Welcome to this instalment of Rapid Fire, my ongoing series of quick interviews with authors talking about their new releases. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.
In this instalment I spoke to Black Library author David Guymer about his new Warhammer Age of Sigmar novel The Court of the Blind King, which is available to pre-order tomorrow in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats. It’s the first time the Deepkin have had a novel of their own, so if you’re interested in this (relatively) new breed of Warhammer aelves, this is the book to check out!
Let’s get straight to the questions and David’s answers, to find out more.
Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for The Court of the Blind King?
David Guymer: It’s Game of Thrones with Idoneth Deepkin.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
DG: Our ‘hero’ is Prince Lurien of Briomdar, adopted son of the late queen. He’s cruel, conceited, unproven and unpopular, but determined to seize the throne. On his side is a namarti slave called Namaríel who sees the prince’s ambition as the perfect means to realise her own.
In addition to that there’s a huge supporting cast of princes, queens, sylvaneth, and champions of Nurgle
ToW: Where and when is it set?
DG: In the Green Gulch of Ghyran, the ‘when’ isn’t so important except to say that it’s current, so post-necroquake
ToW: What appeals to you about the Idoneth Deepkin as characters to write about?
DG: They are so bitter about their existence. They’re failures and they know it. They had everything and they lost it. Their own creator tried to destroy them. Slaanesh wants to devour them. They have to harvest the souls of other races so that their children will live. They are the most unbelievably messed up race in the Age of Sigmar and that makes for fantastic stories.
ToW: There’s a lot of Idoneth terminology and mythology in this book, which might be unfamiliar to readers considering how new the Deepkin are to Warhammer. What would you recommend fans check out before reading this, to get the most out of it?
DG: Most of it is stuff that I made up myself so a reader new to the Deepkin should be ok with it. I also hacksawed quite a bit of lore from Graham McNeill’s High Elf books and the Malus Darkblade series, referencing the fact that most Deepkin culture and myth is derived from what they’ve forgotten of Teclis’ teachings. The novel builds on the world I started to establish in the short story, The Learning, and one character from that story does pop up here, so the completests out there can certainly start there, but it’s not essential.
ToW: By their nature the Deepkin are isolationist and (largely) not very keen on extremes of sensation…or even each other. Did you figure out how to deal with that in advance, or was that something you tackled during the writing process?
DG: Yes and no. I’d dealt with a similar problem when writing my Iron Hands series, having to come up with innovative ways to write dialogue for characters who are physically incapable of performing the shrugs, smiles, nods and so on that break up regular conversation. The bigger problem that I ran into, actually, was in making them not Iron Hands, and that’s definitely something I grew into as I wrote and developed a better understanding of what makes the Idoneth unique.
ToW: Why this story? Of all the possible stories you could have written about the Idoneth, what made you go for this one?
DG: This is the Idoneth’s first appearance in novel form and so I wanted to show everything. I figured that a tale of war and intrigue between rival enclaves (throwing in some sylvaneth, Nurgle, and even my own tabletop army, the Beastclaw Raiders) was the best way to show the many and varied ways that it’s possible to be Deepkin.
My personal favourite were the Dwy-Hor. If I had the skill or the patience to convert wooden face masks and armour for my Idoneth, then I would definitely be building an army of them now.
ToW: This is a very different style to your Hamilcar stories, for example, although there are still some great touches of humour in there. Do you think writing about Hamilcar affected how you wrote this book?
DG: That’s probably a better question than you realise as this was the first novel that I wrote after Champion of the Gods and Force of Personality so Hamilcar and his particular style were very much still in my mind when I wrote this. It caused me some problems, slipping into first person every so often, dropping jokes where it wasn’t appropriate, until my mind slipped into the proper grimdark gear. The humour that’s in there is mostly pretty dark, and normally at some other poor soul’s expense. Lurien has a definite streak of black humour running through him. His retainer Éodrain, who was never in my outline and who I tried to leave behind or kill off so many times, provided great relief as well.
ToW: What do you hope Age of Sigmar fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
DG: That they’ll be as cold and desolate inside as an Idoneth!
ToW: Do you have any plans to write more about Prince Lurien and the Idoneth?
DG: This was a really tough book to write, really tough, partly because the Deepkin are so alien and so new, partly because it came after Hamilcar and Realmslayer which were very different projects, and partly just because I had a lot of stuff going on. I have a long-standing theory that the books I find the hardest or enjoy the least (The Last Son of Dorn, Slayer) will be the ones that fans love the most, and so when I turned The Court of the Blind King in to my editor I joked that the fans would love it so much I’d end up writing six more. I probably wouldn’t complain if that happened though.
Probably.
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Thanks as always to David for taking the time to answer these questions! Keep an eye out for a review of The Court of the Blind King coming very soon, and in the meantime if you’d like to check out my reviews of David’s other stories you can find them all here.
Click this link to order The Court of the Blind King, or this one for the audiobook version.
Click here if you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews. If you’ve got any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, or find me on Twitter.