Nounslayer: Gotrek Through the Ages (Part Two) with William King, Nathan Long, David Guymer and Darius Hinks

Welcome back to part two of Nounslayer: Gotrek Through the Ages, in which I’m talking to the four Black Library authors most associated with the enduring character of Gotrek Gurnisson. The first part of this article (check it out here if you haven’t already read it) covered an introduction to Gotrek, an exploration of why he’s proved such an enduringly popular character, and a history of the Nounslayer series from William King’s earliest stories through to Nathan Long’s five novels. That took us up to 2010’s Zombieslayer, Long’s final instalment in the series.

In this second part we’re going to move the timeline on to look at David Guymer taking up the reins, followed by Darius Hinks joining the writing team, before taking a quick look at the future of the character and what we might be able to expect to see next. I’ve also asked the authors to talk a little about the challenges involved in writing such a well-loved character created by another writer entirely. Without further ado, let’s get straight onto the next step in the history of Warhammer’s favourite grumpy dwarf (don’t call him a Duardin)…

Guymer takes over
After Nathan Long’s Zombieslayer was published in 2010, there was another three year gap before Gotrek and Felix returned in three standalone adventures which weren’t tied into the main timeline and, accordingly, didn’t fit the Nounslayer theme. David Guymer wrote the second of these – City of the Damned, published in 2013 – before going on to contribute the next two in the Nounslayer series. As with Long before him, it was clearly an exciting time for Guymer.

“Trollslayer was the first Black Library book I read as a young, impressionable teenager. They’re a big deal. When the series was first offered to me with City of the Damned, I felt like I’d been invited to the top table of the geek pantheon, I don’t mind saying.”

City of the Damned – David Guymer’s first Gotrek & Felix novel – doesn’t quite follow the Nounslayer timeline

City of the Damned was only the beginning for Guymer, who has gone on to write two more Gotrek and Felix novels, a pair of the Age of Sigmar-set Realmslayer audio dramas and a couple of short stories…so far. It’s been an interesting journey, as when the End Times came he contributed two novels – the ominously-named Kinslayer and the rather final-sounding Slayer – and with Gotrek seemingly finding his long-awaited doom even as the Old World was destroyed, it looked for a while as though we’d seen the last of everyone’s favourite Slayer.

“There was no plan at the time to see him return, and I didn’t know about the Age of Sigmar. I didn’t even know that the world was going to be blown up! As far as we were all concerned at the time, Slayer was Gotrek & Felix’s epic conclusion. I had an easier time of it [writing for the End Times] than Josh, Guy, Gav and Chris, who wrote the main series books. They had the responsibility to tie their novels directly to studio books, while I could just pillage all the benefits of having an epic backdrop to my stories and feature the likes of Aekold Helbrass and Vlad von Carstein. Personally, I love having that bit of structural foundation to build a story around!”

It sounds like a great experience, working on Kinslayer and Slayer, and a different experience to writing City of the Damned. “It was a lot more fun, being able to include characters like Snorri and Malakai, and pick up those story threads that Bill and Nathan left for me. Getting the chance to write Bjarni Bjarnisson was the realisation of a small, but earnestly kept dream.

“With City of the Damned I went in with the idea that Gotrek & Felix would be great protagonists for a supernatural horror story. For Kinslayer and Slayer, I had the stricter brief of bringing their saga to an end. Whether by accident or intention, Bill King had hinted at a lot by way of backstory while actually revealing very little. This made my job a lot easier than it had a right to be. It’s a favour I’ve tried to pass forward with Realmslayer.”

For consistency’s sake I asked David about his favourite characters from the whole series. “In all Gotrek stories? It’s got to be the aforementioned Bjarni. Essentially the grimdark version of the Discworld’s Cassanunder. Of my own additions to the canon? Probably Kolya’s horse. Sob.” And as for favourite moments? “Without wanting to give too much away to those who might still want to read it, the final third of Slayer is definitely one of my finest hours.”

If there’s one defining characteristic of Guymer’s Gotrek and Felix novels, it’s probably the darkness and sense of sadness – which you’ve probably picked up on from David’s comments there. The tone certainly changed when Long’s Orcslayer moved the timeline on, but in Kinslayer and Slayer things got really, really grim – it was the end of the world, after all!

Of course, while Slayer apparently wrapped up Gotrek’s saga back in 2015, in 2018 he burst back onto the scene with the four-hour audio drama Realmslayer, which introduced the irascible (and by now both somewhat puzzled and incandescently angry) Slayer to Age of Sigmar and the Mortal Realms. They even picked up the Nounslayer theme! Check out my quick interview with David Guymer about Realmslayer here.

When asked whether Gotrek has changed since his return, Guymer thinks not. “That’s one of the joys of Gotrek Gurnisson: it’ll take more than the ultimate and final victory of Chaos and the destruction of everything to change this dwarf.” Fair enough.

Gotrek strides into the Mortal Realms in Johan Grenier’s Realmslayer cover art

Being audio dramas, Realmslayer – and its sequel Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World – have a slightly different feel to the novels. “This wasn’t Gotrek’s first adventure in audio. I wrote Curse of the Everliving and Nathan wrote Slayer of the Storm God (which I make reference to in Blood of the Old World!) which even fits into the chronological Nounslayer storyline. But doing it the way we did it, in a four part story as a sumptuous box set, allowed us to go all out in a lot of ways. The character had to become a little more vocal and bombastic for the medium, but it’s still the same Slayer.”

Speaking of becoming more bombastic, who better to voice Gotrek than the legendary Brian Blessed? Interestingly though, even after hearing the first Realmslayer and writing the second, Guymer doesn’t hear Blessed’s voice when writing about Gotrek. “I feel bad saying so, after everything that Brian Blessed brings to the part, but the voice I have comes from those teenage readings and re-readings of Bill King’s books, and is as much a feature of my head now as my own voice! Hearing Brian as Gotrek in the Realmslayer audios, and cementing his place in the head-canon of millions through the Total War games, is fantastic, but the voice in my head is just too stubborn to die.”

Having now written two Realmslayer audios, I wondered whether Guymer was fully committed to Gotrek’s audio adventures, or if he fancies working on another novel. “I’d love to do both! Audios are lots of fun. It’s like prose writing but pared right down to the narrative basics of character and plot. It’s also a great team effort, which makes for a nice change when you’re a solitary, reclusive, and semi-nocturnal creature like most authors are. But there’s no substitute for the total investiture you get over the 3-4 months it takes me to write a novel.”

Hinks joins the Slayer gang
For the first time in this series’ history, while David Guymer is still working on Gotrek stories a second author – in this case Darius Hinks – was introduced to write full-length stories at the same time. Hinks’ short story The Neverspike was released in the Black Library Events Anthology 2018/19, before getting a wider digital release in September 2019 alongside his novel Ghoulslayer – the first Nounslayer novel to be set in the Age of Sigmar. For a quick overview of Ghoulslayer check out this Rapid Fire interview with Darius.

Johan Grenier’s Ghoulslayer cover art sees Gotrek in Shyish

Like many of us, Hinks was already familiar with Gotrek before he started writing about him. “I read and loved the Bill King novels when they were originally released, so I feel like this character has been a part of my life for a long time. Then, when I was asked to write a Gotrek novel of my own I caught up on his more recent adventures and found they were great too. I love the way everyone who’s written about Gotrek has brought their own slant to him. There’s something to enjoy in all these stories.”

Hinks’ comments mirror Long’s when asked about his response to getting involved: “Don’t mess it up! I was excited but nervous when Black Library asked me to tackle him. People really love Gotrek. He’s kind of a nightmare: irascible, cantankerous and wildly unpredictable, but there’s a lot of affection for him in the Warhammer fan base and people have a very clear idea of who he is, so my main goal was to write a book in which Gotrek really feels like Gotrek.”

After Realmslayer, Robbie MacNiven’s novella The Bone Desert, and a couple of short stories – not to mention Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World which was released at the same time as Ghoulslayer – Gotrek is now starting to feel established in the Age of Sigmar. Hinks identified that as something to play around with: “Gotrek is not someone who cheerfully adapts to new situations, but in Ghoulslayer I did want to give a sense that he’s starting to see aspects of the Mortal Realms that aren’t entirely useless.”

Part of that sense of establishment, of course, was the introduction of new companions for Gotrek, seeing as Felix isn’t around any more. Well, it might turn out that he is – in some form – but that’s for us to find out in the future! In the meantime, Gotrek needs new companions to keep him company, and we as readers need new characters through whose eyes we can see the Slayer.

Introduced by Guymer in Realmslayer, Hinks identifies the aelf Maleneth as a favourite character and features her heavily in Ghoulslayer. “Maleneth is a great character! David did a brilliant job with her in Realmslayer and I’ve really enjoyed carrying on her story.”

Johan Grenier’s fantastic illustration of Maleneth from the Realmslayer boxed set

Maleneth is what in the Warhammer Old World would probably have been a Dark Elf – an assassin, trained in the temple of Khaine. In the Mortal Realms, however, she (technically) fights on the side of Order, and specifically works for the Order of Azyr. Suffice to say she’s not what Gotrek is used to in a companion, while at the same time he’s unlike anyone she’s ever known before.

“I like the idea of Malaneth being the polar opposite to Gotrek but being bound to him,” says Hinks. “It’s a classic odd couple set up. He’s a deranged, doom-seeking berserker and she hates him with a passion, but she has to try and keep him alive.” The reasons for which are covered in Realmslayer. “It works really well. Even by the end of Ghoulslayer though, the dynamic between them is starting to change as Malaneth sees what an impact Gotrek has on events and people; she’s starting to guess that his importance might go beyond the rune stuck in his ribs.”

As for Gotrek’s enemies, Ghoulslayer featured a familiar archetype from old-school Warhammer – ghouls – adapted and updated for Age of Sigmar. “Writing about the Flesh-eater Courts was loads of fun. It’s such a tragic part of the Age of Sigmar story and I enjoyed taking it to its logical conclusion.”

At the time of writing Ghoulslayer is the latest Gotrek novel, but there’s plenty of scope for more from both Guymer and Hinks. Whether or not the Flesh-eater Courts make another appearance remains to be seen (probably not, judging by the series’ tendency to feature different enemies each time), but they certainly made for interesting antagonists this time around.

The future of Gotrek

So that’s where we stand right now, with long-form Gotrek stories from two different authors released in 2019 (the paperback of Ghoulslayer is now available too) – and that’s on top of two short stories, plus another short story and a novella released at the end of 2018. The future is bright for everyone’s favourite Slayer, it seems, but what does Black Library have in store for him now that the door has been opened to multiple authors working on Gotrek stories at the same time?

According to Guymer, “I suspect it’ll allow them to tell more stories, although if there’s a plan to tell an overarching narrative with them in the old style, then it’s not a plan I’ve been made privy to yet.” Hinks suggests that “he’s always been passed around from author to author and I think that’s where some of his richness has come from. Just like with your favourite superheroes, characters are revitalised when someone new picks them up (as long as that person gets under the skin of the character rather than just getting a surface-level view of them).

“Also, I think the key thing with a well-loved, interesting character like Gotrek is to throw him into the heart of the Age of Sigmar narrative. Maybe not straight away, but that’s where he should be headed. He shouldn’t be a footnote to the bigger story, he should be the bigger story! He’s no wallflower.”

The cover art (by Johan Grenier again) for the second Realmslayer audio has a similar tone to that of Ghoulslayer

Of course, with multiple people working with the same character, it’s arguably going to be harder than ever to keep readers interested in a character who’s generally thrown head-first into ever-escalating enemies and dangers. It’s a challenge faced by every author who’s written about Gotrek, from King and Long through to Guymer, Hinks and beyond.

Looking back to his contributions to the series, Long has this to say on the topic: “It was a real challenge, and there were many times when I wanted to try smaller and more personal conflicts just for a change of pace. One thing that saved me was that each book had to be about a different enemy type, so by default the settings and details of the plot were going to be different. I think I may have gone over the top with the Harp of Ruin in Elfslayer, but the bosses bought it, so why not?”

For Guymer, “repetition doesn’t seem to be a problem. Without wanting to sign off on my own exit, perhaps the occasional change of author has something to do with that? Whatever the reason, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the series repeat itself.”

Hinks makes an excellent point, too: “Gotrek’s challenges go a lot deeper than just killing stuff. The gods promised him a doom and then robbed him of it, he’s lost everything he ever knew and he hates where he finds himself, but he’s not a quitter or someone who’d just accept his lot in life, so where does he go from here? He’s pitted himself against the universe. He’s like a hero in an epic saga. That said, even in terms of physical danger, the stakes have been raised in the Age of Sigmar so, for all Gotrek’s might, there’s plenty of stuff waiting out there to test him.”

Although, as Guymer points out, “As for escalating the danger…well, I think that airship has sailed since the End Times!”

The challenges of writing Gotrek

While I had the attention of our authors, I couldn’t resist asking Long, Guymer and Hinks them to talk a bit about what it’s been like continuing the story of Gotrek and his exploits. After all, although he’s featured in eighteen novels and countless other stories, fought all manner of enemies and travelled the length and breadth of the Old World (and now the Mortal Realms), Gotrek’s core characteristics have largely remained the same as they were when he made his first appearance.

Giantslayer, William King’s final Gotrek and Felix novel – it must have been a daunting task to follow on from this!

As Long says, “Gotrek’s a weird character in that regard. He doesn’t change much, and his function in the story is always the same, to keep driving relentlessly toward evil without regard to personal safety, and to kill the big bad in the end. And you can’t change that formula or you wreck the series.”

As a character who has been around for a long time and changed authorial hands several times, writing about Gotrek must therefore be an interesting challenge. How do you make him your own and tell exciting new stories about him without changing things up so much that you take away from what makes a Gotrek story?

Well, while you “try to make sure the characters feel like the same characters the previous writer created,” as Long says, “there’s also the challenge of trying to come up with new and different plots and situations so the stories don’t feel repetitive. Then there’s the problem of the relationships. Do you allow them to grow? Do you keep them in stasis? How many times in a series can a character have the same epiphanies? How can the characters evolve from book to book, and at the same time stay enough the same that they remain together and have the same kinds of adventures. Maybe that’s the reason the Spiderman series keeps restarting.”

The Spiderman analogy is an interesting one, considering how many authors have now written Gotrek stories, but of course with Gotrek the series has never restarted – only moved on, occasionally.

While Long, Guymer and Hinks each took slightly different approaches when they started to tackle Gotrek, they all wanted to add depth to his character rather than fundamentally changing anything.

“I did try to expand him a bit,” says Long. “I gave him some history with Hamnir in Orcslayer, and reminded readers that he’d been an engineer before he was a slayer in Elfslayer. But in general he’s a force of nature, and the stories come more from how those around him deal with his recklessness and unbending personal code than with exploring his psyche.”

Nathan Long’s Elfslayer – with cover art from Geoff Taylor

Guymer looked at the central relationship between Gotrek and Felix as an opportunity to develop things. “It had been pretty constant throughout their adventures, and I wanted to stress that a little. Kinslayer sees them coming back together after Felix attempts a peaceful retirement writing state propaganda, and it was fun to explore all angles of that.”

It’s not just Gotrek’s companions who offer the chance to show different angles of Gotrek’s personality, either. As Long points out, “he’s immutable, and I did my best to keep the characterization as close to Bill King’s as I could. Instead, I concentrated on detailing how the world and the people around him reflected him and reacted to him. What would it be like to be the companion of someone so driven? How would a villain try to contain or divert him? I also tried to give him situations that required cleverness as well as axe swinging to show that he wasn’t just a killer, he was smart too.”

Hinks took a similar approach, exploring Gotrek’s depths. “Even though it’s inherently funny watching him smash through the Mortal Realms with such disapproval of EVERYTHING, I was keen to show that he’s not just a joke. He has values and, despite his gruff exterior, he does care about things. He’s also not dumb. He’s a canny survivor of a culture with a rich, proud history. I was keen not to oversimplify him. Gotrek has depth!”

In terms of keeping things fresh and not treading old ground, that’s a challenge which the recent authors have been helped with, in some respects, by the changes to the Warhammer setting. As Guymer wryly puts it, referring to his Slayer and Kinslayer novels, “no one else has got to throw him at an entire universe!”

That’s probably true, although Guymer did then proceed to write Gotrek’s introduction to the Mortal Realms in Realmslayer, which Hinks was able to carry on from in Ghoulslayer. “I was very keen to make my take on Gotrek feel familiar to people who have read about him before,” says Hinks. “I was lucky in the sense that Ghoulslayer is his first Age of Sigmar novel, so this book was always going to feel different to previous tales because of the ‘stranger in a strange land’ aspect of it. He’s discovering a completely new world and it was fun thinking about how he would respond to it.”

So what does it feel like to pick up a character like this and add to the series with brand new stories? Surely it must have been an exciting, but daunting, task for Long to follow in King’s footsteps, and for Guymer and Hinks to pick up the baton when they got involved later on?

Long’s initial concern was simply “Don’t fuck it up. Seriously, that was pretty much it. William King’s books were so loved, Gotrek and Felix were so loved, that I was terrified I wasn’t going to be able to live up to his legacy. I also wanted to explore a bit more of Gotrek’s history and his relationship to dwarfish society.”

Kinslayer introduced a darker tone for the cover art (by Slawomir Maniak)

Guymer is a bit more sanguine. “It’s not as tough as you might think. Having read all the books already I had a solid handle on the characters. When I was younger, I used to script Star Trek: The Next Generation missions in my head. This is sort of the same. I’ve absorbed so much of the characters over so long that I just know what they’re going to do! Every writer brings their own personality, experience and style to the mix, of course. I’m a different person to Bill King or Nathan Long so I write Gotrek ever so slightly differently.”

As the latest author to take up the baton, Hinks “was worried at the planning stage about matching up to what has gone before but, to be honest, from Gotrek’s first line of dialogue I felt like he was in charge and I was just along for the ride. I know this character well so I kind of knew how he’d react to whatever I threw at him. I was laughing out loud as I wrote some of his lines. He’s a lot of fun.”

What will readers get out of these stories?

Whatever the challenges, and whether we’re talking about existing stories or those yet to come, there’s an overarching sense that tales of Gotrek – whether they feature Felix or not – are always, and should always be, about entertainment and excitement. To finish things off, I asked each of the four authors for what they hope readers (or listeners) will take away from their stories, and the answers were remarkably similar.

For King, he just wants readers to get “as much entertainment as I got writing them!”, while Long hopes they deliver “a thrilling ride, some intrigue, some honest emotion, and a satisfying payoff at the end.” For Guymer, the hope is that his stories offer “enjoyment and the desire for more, and perhaps even, one day, to go back and read or listen again. That’s all I really want to bring.” Perhaps my favourite answer of all, however, is Hinks’: “A chance to spend some time with an old, familiar friend.” That’s exactly what Ghoulslayer was!

Of course, given that Gotrek somehow managed to survive the End Times, the question still remains of whether he will – or indeed should – ever find his doom. As Gotrek’s creator I wondered what King would have to say on the topic, and his response was phlegmatic: “I suspect he will be seeking it for as long as readers are interested.” Long, on the other hand, “was actually building toward writing an end to the series – I had a three-book arc worked out that would start after Zombieslayer. But then BL decided they didn’t want to do that and the series passed on to the other authors.”

Guymer has a different view on the topic again: “While he’s not technically looking for his doom any more (spoiler: he sort of found it), old habits die hard for this particular Slayer. The romantic in me would like to see him earn some kind of peace one day. What sort of form that might take though after all that he’s been through is anybody’s guess.”

Meanwhile Hinks disagrees: “It would be a tragedy if he ever found his doom! The fun is watching him glower, curse and stomp through life with the whole world pitted against him. Where would the fun be in a Gotrek who attained existential peace? I like him best when he’s pissed off. (Don’t tell him I said that.)”

Don’t worry Darius, nobody’s going to know you said it…

***

Once again, I’d like to say a massive thanks to our four authors – William King, Nathan Long, David Guymer and Darius Hinks – for taking the time to talk to me and contribute to this article! On the off chance that you’ve got this far without going back and reading the first part, you can find that here.

If you’d like to check out some of the many Gotrek stories, here are a few links to where to start:

Click here to buy Gotrek & Felix: The First Omnibus, featuring William King’s first three novels.

Click here to buy Gotrek & Felix: The Third Omnibus, for King’s final novel and Long’s first two novels.

Click here to buy Kinslayer by David Guymer, or here for the audiobook edition.

Click here to buy Realmslayer by David Guymer.

Click here to buy Ghoulslayer by Darius Hinks, or here for the audiobook edition.

Are you a big fan of Gotrek and Felix? Is this the first you’re hearing about the series? If you have any questions or comments about this interview or the many Gotrek stories, I’d love to hear them – please do get in touch either in the comments section below or by finding me over on Twitter.