RAPID FIRE: Nick Kyme Talks Sepulturum

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.

For this interview I spoke to Black Library author Nick Kyme about his new 40k novel Sepulturum, his first full-length contribution to the burgeoning Warhammer Horror line. It’s available to order now in hardback, ebook and audiobook, so read on to find out more about this awesome-sounding 40k zombie story!

Once you’ve taken in that awesome cover art, let’s get to the questions and Nick’s answers…

Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for Sepulturum?

Nick Kyme: Hunted and on the run, a woman with retrograde amnesia flees to the hive city of Blackgheist to try to find a way to restore her memory when a deadly viral plague breaks out, plunging the city into chaos.

ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?

NK: The main character is Morgravia Sanctus, and she’s the one trying to restore her memory. She’s an inquisitor and her mission has brought her to this hive city, she just can’t remember why or who or what is coming after her. She’s tough, self-sufficient and carries plenty of scars both internal and external. She’s extremely capable and the only thing that really scares her is not knowing what happened to her in the gaps left in her past. Her ally is a Death Cult assassin called Hel, an amoral, terrifyingly effective and arguably sociopathic murderess who actually saved Morgravia’s life and is the only surviving member of the original inquisitorial team.

Cristo is a bullet-maker. He’s a citizen who believes in working hard and doing what the Imperium tells him to do. He’s a big man, strong, and has a child, Karina, who is pretty much his entire world since his wife died several years ago. He has a violent past but he’s trying to be better and he wants better for his daughter but is scared that she’ll join a gang and end up dead in some forgotten part of the underhive. He is desperate to keep her safe and when the plague hits he has his work cut out for him. Karina is tough, outspoken, but still relatively young, and will come to learn she doesn’t know everything and that maybe her and her father have more in common than she thinks.

Barak is a barmen and bar owner, an ex-enforcer (cop) who’s worldly and world-weary at the same time. He has a good life, compared to most, a pragmatic man who is a little in denial about the fact he’s not as young as he used to be. His wife, Jana, is the genuine light in his life and he’d do anything for her.

And then there’s Drover, a mercenary and gunman who is self-serving, witty but with a really callous streak. He is a decent man, though does his best to hide it, but very dangerous and ends up thrown together with Morgravia when the crisis hits Blackgheist.

Nick’s first Warhammer Horror story – the short story Stitches.

ToW: Where and when is it set?

NK: The when is vague. The story doesn’t rely on canon events to give it a firm footing in the chronology. It’s the 41st millennium, though, and is largely set in the hive city of Blackgheist. It’s a dirty, forlorn sort of a place, the kind of place you’d end up in if something had gone seriously wrong in your life. It’s also teeming and overcrowded; aggression and violence are like breathing to its inhabitants.

ToW: What sort of horror story would you say this is?

NK: It’s a zombie story, and survival horror. It deliberately leans into these tropes but hopefully twists them in cool and unexpected ways. There’s some psychological/body horror too that underpins an important part of the story.

ToW: You’ve written a lot of Black Library books before, but this is your first in the Warhammer Horror range – where did you look for influences outside of your usual reference points this time?

NK: The obvious ones are George Romero movies like Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead etc. I also lean in to the Gothic, in so far as one of the novel’s themes is duality, which is a prevalent theme in the Gothic novels of the 19th century, which I studied many years ago and then re-read for this project. I also read a fair bit of modern horror – The Loney, by Andrew Michael Hurley, and The Hollow Tree, by James Brogden, being particular favourites. I basically immersed myself in as much horror as I could stand!

ToW: Would you say that this would work as an introduction to the 40k setting for someone picking it up who maybe isn’t an existing fan, or is it aimed more at readers who are familiar with 40k already?

NK: I wouldn’t say it introduces the 40k setting. First and foremost, it’s a horror story, just one that’s set in this universe, but because of it’s more domestic nature you don’t need to have any sort of pre-knowledge of the background. If you do, there’ll certainly be plenty of things you’ll recognise and find familiar.

ToW: Why this story? Of all the 40k stories you could have written, what made you go for this one in particular?

NK: I’ve had a notion to write a 40k zombie horror for several years but never really found the right outlet or forum for it. Warhammer Horror was the perfect opportunity to realise this ambition. I think what really drew me to it is that it’s about ordinary people (yes, even the inquisitor, for reasons which will become clear when reading the novel), and the stakes aren’t galactic conquest or the fall of worlds/empires; they’re simply lives and survival. The intimate nature of that, the immediacy of it was really appealing as was writing a set of flawed and really relatable characters in such a way that I hadn’t been able to until this point.

ToW: Horror elements aside, how would you say this story compares to the rest of your work? DId you take a different approach to this than you do normally, or was it a similar sort of process?

NK: It’s still a novel, so I approached it as I normally would for any piece of long form fiction. What differed was the types of motivations and situations that arose out of the more domestic, ground level setting and characters.

ToW: What do you hope 40k and Warhammer Horror fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?

NK: Well, hopefully, a damn satisfying and terrifying story with richly drawn characters that you’ll want to kill/save in equal measure. I hope it neatly straddles the divide between 40k and survival horror, effectively bridging the two for fans of one, the other or both. Most of all, I hope whoever reads it doesn’t sleep so easily at night when they’re reading/have read it…

ToW: Do you think you might come back to characters or locations in this for future stories, or is the plan for it to stand on its own?

NK: It’s left open enough for a sequel, I guess, and there are some ‘threads’ that reach out to other Warhammer Horror stories but in an unconventional and unusual way that I shouldn’t spoil here (it might take a while to work out, but you’ll know it when you see it… eventually). It’s my intent that the novel stands firmly on its own, that’s how I wrote it to be a ‘one and done’, so once you’ve reached the last page that’s it.

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As always, huge thanks to Nick for taking the time to answer these questions. Keep an eye out for a review coming sometime soon, but in the meantime if you’d like to check out my reviews of some of Nick’s other Black Library stories you can find them all here.

Click this link to pre-order Sepulturum, or this one for the audiobook version.

Click here if you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews. If you have any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, or find me on Twitter.