probably wouldn’t be doing.
ToW: You’ve written a lot for other publishers – what would you say you’re best known for, outside of Black Library?
JR: Probably the Royal Occultist stories, which are short stories, a few novels and some audio stuff as well, about an occult detective in 1920s England. The Royal Occultist is a guy who’s basically given a charter to defend the British Empire from all sorts of supernatural nastiness. It’s sort of a Jazz Age Adam Adamant, if you remember that TV show. It’s actually a lot like PG Wodehouse crossed with Kolchak: The Night Stalker, it’s upper class twits and fancy cars but also werewolves eating people and vampires at dinner parties, and all that sort of thing.
ToW: I enjoyed The Whitechapel Demon, especially one scene in a bakery where characters discuss the relative merits of different styles of tie-knot in the middle of a fight…
JR: That’s probably my favourite fight scene I’ve ever written, just because it’s so ridiculous! That’s my style essentially, if you want writing that encapsulates everything that I do, those stories are it. There’s humour and there’s horror, there’s serious stuff but also not-so-serious stuff…
ToW: So if that’s where someone should start if they want to explore your non-BL writing, what’s the best place to start within the Royal Occultist stories?
JR: You can really start anywhere. On my website there’s a Free Fiction page – click the Works button and under that there’s a little Free Fiction link. That has a lot of the Royal Occultist stuff, it has everything that’s available online, and that’s a good place to start to get a feel for my non-Black Library stuff. It’s free, it’s online, you can read it and get a taste of my work from the beginning to relatively recently. There’s stuff running the gamut from 2003 to 2017.
ToW: You’re also involved in a project called Cryptid Clash at the moment, which is really cool. Could you talk a bit about that?
JR: Yeah, I actually came up with the idea for Cryptid Clash and I’m co-editing it with James Bojaciuk, and it’s published by 18th Wall Productions. Basically I came up with the idea on Facebook and shopped it around to a couple of publishers, and within a day had a deal ready to go. It was then just a case of finding the authors who were interested.
Cryptid Clash is a series of grindhouse novellas in which Cryptids – things like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster – get in fights! It’s grindhouse versions of the old Monster Rally Movies, so it’s like Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, except with Bigfoot and the Loveland Frog. Then it’s just a fight, it’s two Cryptids enter…one Cryptid leaves. And a bunch of innocent people get killed in the middle!
I’m hopefully going to do another interview with Josh and a few of the authors involved in Cryptid Clash, so keep an eye out for that!
ToW: Can you talk at all about what you’re working on next for Black Library?
JR: Well, I can’t say much but what I can say is that the next few books I’m working on are all for Age of Sigmar, including the next Hallowed Knights novel.
[The Age of Reynolds continues!]
ToW: Final, slightly daft question – which of the mortal realms would you choose to live in?
JR: Ooh, that’s a tough question. I actually think I would live in Ghur. I’m okay with animals, and Ghur seems to have the least amount of background weirdness. It’s mostly just animals that look to eat you, and I grew up in South Carolina and that was pretty much par for the course there!
***
Once again, I’d like to say a big thank you to Josh for taking the time to answer all of these questions. I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading this interview – if you want to go back and have another read of part one you can find that here.
For more information about Josh’s writing you can find everything that’s currently available on his author page on the Black Library website or his Amazon author page, and check out his blog here.
You can also find all of the reviews I’ve written for Josh’s work here!
If you’ve got any thoughts, feedback or questions off the back of this interview, please do feel free to let me know – you can get in touch via the comments on here, by emailing me at michael@trackofwords.com or via either Facebook or Twitter.