Hello and welcome to this Rapid Fire author interview, where today I’m delighted to welcome Justin D. Hill back to Track of Words to discuss his new Warhammer Horror novel The Bookkeeper’s Skull. Alongside his excellent historical fiction (written under Justin Hill, without the D), many Black Library fans will be familiar with Justin for the excellent work he’s done tackling the Cadians (three novels, several short stories and counting), but The Bookkeeper’s Skull is in fact his fifth BL novel, and his first in the Warhammer Horror range. It’s available to buy right now in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats, so if you’re keen to explore the darker side of Warhammer 40,000 and life in the Imperium, then read on to find out more about this intriguing new novel!
Track of Words: To start things off, could you give us an overview of what The Bookkeeper’s Skull is about?
Justin D. Hill: As the tithe fleet arrives, a young enforcer is sent to a distant farming community to ensure the planetary quotas are met.
Unfortunately, Houston, we have a problem….
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
JDH: The main character is Rudgard Howe, Chief Enforcer of Potence, the planet which featured in Cadian Honour. I had really enjoyed writing his slightly detached and sardonic style and there were a couple of throw-away comments about his early life that had always stayed with me, and intrigued me. I thought this would be a great way of going back and investigating it in fictional form. To look at someone young and fresh, learning how the system works from a few old hands.
ToW: Where and when is this set?
JDH: It’s set on Potence, capital of the Gallows Cluster, which is the setting for Cadian Honour. For those who haven’t read that, it’s the capital of the Gallows Clusters, a backwater on the edges of the Segmentum Solar, home to a number of heretical religious cults that veer towards the Temple Tendency, and which are protected by the local aristocracy, the Richstars, who trace their ancestry back to the earliest days of settlement.
I think it’s the first time Black Library fiction explores a farming settlement on an agri-world.
ToW: What sort of horror story would you say this is?
JDH: In one way it’s a Stephen King-esque Mid-West America style story. Our hero turns up at a farm, and senses at once that something is very wrong. He has to work it out, and sort it out, or die.
In another way, while most 40k fiction looks at the heroes and the extremes, this book goes into the mundane and the everyday and explores the horror of that. Which, I think, in some ways, can be even more disturbing.
ToW: Of all the Warhammer Horror stories you might have written, what inspired you to write this particular story, and explore an earlier incarnation of a character from one of your previous novels?
JDH: When we first meet Rudgard Howe in Cadian Honour, he is an embodiment of the Imperium of Man – ugly, brutal, and ruthless. But I was intrigued about how he became like that. So, at the start of The Bookkeeper’s Skull, Rudgard is young, naïve and perhaps a little idealistic. He lives a privileged life, but with that privilege come great personal threats to his own life. And the structures of Potence and an agri-world shape him into what he becomes.
ToW: An agri-world might not be the first thing that comes to mind for most readers when thinking about where a 40k-set Warhammer Horror story might take place. Can you talk a bit about why you chose this setting, and what it meant for the story?
JDH: We spend a lot of fictional time with the grand armies and fleets of the 40k Universe – and what happens when they turn up and invade a planet. I really wanted to explore what it was like to be at the opposite end of the telescope, what it was like to be on an average agri-world, waiting for the tithe fleet to arrive and knowing that the quotas were always increasing.
I thought a small, isolated farming community felt very Stephen King. And a small community, with dark secrets, and links to a sinister past.
ToW: You’ve written Warhammer Horror short stories before, but this is your first novel in the range. How have you found the experience of working on this book?
JDH: I’ve really enjoyed writing horror so far. It naturally opens up mundane places within the Grim Dark future, with ordinary people facing their fears or their miserable existence. So I was very excited to get to grips with this and imagining the domestic spaces, from a child’s nursery to farming communities.
My initial fear when writing this, which some of the first readers laughed at, was that this novel wouldn’t be horrific enough, or that the horror I was trying to depict wouldn’t work….but I’ve learnt that my writing can tend towards the dark. Not sure what that says about me. It’s what happens when I lock myself in a room all day.
I had barely started writing when Covid took off in early 2020. The schools in the UK shut, which meant we had four kids at home, two of whom could look after themselves, but the younger two needed supervising and supplying with work material. And spent a large amount of time sitting in the corner of my office.
It was a slow-burn nightmare, to be honest, trying to immerse myself into a fictional world whilst being interrupted every twenty minutes to mark a maths worksheet, motivate an unmotivated child, or fix them some lunch.
I kept on writing, but I have to admit, I think it sent me a little mad. Luckily the kids went back to school that autumn, and I rewrote the whole thing and I had a huge burst of inspiration and energy, and the best bits in this novel came in that second draft – including Gambol, who is perhaps the most disturbing figure in the novel. I put him up with ‘scrape’ as one of my grimmest 40K inventions [ToW: shudder. Scrape is genuinely gross – see Terminal Overkill].
ToW: Looking back at your previous interviews, it feels like you’ve naturally gravitated towards a darker approach to 40k that really suits horror fiction – is that something you’ve noticed in your writing? Any thoughts on what might be behind that trend?
JDH: One of my favorite writers was Raymond Carver, whose writing focused on the underbelly of US life, and was dubbed ‘dirty realism’. I think my writing is ‘40k dirty realism.’ I’m chiefly interested in the human experience of living in the Warhammer 40k universe, and how these everyday pressures distort the mundane life for low-level management and workers. I spent most of my adult life living in either China or Eritrea, both fairly brutal dictatorships, and those totalitarian regimes offer ample examples of how the ordinary man, woman, or child suffers under such regimes.
ToW: What do you hope readers will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
JDH: Well, first of all a great story, which will be rich and deep enough that they can revisit it sometime in the future. It’s a horror story, and so it’s a little disturbing at times, and deals with matters supernatural. Perfect for the long dark winter nights!
But for anyone who has been reading the Minka Lesk series, it gives you an insight both into the world of Potence, and the character of Rudgard Howe – and other enforcers like him. And gives you a rare tour of the domestic setting of the Imperium of Man.
ToW: What can you tell us about what you’re writing now, or other projects (for BL or otherwise) that you’ve got coming out in the future?
JDH: The great news is that I’m filling my schedule with various projects right up to 2024 – which is a lovely place to be as a freelancing creative. There’s some very exciting news on the BL front, which I can’t talk about, obviously, and on the personal front – I’m finishing up a Justin Hill novel that deals with Hong Kong, and I have started planning out the third of my 1066 historical novels, which will be called Hastings – which I’m really looking forward to writing. And which people have been nagging me about ever since Viking Fire came out.
ToW: Finally, if you were part of the Imperium in the 41st millennium, where would you choose to live and why?
JDH: Hmm… good question. Well, life would be pretty unpleasant but actually there are a number of places I think it would be interesting to live. Actually, I think the Evercity, on Potence, would be a very interesting place to live as it’s ancient, run-down and full of intrigue and history. If there’s a modern parallel it would be a corrupt Italian state, under the Medicis…so it’s full of art and beauty, but with poverty and cruelty thrown in.
But I think if I had to choose one place I think I’d go for Cadia. It would be immediately better than a hive/mining/forge world. And I think the Spartan/military life-style would rather suit me. And Cadia is a pretty cool place to live. Or rather, was…
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Justin D. Hill is the author of the Necromunda novel Terminal Overkill, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Cadia Stands, Cadian Honour and Traitor Rock, the Space Marine Battles novel Storm of Damocles, and the short stories Last Step Backwards, Lost Hope and The Battle of Tyrok Fields, following the adventures of Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed. He has also written Truth Is My Weapon and the Warhammer tales Golgfag’s Revenge and The Battle of Whitestone. His novels have won a number of prizes, as well as being Washington Post and Sunday Times Books of the Year. He lives ten miles uphill from York, where he is indoctrinating his four children in the 40k lore.
You can find Justin on Twitter, on Facebook and on his website.
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As always, I’d like to say a big thank you to Justin for chatting to me for this interview, and for taking the time to give us the lowdown on The Bookkeeper’s Skull! It certainly sounds dark and sinister enough for the Warhammer Horror range, and promises to be another excellent read. The Bookkeeper’s Skull is out now from Black Library, as a hardback, ebook or audiobook.
See also: all of the Justin D. Hill-related reviews and interviews on Track of Words.
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