Adrian Collins's Blog

In the meta horror masterpiece movie The Cabin in the Woods—where the cabin itself is designed to stave off the apocalypse by releasing monsters to kill the unknowingly sacrificial twenty year olds and thus appease the ancient gods—the villains explain to the final heroes how they all represent certain horror tropes: the jock, the jester, the virgin, etc. The unifying theme? They’re all young, and it’s not their time to die. That’s what powers a good horror, and even more so a good slasher: young people with everything to live for, cut down brutally. But what if the slasher victims are the elderly, with a decade or so, maybe much less, to live out their life? How does that change the horror rules, and how can a slasher work around that? It’s going to take a great horror author to get this right, and so enter Philip Fracassi, who with The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, out now, has taken the slasher genre to new places and in the process written a deeply moving, marvellously twisty, and terrifyingly dark tale which gives us one of modern horror’s most triumphant final girls in the indomitable pensioner Rose DuBois.

The aforesaid Rose is in her late seventies and living out her twilight years in the eponymous retirement home Autumn Springs. This is not some depressing parking spot for the nearly dead: its apartments are spacious and sought after, and the fancy community facilities allow for all manner of social activities. Indeed, many of its residents are in fine fettle, having bagged a hard-to-get place in this friendly community in anticipation of future failing health. Rose herself has a nice life; a dapper gentleman friend Miller, who she keeps in the friendzone despite his obvious feelings for her, a daughter who clearly cares for her and a wide circle of friends. But when one of her friends dies, allegedly after a fall in the bath, Rose becomes suspicious as to whether the cause of death is entirely correct, and when others start dying in similarly suspicious ways, Rose begins to suspect there may be a serial killer in their midst. In the face of sceptical authorities, the question becomes: what is she going to do about it?

The first thing that grabbed me in The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre was the masterful way in which Fracassi handles the tone. In his arguably finest work so far, Boys in the Valley, we get a similarly confined space where hell descends on a community home, in that case an orphanage. But where that book is brutal from the start, here the early chapters almost feel like a cosy crime mystery—Richard Osman in the States—as Rose rounds up her gang of friends to investigate the mysterious goings on. But Fracassi is a horror writer first, not a crime writer, and this gentle, heartwarming community feel soon descends into a claustrophobic, nightmarish smorgasbord of paranoia, pain, and endless death, made all the more horrifying by the deceptive start.

Another success of this tale is how Fracassi handles the subject of the elderly. A cynic might ask: why should we fear for these characters whose lives are almost over anyway? Indeed, this is a book that doesn’t shy away from some of the depressing truths of the end of life. Next to the fancy retirement flats is a medical centre where you go when you need round the clock care—the flats there aren’t so nice, and all live in fear of being forced to go there. And for all the community feel, when things go bad the truth of old age is revealed: not everyone’s families care enough to come to the rescue of their endangered elder members. This is a book full of the realisation that life is running out of road, and regrets may be more potent than future plans. But—and it is such an important but—Fracassi also wants to transmit a message of hope and a counter to the prevailing narrative of the elderly as different from the rest of us and somehow less invested in the world. Rose has many things she still wants to do: plans, dreams, maybe even a shot at love. She’s far from done yet, and no one reading this book could get the impression that she has come to Autumn Springs to die. If anything, the ending of this book suggests, she has come here to finally live.

Those chewy themes aside, let’s be clear: The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is enormously grisly fun; the killer is endlessly inventive and enormously creepy, when the chaos starts it really starts, and Fracassi has handled the slasher reveal perfectly as if he was an author who has been writing slashers all his career—the clues are all there in retrospect but it’s not an obvious one (I came close but no cigar—you got me, Philip) and the red herrings are magisterially done.

 And maybe the most important thing to be said about this book is just what a character for the modern slasher age we have in Rose du Bois. Fearless, indomitable, bowing to no one—but kind and vulnerable and haunted by the secrets in her past, which you definitely won’t see coming. Agism has found a powerful foe in Rose, and the care with which Fracassi has given this character makes this one of his finest horror efforts yet. Oh and one Rose-related moment that came out of nowhere made me cry, the kind of surprised tears where a book takes you somewhere you didn’t see coming. You’ll cry too—this book is as moving a slasher as you’ll ever read.

Overall, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is a superbly creepy yet truly moving slasher that rivals Fracassi’s best work. His first trick is to make the elderly the victims, but his second is just as impressive: to make you care so deeply for them amongst the carnage. Age is just a number—in this case, a body count.

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My latest novella, The Cold House – published in October for the spookiest of seasons – features Dr Everly Bainbridge, a writer who’s recently been bereaved and is unsure if she wants to go on. When circumstances push her to choose she finds herself as a sort of final girl in someone else’s game – but they don’t know all there is to know about Everly. 

I’m fond of final girls, but not all final girls are created equal. Some are born final and some have finalness thrust upon them, by which I mean some have a survival instinct and will not be messed with, while others take a little while to figure out that no one is coming to save them. Faced with queries (so many queries), I’ve come up with 5 points on the theme (because my brain works best with bullet points), and that theme is roughly how do I construct my heroines to make them not be victims? These techniques are entirely personal to me, other writers will do it differently, so don’t regard this as a proscriptive list. 

Point #1: No gothic fainting goats.
If you’ve seen the reels on Instagram and TikTok of fainting goats you’ll have a visual of what I mean. Something that irks me no end is the old-fashioned screaming, fainting heroine of yore in gothic novels – and it’s not even just of yore, but also in contemporary horror novels (and films). Here’s the thing: not every woman screams or faints when frightened. Yes, yes, I know it’s a particular staple of horror and I do like to call it the “gothic fainting goat effect”. 

That’s not to say my heroines don’t spend some time unconscious – Everly certainly does – but I try to keep the occurrences down to a reasonable number, and because they’ve been hit on the head or drugged or are unwell – besides, too many bonks on the noggin will lead to brain damage. They certainly don’t faint because a sudden fit of the vapours has rendered them unable to keep their eyes open. 

It also doesn’t mean they’re Terminators who can’t be frightened or stopped either, but if they faint they’re going to be vulnerable. Staying conscious is in their best interests, even if it means seeing something awful; so even the heroines of my gothic novels don’t faint for no reason. And yes, at the end of every novel I do a count of how many times my heroine is rendered unconscious, how and for how long. 

So, what’s critical mass for entering gothic fainting goat territory? My randomly chosen number is four periods of unconsciousness – if I’ve hit four, then that’s one too many.

Point #2: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. 

When I’m writing action/fight scenes I try to keep in mind the character’s physicality because no matter the training or fitness level, a female character isn’t likely (not impossible, of course) to be able to overpower a significantly larger male with the same techniques as a man would use. So, she has to be smarter about how she fights and she’s going to have to be sneaky. Only a fool fights fair when your opponent is well-equipped to kick your arse. Unless the character has supernatural strength and powers – unless she can hulk out – you need the fight and its outcome to be believable in order to keep your reader in the story.  

Personally, I also like my heroines to be smart enough to assess the situation they’re getting into, and sometimes that’s going to mean they’ll decide that discretion is the better part of valour and run like hell. Everly does some smart stuff, but also some stupid stuff because she’s angry and loses perspective – and she learns from it. 

So: I try to make my protagonists scrappy. They fight dirty, win believably – or bolt for the sake of fighting (and winning) another day.

Author Angela Slatter Photo by Leah Desborough

Point #3: Curiosity killed the cat.
One of the big issues I’ve always had with female characters in horror (gothic and modern) is that they’re often punished for their curiosity. Indeed, the whole fairy taley “Be bold, be bold but not too bold” is just another way to make us stop seeking answers to our questions. The idea is that if we know too much, we’ll be in danger, that ignorance will protect us – except we’re already in danger and if we remain ignorant, we won’t be prepared for whatever horror is coming down the pipeline. 

So, what I want for my horror heroines is that they live by the motto that knowledge is power. I never want my protagonists to be the sort that bury their heads in the sand and assume everything will be fine, that someone else (a big strong man) will look after them. Everly didn’t do this, but she kind of let her guard down and it bites her in the backside – however, she does start seeking out knowledge very quickly because she knows it’s key to her survival.

One of my favourite lines in anything ever is from Charlotte Bronte’s Villette where Lucy Snow says “self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by circumstances” and I adore that she recognises this and acts accordingly. Lucy doesn’t have to fight off gothic horrors, but she knows she’s the only person she can rely upon and that knowledge will help her get through life, so she seeks it out, and that’s the attitude I try to infuse into my own final girls.

Point #4: Home, Scary Home.
Everly is in the position where she’s haunted in her own home by memories of her dead husband and daughter, and also by the knowledge that her husband lied about who he was. Her solution is to flee to another home in hope of escaping the familiar environment that keeps reminding her of everything – and things get worse.

Ellen Moers in “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother” posits that in gothic stories female characters get to ‘explore’ the domestic sphere the way men get to adventure outside the home. That might sound boring except for the fact that the home (new or old) isn’t always a nice place to be – after all, that’s where the domestic horror occurs. Consequences of bad marriages, dangers of childbearing, the loss of independence (physical, financial, bodily), and also threats that break inside the four walls that are meant to keep you safe, all play out in the home. The domestic sphere – the home, the place where the heart is supposed to be – is what in the best of worlds would be the woman’s safest space, but in horror becomes another locus of danger. And equally heartbreaking whether the story is gothic or contemporary horror, because it’s also often the place where love falls apart or is shown to be false. 

Home is also where things hide sometimes in plain sight, where partners take off their masks and show the monsters beneath – the faces they wouldn’t dare display to coworkers, friends or strangers. It’s the place where a woman’s faith in her partner can be absolutely shredded and with it her confidence because she trusted someone who’s been lying all this time. It’s the place where all the excuses they’ve been making for terrible husbands and boyfriends are laid bare. It can be the place where trust dies – so with my heroines, I try to make sure that the home isn’t some saccharine sweet place of safety – I make safety something they have to fight for, the home they want to be safe is somewhere they have to defend – or escape. 

Point #5: Sword and shield.
Something that’s critical to me as a horror writer is that my female characters aren’t just thinking of saving themselves – this isn’t always the case, sometimes I write protagonists who are very much all about themselves and their own preservation (note: things don’t end well for them), but for the most part they’re not just out for their own survival. They have a loyalty to and a care for those who can’t defend themselves – think Ripley in Aliens, doing everything she can to rescue Newt, a kid she’s only just met. Is she taking chances? Absolutely! Is she being dumb about it? Nope, she takes calculated risks, is strategic, and doesn’t let her own fear get the best of her. Her fear is her fuel, and she defends the vulnerable. That was one of the things that imprinted on my mind even before I was a writer and it’s stuck with me, that loyalty to the defenceless. I hope readers will always believe that my characters will stay and fight rather than run screaming into the night after they’ve thrown someone else into the jaws of death. 

Everly… well, you’ll need to stick around to see what Everly does.

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This article first appeared in Grimdark Magazine Issue #44

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Traumaland, Josh Silver’s third book, is a psychological thriller that follows seventeen-year-old Eli, who is coming to terms with his near-fatal car accident. Everything he knows about what happened comes to him in fragments and has left him emotionally destitute, seemingly without any recollection in the months following the accident. Desperate to feel something (anything) again, Eli finds himself at an underground club called Traumaland. Here, he joins throngs of other emotionally numb people, all trying to find a ‘cure’ for their numbness. Traumaland is a story of losing your grip on reality, only to have it chucked back in your face by some questionable stranger.

I haven’t read YA in a long while, but this novel had me hooked from the beginning – yes, I’m talking about that horrifying epigraph – I kept turning the pages, thinking to myself, Oh my god, now what? Coupled with the fact that Silver is a certified mental health practitioner, it was entertaining to watch him turn therapy speak on its head. The story begins with a therapy session (of course). Never a good sign, is it? We experience Eli’s mangled memories as he tries to navigate this god awful ‘Incident’ that everyone seems to be reeling from and tiptoeing around. I love that we’re thrown in headfirst, and we’re not sure if we can trust this narrator or not. It begs to question–what is this boy doing here, and what’s wrong with him? Personally, I enjoyed being caught up in someone else’s therapy session. It kept the first chapter from feeling dreary.

Although a little slow burn at first, Traumaland’s suspense heats up as Eli hints at his doubts about his therapist, his family and his own memory. Just the thought of being mentally manipulated by the people closest to you was enough to send shivers down my spine. 

Eli can’t seem to remember the incident, and worse, he feels nothing. His environment completely contrasts the state of his mental psyche – Eli lives in a beautiful suburban house, his father is a politician who’s doing well at work and his family seems to be a unit, working through the terrible traumatic incident. This seemingly perfect, even ideal environment weighs on Eli to be a good, dutiful son and he eventually begins his secret, thrill-seeking ‘experiments’ on his way home from his therapy sessions. I must say, after this point, everything is full speed ahead.

Without giving away too much, Eli’s unwilling new acquaintance, Nisha sends him down a rabbit hole (literally), to an underground club that claims to help you ‘feel alive’. I found the scenes in the club exhilarating because it seems that every night in Traumaland is Halloween, and if you’re a horror fan, this particular turn in the story is where we enter darker territory.

What I enjoyed most about Eli’s interactions from here on out was how he seemed to attract other misfits and the mentally unsound – people who’ve been hurt by the system – I think these interactions made the scenes more chaotic, devastating and ultimately more human, which to me, is the scariest thing of all. 

Ultimately, Traumaland is a story of found family and the power that authority holds on the mentally ill. I think this novel will resonate most with fans of Fight Club and Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, and will make a fantastic read this Halloween.

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You probably don’t know Cullen Bunn as the author of the upcoming Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World. But he may be familiar to you from his extensive comics writing CV that points to an outstanding work ethic, and fertile imagination.  He has worked for publishers as diverse as Oni Press (The Sixth Gun series was his breakout title), Marvel Comics (Deadpool – we won’t hold that against him, Spider-Man and Captain America credits), plus DC (Superman and Batman titles), before moving on to Dynamite Entertainment, IDW, Dark Horse and Image.

In other words, Bunn is an experienced writer with a huge list of titles to his name.  As he told AIPT in August 2025, ‘I don’t recommend my work schedule to anyone else, but it’s what makes me happy. So, for me, it’s a combination of that I love telling these stories. I usually say I’ve got one speed, and it’s full speed ahead.’

Bunn’s debut novel, the horror shocker Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World is published by Gallery Books in November 2025.  In it, the inhabitants of Wilson Island are first terrorised by a masked killer who strikes indiscriminately, harvesting his victim’s organs in service of a voice only he can hear.  It is only when his true mission is exposed does the full terror become apparent.

Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World is, being honest, only a fair to middling effort.  Perhaps it was a function of reading it on a Kindle, but the first three quarters of the book felt like a real slog, a shapeless morass with no real momentum.  Wilson Island is sketched out, the inhabitants (the largest bunch of ‘shreddies’ I’ve ever come across in a horror novel) are labouriously introduced, the bland villain of the piece plods through a series of grotesquely gory kills and none of it really coheres.

The heroine of the story is Willa, a plucky young woman who finds herself in the family way at the start of the novel.  Her erstwhile boyfriend Kenny is introduced, as is her friend, Sarah, herself a forthright character who sees herself as matchmaker after Willa and Kenny’s blossoming relationship is abruptly curtailed.

Elsewhere on Wilson Island, a folksy tourist trap if ever I saw one, the town’s Sheriff Buck rules with something of an iron fist, riding herd over a gaggle of otherwise faceless deputies.  It’s an open secret that Willa’s Dad, Wade, is a local gangster of some notoriety.  That situation, sheriff and gangster, is ripe with sadly unfulfilled possibilities, except for a nicely written tense scene between both men in the back half of the book, which otherwise goes nowhere.

Bunn tries very hard to channel several horror storytelling styles – the younger cast and the seemingly supernatural background echo Stranger Things.  There’s a touch of Lovecraft in the overall framing device of what exactly is going on.  The small-town setting and large number of characters evoke Stephen King and to a lesser extent Twin Peaks.  And the visceral kills echo some of the genre’s better splatterpunk authors.  But I struggled to find anything uniquely Bunn-ian in the book, which I found to be something of a shame.

While the first three quarters of the book feel like you’re wading hip deep through treacle, the last section of the book, once the nature and full import of the menace are revealed, is a psychedelic rampage as swarming creatures with too many segmented limbs and gnashing teeth swiftly reduce the population of the island down to a mere handful.

This is where Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World comes to life, but it is, I fear, too little and too late.  Not enough was done by Bunn to lift the characters off the page as fully rounded people.  While Willa and Sarah are nicely portrayed, I didn’t really feel their plight as their world collapsed around them.  And while the true horror at the centre of the action is a ghastly creation, the swift collapse that ends the book feels like it comes from an entirely different story to the one Bunn seemingly was setting up from the start.

In its defence, Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World is a decent first stab at a horror novel.  You don’t need me to tell you that writing for comics and writing a novel are two different beasts.  Bunn does manage his large cast relatively well, and imbues some of them with character and depth.  But for too much of its page count, Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World‘s pacing is glacial.  It is only when the menace reveals itself does the novel hit the accelerator, but by then, for me, the ship had already sailed.

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I love A.G. Slatter’s writing. She is one of those authors who, for me, could rewrite a phone book, and I’d probably eagerly jump in and expect to enjoy it. However, Slatter’s latest offering is the horror novella The Cold House. I love Slatter, but I am a wimp at horror. I’m good with gothic horror, but have quite a low threshold for body horror or gore. The cover of The Cold House, with its burning corn doll and rusty scissors, didn’t fill me with warm fuzzy feelings. But I dove in (with the lights on) for this story that kicked me in the gut, but I still loved.

“You know how Emily Dickinson said hope is the thing with feathers? Well, grief is the thing with claws. It takes a while, and some people don’t survive it.”

In The Cold House, we meet Everly. Dr. Everly Bainbridge. A writer with a dark past, whose life is left shattered after the sudden and violent deaths of her husband and daughter. After the accident that rearranges Everly’s world, she learns that, as well as being dead, her husband was a liar. He had a life she knew nothing about; now she is a very rich widow. To escape the echoes of her former life, Everly retreats to a lonely house in the countryside. There may not be any memories hiding in those walls, but the house is so frigid. One night, Everly wakes up one step away from plummeting down into the well in the cold, cold cellar, and her dead daughter’s voice is ringing in her ears.

Even as someone who is much more of a fantasy fan than a horror fan, The Cold House is a read I really enjoyed. Slatter uses a contemporary setting, so initially, the novella reads a little like a thriller. I had a very physical reaction to certain parts – that feeling when the hairs on your arms stand up or your stomach drops. That might be because I’m a parent, but oh boy, did I feel Everly’s grief. There were times as I was reading where I thought that either this could be a supernatural tweak or Everly could be psychotic from the loss. Both would have made sense to me, given how great her grief was. As a protagonist, Everly is entirely compelling, and how she deals with this catastrophic loss carries The Cold House.

Slatter weaves the supernatural elements of The Cold House into the very human theme of bereavement. Everly’s guilt as she works her way through her loss is threaded with her anger as she discovers the extent of her husband’s other life and her questioning of what is happening to her in this strange old house.

For a shorter read (just over 150 pages), Slatter held my attention well, and The Cold House still has the same appeal for me as her other works, style-wise. My initial wariness was unfounded because this was a modern horror novella, not a part of her Sourdough Universe that I love so much. There are dark things at work here. Slatter uses many of the tools of a gothic or folk horror tale, but any body horror or gore did not exceed my limits.

If you’re after a shorter unsettling read that will grab you and drag you through its delicious twists and turns, then The Cold House would be one for you. Thank you very much to A.G. Slatter and our friends at Titan Books for sending us an advanced reader copy.

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Last Updated on October 2, 2025

Hello, lovers of all things morally gray. In Grimdark Magazine Issue #44, October has arrived, bringing with it a sense of duality, transformation, and endings. The line between beauty and the grotesque is always at its thinnest, leaving us uncertain about what lies beyond the fireline. Our fiction lineup for October draws its cues directly from the season—haunting and uncompromising. October’s issue will be headlined by Zamil Akhtar, known for his “Gunmetal Gods” series. Additionally, inside you’ll find a wealth of premier talent from the speculative fiction world, including Miles Cameron, Emma Burnett, Ryan Cole, Hûw Steer, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Rich Larson, and Max Gladstone.

We’re thrilled to feature an interview with Senlinyu, whose Alchemised delves into ruthless characterization and the Gothic heart of modern fantasy. Mary Robinette Kowal and Sam J. Miller discuss their upcoming Saga Doubles called Red Star Hustle / Apprehension—two very different stories in one universe. John Mauro had the opportunity to interview the legend, Glen Cook, and to round out the discussion, we have a great interview with Anton Hur on the importance of translation.

As always, our non-fiction is stellar. We have an article by Aaron Jones on grief in speculative fiction, as well as a new Project Starship article by Dr. Kristi Charish, which explores gene degradation in space. Angela Slatter has written an interesting article about subverting the Women as a Victim trope, as well as author Krystle Matar discussing grimdark as a genre.

Every page this month lingers like smoke, heavy with atmosphere and sharp with consequence. Draw closer to the fire, let the cold edge of October seep into your reading, put your feet up, and drink something warm. Join us as we embrace the strange beauty of the dark.

Cover art

Carlos Diaz of Kamyu Digital Arts has brought headliner Zamil Akhtar’s The Salt Apostle to life this issue.

The lineup

Grimdark Magazine presents the darker, grittier side of fantasy and science fiction. Each quarterly issue features established and new authors to take you through their hard-bitten worlds alongside articles, reviews and interviews. Our stories are grim, our worlds are dark and our morally grey protagonists and anti-heroes light the way with bloody stories of war, betrayal and action.

FICTION

Ten Times Dead from the Goddess in the Womb by Ryan ColeReconnaissance Notes, Episode 1 by Miles Cameron and Emma BurnettContagion’s Eve by Rich LarsonThe Bull Beneath by Hûw SteerThe Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne by Yudhanjaya WijeratneThe Salt Apostle by Zamil AkhtarThe Iron Man by Max Gladstone

NON-FICTION

All Systems Grimdark by Krystle MatarAn Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal and Sam J. Miller by Rai Furniss-Greasley and Beth TablerReview: Red Star Hustle/Apprehension by Mary Robinette Kowal and Sam J. Miller (review by Rai Furniss-Greasley)The Power of Fantasy and Sci-fi when Dealing with Grief by Aaron S JonesAn Interview with SenLinYu by Beth TablerProject Starship: Space: We’re Probably All Going to Die by Dr. Kristi CharishAn Interview with Glen Cook by John MauroReview: Lies Weeping by Glen Cook (review by John Mauro)Review: Alchemised by SenLinYu (review by Beth Tabler)An Interview with Christopher Ruocchio by Z.B. Steele and William McclellandAn Interview with Anton Hur by William McclellandSome Ways of Subverting the “Women as a Victim” Trope by Angela SlatterRead Grimdark Magazine Issue #44

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We recently got a chance to speak with Dariel R.A. Quiogue about his sword & sorcery character Orhan Timur, sword & sorcery in general, and the crowdfunding campaign with New Edge Sword & Sorcery to release his new novella The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues.

[GDM] Thanks so much for taking the time for this interview. Can you tell us who you are and what sorts of stories you write?

[DQ] Hi Alex, and thanks for the interview. I’m Dariel Quiogue, I used to do commercial photography work and wrote for some magazines, but well before that I was a fan of fantasy and science fiction. Getting introduced to Star Wars, Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter all in the same year (1977) kinda warped my brain, so I guess it was kinda inevitable I’d write fantasy and science fiction in the pulp tradition.

[GDM] The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues is not your first tale with Orhan Timur. I first read him back in New Edge Sword and Sorcery  Issue 0 with your story “The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” (which was really good, by the way!). Where did Orhan come from? How has writing him changed from story to story? 

[DQ] The first Orhan story was “Lord of the Brass Host”, which first appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #7 (it’s still free to read on their site, and also appears in their Best Of Volume 1 and my Swords of the Four Winds collection). The inspiration for that was the Terra Cotta Army that was found in the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shih Huang Di; as I was looking at the photos I started to imagine what if these were clockwork automata? I needed a protagonist to pit against the clockwork army, and since the setting was going to be a fictional North China frontier city, I thought a character of Mongolian-inspired origin fit the bill best. 

To give the character extra spice, I set him up as an alternate-world version of Chingis Khan, who had just been overthrown by his former friend and sworn brother, the equivalent for the historical Jamuqa. I was aiming to make Orhan Timur a series character from the very first, so I wanted a hook that could be used again and again in many variations.

I wrote that first story in 2013. I guess I’m changing as a person, and I’m also looking for new angles for this character, so this reflects in the newer Orhan stories. I’m exploring his origins more, getting deeper into Mongol history and culture, and I guess writing more of him, specially in longer formats, lets me explore his humanity. He can be a cold-hearted badass, but he’s also got his ties and dreams. 

[GDM] Orhan and his stories are inspired by and take place within Mongolian culture. What got you interested in the subject and what is it that you enjoy about it?

[DQ] I’ve always been interested in the history and culture of the Eurasian steppe nomads – the freedom of life on the wide open steppe, which was a great highway between cultures rather than a barrier, you could have a character get on a horse in Xinjiang in one adventure and end up on the shores of the Caspian in the next one. I’ve also got this thing with what I call ‘Forgotten Asia,’ Asia from the Chinese border west to Persia and from Siberia south to the Southeast Asian archipelagoes – you find a lot of English-language media inspired by China and Japan, but very little in Forgotten Asia. 

So when I was coming up with my first stab at writing and publishing fiction, I came up with the title Swords of the Four Winds, a book that would explore this Forgotten Asia and also as a homage to an author I consider a mentor of sorts, Harold Lamb. I first read Lamb’s Babur the Tiger while living in Delhi, actually found my copy in a bookstall within view of the Red Fort so that was really appropriate, then devoured his other histories and biographies in the school library. All that of course got me even more interested in the steppe peoples. 

[GDM] While most S&S stories are episodic in nature—with the reader being able to pick them up at any point in a character’s saga—is there an arc that you’re working towards with Orhan?

[DQ] Not really. The changes in Orhan’s personality are organic, and since I’ve been writing tales of his earlier adventures, he’s almost two different characters. In the interests of consistency though I always try to be sure where an Orhan story in production would have occurred in relation to his other stories. Recently, because there are now too many tales to easily keep track in my head, I wrote down a rough sequence on my blog. 

Readers new to Orhan Timur can start anywhere in the sequence, they’re all self-contained and episodic, but for the curious, Hunt of a Thousand Leagues occurs several years after the events in “Curse of the Horsetail Banner” (New Edge of Sword and Sorcery #0), and a year or two before the events in “Battle of the Nine Waters” (New Edge of Sword and Sorcery #4).

Author Dariel R. A. Quiogue

[GDM] Where do we find Orhan in the beginning of The Hunt of A Thousand Leagues?

[DQ] The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues finds Orhan Timur, betrayed while plotting a rebellion against his rival and usurper Jungar, fleeing for his life then mortally wounded. Even as he’s dying, the only thing on his mind is revenge … and Things Happen when the Snow Leopard is in a bad mood!

‘Hunt’ has ended up as an exploration of the culture of vendetta – its pervasiveness, how it warps relationships and the price for engaging in it, even while it’s considered a form of justice and even spiritual obligation. Orhan starts the chain, wanting revenge on his betrayers, but that only leads to others declaring vendetta on him!

[GDM] Do you have lots of other Orhan stories you’ve tried writing or have ideas for?

[DQ] More like there are a lot more historical hooks, nooks and crannies I want to explore with Orhan Timur as my lens. Most of my S&S stories are inspired by history and real-world cultures – you can’t get any weirder than what humankind has already done in thousands of years of history. So in one recently written story I had Orhan Timur meet my world’s equivalent of the Varangians, who in the real world were actively trading and raiding around the Black and Caspian Seas from Russia. 

[GDM] What were some of your first sword & sorcery stories that got you into the genre? Is there a specific S&S character or story trope that you’re really fond of?

[DQ] In a way my very first S&S read was Homer’s Odyssey (in an abridged prose version of course). I was an asthmatic bookworm as a kid, and when I found our family copy of that I devoured it. Exposure to Conan, first through the pastiches of de Camp, Carter and Nyberg, merely sharpened the taste I’d already acquired through The Odyssey and Ray Harryhausen movies for swashbuckling adventure in faraway lands. 

I also acquired, through my father’s collection of military histories, a fascination with warfare. He had a battered old copy of Hemingway’s Men at War collection, that was specially seminal for me. That, plus Tolkien’s vivid descriptions of battles in Lord of the Rings, spurred me to often include battle scenes in my stories. The Orhan Timur tales get more of those, he’s modeled on Chingis Khan so of course I portray him (or try to) as a military genius. 

[GDM] The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues is part of a larger funding campaign with Brackenbury Books. You’ve worked with them before, for both New Edge Sword & Sorcery and Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery . Can you talk about what that experience has been like?

[DQ] It’s been a great pleasure and eye-opener into the indie publishing world. For one thing, it’s taught me that I’m better off producing stories and finding publishers for them rather than trying to be a one man show. And Oliver Brackenbury is for me a fantastic person to collaborate with, really professional and at the same time a real fan of the genre. Working with Bryn Hammond has also been great, her encyclopedic knowledge of Mongol culture is reshaping Orhan and the Orhan stories. 

[GDM] What are you reading now?

[DQ] Nothing at the moment, but I’ve just recently finished Harry Turtledove’s Krispos of Videssos trilogy. 

[GDM] Do you have any other projects that you’re working on and can talk about? Do you have anything coming out soon that we should look out for?

[DQ] I’m planning to spend most of 2026 writing stories for a second volume of Swords of the Four Winds, and planning a wider re-release, with more art, of the first volume. So look for those in 2027, and keep an eye on out Brackenbury Books’ updates.

Dariel’s novella—as well as the other novellas in the crowdfunding campaign—can be found on BackerKit.

The post INTERVIEW: with author Dariel R.A. Quiogue appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

With Richard Swan’s Empire of the Wolf prequel novella The Scour now mere weeks away, I know you are slavering for more Vonvalt and Bressinger. According to James Tivendale of You and I Books, “The banter between Vonvalt and Bressinger is top-notch and reminiscent of high-quality exchanges between fantasy book duos Geralt and Dandelion (The Witcher) and Hadrian and Royce (The Riyria Revelations).”

Ask, and ye shall receive. In the first of what I hope will be many short stories where we add new art and post them on our site as free fiction, I give you A Reputation for Prudence, originally published back in Grimdark Magazine Issue #31.

If you’d rather watch Black Sails actor Luke Arnold perform this story instead of reading it, skip right to the bottom of this post and you can watch it on YouTube. Click here to watch A Reputation for Prudence.

A Reputation for Prudenceby Richard SwanAn Empire of the Wolf prequel short story

Sir Konrad Vonvalt watched the waves through a broken window as they crashed rhythmically against the shore.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

Like the ticking of a slow clock.

Seabirds trilled in the cold salt air. A biting wind whipped across the dunes. Razorgrass flickered and rustled.

He drummed his fingers on the old altar—fingers clad in the fine leather of a Justice’s glove. This place had once been a pagan temple. Now, roofless and glassless, its only congregation was the brackish, drizzly air.

The old temple creaked. Wooden beams older than him protested. Stones and mortar older than his grandfather grated and chafed as the earth shifted under the sea’s relentless pounding. Through the bones of the roof, the light drained from the sky like blood from a corpse.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

His foot tapped against the flagstones. He had been waiting all day, whilst snow had turned to sleet and then to drizzle. His body ached where the wet cold had seeped into it. In an hour it would be dark.

But he was patient. He had learned patience. It was a Justice’s best quality.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

The waves no longer pounded like a clock, but like some monstrous heartbeat.

“Sir Konrad Vonvalt,” a voice said, cutting through the frigid air. Vonvalt looked up sharply. Justice Klaudia Sokol stood in the old entranceway. The wooden steps had rotted away, and she lowered herself to the floor stiffly, though it was no great height.

He knew better than to move to assist her.

“You received my message, then?” Sokol asked.

Vonvalt nodded. “Shall I fetch Sir Ivan?” he asked, referring to the local sheriff. His voice was hoarse; they were the first words he had spoken in many hours.

Sokol pulled an expression of distaste and sat at the altar with a grunt. She was much too old for these misadventures, but the winter’s bite of Baniskhaven, an old coastal town at the western extremity of Denholtz, would have tested even the toughest of the Emperor’s Legionaries.

“No,” she said. “There is no one in the residence except Lord Emil Baran.”

“He is a Reichskrieg veteran,” Vonvalt said.

“What man is not?”

Vonvalt shrugged. His shoulders were stiff. “I am just saying. If he is half the rogue you say he is, he will not go quietly.”

Sokol looked at him askance. “You have a reputation as an accomplished swordsman.”

“I am trying to cultivate a reputation for prudence.”

Sokol smiled, and then laughed—quietly, for they were trying to remain undetected. Vonvalt smiled too.

“Master Kadlec says you are the best in the Order. That is why I asked for your assistance.”

“I assumed it was because I was the only other Justice in the Westmark of Denholtz,” Vonvalt replied.

“Aye,” Sokol allowed. “There was that, too.” She gestured outside. “Your man is with the sheriff? What was his name?”

“The sheriff, or my taskman?”

Sokol grunted. “Better give me both.”

“The Sheriff of Baniskhaven is Sir Ivan. My taskmen—”

“The Grozodan?”

“The Grozodan,” Vonvalt confirmed, “is Dubine Bressinger.”

Sokol looked out through the door, though she could not see the posse of men hiding in the forest there. “You and I will enter the manor alone. I have instructed Sir Ivan to hold back unless we call for him.”

Vonvalt sighed but nodded. He had to be careful not to seem impudent. He was well-respected in spite of his relative youth, but Sokol was many years his senior — indeed, this was to be her last case before she returned to Sova. There her life as a roving Justice would end; her twilight years would be spent as Jurist, maintaining the philosophical health of the Order of the Magistratum.

“Here,” she said, opening her satchel and unwrapping a parcel of cured sausage and bread. She nodded at the sky. “We will go in after nightfall.”

Vonvalt accepted his share of the food, and they ate in silence, waiting for the last of the light to fade.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

The manor was unremarkable, a two-storey box of grey stone, sloped roofs of lichenous red slate, and a crenellated tower that sat at the nexus of two uneven wings. The whole structure lay in the centre of extensive grounds which had been cultivated into attractive gardens—though a careful observer would notice several months’ worth of neglect that had left the flowerbeds ragged and the weeds unchecked. Sokol knew why, though given the number of missing people reported in Baniskhaven, Vonvalt had his suspicions.

They left the temple ruin under the cover of darkness and surmounted a low stone wall that separated the ornamental gardens from the wider landholdings. The manor was mostly dark, but there was light in several of the oriel windows in the south wing. There was almost no moonlight, and thanks to the wind and drizzle, their approach was well masked.

“Here,” Sokol whispered. They had reached the dark northern wing and were crouched beneath one of the windows. There was just enough space to slip a dagger through and push the latch up, and Sokol did so. She exhaled slowly as she opened the window and peered into the darkened chamber beyond.

Immediately, she ducked back down.

What is it? Vonvalt mouthed. He was crouched on the ground, his back to the wall, hand on the pommel of his short sword.

Sokol did not immediately answer. She spat onto the grass, then cleared her throat a few times and spat some more. Vonvalt moved to stand, but Sokol grasped at his shoulder and pushed him back down.

The silence within the manor continued undisturbed. Sokol eventually pressed herself back up — not without difficulty — and once again peered over the sill. She spent a few moments looking, then motioned for Vonvalt to do the same.

“Nema,” he swore quietly.

Inside was a dining hall, filled with all the ostentation one would expect of a wealthy provincial lord. In the centre, on a huge, ornate rug, was a long table of glossy dark wood attended by three people—two men and a woman—all of them sitting upright and with their arms stiff and outstretched. Between them was a generous spread, and some of this food had found its way onto the guests’ plates. There, it sat, untouched.

Despite the cold, the smell that emanated from the dining hall was overwhelming. It was a rich, cloying, fruity stench, one that caught at the back of the throat and clotted there. It was the sour smell of decay, a smell that both Sokol and Vonvalt were intimately familiar with. And yet, although the food was undoubtedly degrading—the infestation of maggots was testament to that— it was the state of the guests that accounted for at least some of the smell.

Vonvalt and Sokol crept into the dining hall. Vonvalt went first and then helped Sokol over the threshold, despite the latter’s clear reluctance to be helped. Sokol pulled the window closed behind her and eased the latch down.

Vonvalt turned and examined the closest guest. What he had initially taken to be hair in the poor light was, in fact, a dark mass of brain. Looking across at the other two victims revealed the same fate; namely that the caps of their skulls had been cut away with the skill of a barber-surgeon. Some of the brains had been removed, too, roughly excavated by knife and fork. From what Sokol had told Vonvalt about the case, he had no doubt that these morsels had been consumed by Emil Baran.

Sokol drew Vonvalt’s attention with a wave and then gestured to the door at the far end of the room. Vonvalt nodded, and together they made their way quietly to it. Sokol held her breath as she pressed the handle down and pulled the door open, but they need not have worried; the hinges were well oiled, and it made no sound.

They were now in the central part of the manor, a large open hall that was home to little more than a broad staircase and an impressive array of hunting trophies. They crossed it quickly and achieved the door to the south wing. Vonvalt looked at Sokol. She nodded. The time for subtlety was over. Vonvalt pressed the handle and flung the door open so hard it slammed into the wall.

If they had hoped to startle Baran, they were disappointed. A man was sitting in an armchair, facing away from them, and he did not stir. A silver plate of human brain matter and other viscera sat on a small table next to him. Flies, untroubled by the interruption, buzzed soporifically in the cold air.

“Lord Emil Baran,” Justice Sokol said, sweeping past Vonvalt. What little candlelight remained was suddenly extinguished. Vonvalt curled his lip. He was not a credulous man, but the sudden darkness felt inauspicious.

There was no response from Baran.

“Emil Baran! In the name of the Emperor, hearken to me!” Sokol snapped. The words seemed unforgivably loud in the silence of the manor house.

They rounded the armchair. Vonvalt lowered his sword. The man was slumped, unmoving. His skin was waxy and pale, his lips blue. He had the stout frame of the well-fed, though in death his features were slack. In a physical sense, he was, by any measure, an unremarkable man.

Sokol rammed her sword back into its scabbard. Her face was a mask of displeasure.

“That is that, then,” Vonvalt said, sheathing his weapon with no small measure of relief. Sokol had been working on the matter for weeks, and there had never been any indication that Baran was in league with another.

“That is nothing of the sort,” Sokol said, irritably. She moved about the chamber, lighting fresh candles and jamming them into the hot wax of those recently extinguished.

Vonvalt squatted and examined Baran. The body itself did not smell particularly, though the plate of brain matter did. Next to the plate was a crystal goblet. Vonvalt picked it up and sniffed the remnants of the liquid inside. He pulled a sour face.

“Monksbane,” he said to Sokol, but she seemed hardly to notice.

Vonvalt placed the goblet back down and cast an eye over the corpse. He shook his head. Monksbane was too painless and clean a death for someone as monstrous as Baran, there was no question of that, but the matter was concluded. Sokol had not filled him in on every last detail, but it was obvious that those who had been reported missing in Baniskhaven were the corpses in the man’s dining hall. The reasons behind such appalling murders died with Emil Baran, but what was there to be divined? The man had clearly been profoundly insane.

Vonvalt sighed and he stood. There was no longer any need for him to be in Baniskhaven and he was eager to move on. “I shall fetch Sir Ivan.”

“You shall do no such thing,” Sokol said. Vonvalt saw the flash of polished silver where she had pulled her Justice’s medallion from within her blouse, and the pale, wrinkled skin of her forearms where she had rolled her sleeves back. Vonvalt’s features creased in confusion as she approached the corpse.

“You do not mean to—” he began, but she held up a hand to silence him.

“What measure of comfort can I provide to the families of his victims if I do not at least attempt to discover his reasons?”

Vonvalt shrugged. “His reasons cannot matter,” he said. He gestured at the corpse. “The man was clearly a lunatic. It is cold comfort, I agree, but we must play the hand we are dealt.”

Sokol ignored him. She moved so she was standing next to the corpse.

Vonvalt felt his frustration grow. “Justice, this is a risk you need not take.”

“’Tis not a risk if you know what you are doing,” Sokol snapped.

Vonvalt gritted his teeth. “You do not know how long he has been dead.”

“It cannot have been more than a day.”

“You do not have the grimoire necromantia.”

“Any necromancer worth their salt knows the incantations by heart.”

Vonvalt opened his mouth and closed it again. He grimaced. “Justice, your reputation as an experienced necromancer is well known and deserved within the Order, but—”

“But what?”

“The case is concluded. Do you not make for Sova tomorrow?”

“And?”

Vonvalt was silent for a few moments, trapped between speaking his mind and affording a much more senior and experienced Justice the respect of his faith in her abilities.

“If the séance goes wrong—”

“Blood of gods, Konrad, shut up and step back if you are not going to assist me.”

Vonvalt’s further protestations—and he had had plans for many—withered on the vine. Whether it was obsession, hubris, grandstanding, some combination of the three—or something else entirely—he could not shift her.

With a sigh that verged on insolent, he obliged and took several steps back.

Sokol began muttering under her breath in an ancient, arcane tongue known only to a select few within the Order of the Magistratum. The candles, only freshly lit, began to tremble and gutter. Vonvalt turned and looked through the window, out across the gardens and to the forest at the edge of the manor grounds where Bressinger and the sheriff and his men waited. He willed them to approach, to interrupt this foolishness and so give him an excuse to cancel the séance. The baron was long dead, and his mind had been in disarray at the moment of his death. To attempt to commune with him, even for a necromancer with the skill and experience of Justice Sokol, was very ill-advised.

What sounds there had been beyond the residence—the wind, the rustling of the trees, the odd bark of a fox—died away. The more Sokol spoke the incantations and wards, and the thinner the fabric of reality between the mortal plane and the holy dimensions grew, the more sound and light drained away. Soon, there was little except silence and darkness.

Vonvalt felt a familiar cold dread well up within him. His physical courage was beyond question, but some fears could never be fully erased. Necromancy was so offensive to the laws of nature that it was impossible not to be frightened by it, but it was too powerful an investigative tool to be relegated to the Master’s Vaults of the Law Library.

His skin roughed with gooseflesh. His brain reeled from what his eyes were telling it, but the reality of the situation could not be denied:

The corpse of Emil Baran was waking up.

Vonvalt watched the man twitch and jerk as though he were strung to a puppeteer in the midst of a seizure. Justice Sokol’s eyes had gone white like balls of cut marble. She continued to speak the incantation, and the baron responded, his life force being rammed forcefully back into his body like a pillow being stuffed.

Eventually, Emil stopped twitching and his eyes opened. Whereas Sokol’s were purest white, Baran’s were dark pools of obsidian. He maintained the same pose as before and stared fixedly at the ceiling.

Complete, raging silence claimed the solar. Vonvalt let out a shaky breath. His hand instinctively went to the pommel of his short sword. They had entered the séance’s most dangerous period.

“You are Lord Emil Baran,” Sokol said. Establishing the identity of the dead was the first and most important thing. There was power in a name; it anchored a spirit to the Plain of Burden, for a time. But for as long as it was so anchored, it was also vulnerable.

Baran did not respond for a long time. “Quite delicious,” he said. His voice was jarring, at once both muffled and clear. “Quite delicious.”

Vonvalt’s grip on his sword tightened. It was normal to obtain nonsense from the subject of a séance—more often than not, it was all that was obtained.

“Hearken to me!” Sokol said sharply. “You are Lord Emil Baran.”

“What do you want?” Baran asked. “I am in the middle of a dinner party.” He spoke with sudden expansiveness, but his body remained unmoving.

“You are a murderer,” Sokol said. There was venom in her voice.

“I am a murderer,” Baran agreed.

“There are three people in your dining hall,” Sokol said. “You killed them, yes?”

There was a pause.

“Baran!”

“What do you want?” He twitched. For a moment—no longer than an eyeblink—his face was a rictus of agony. “I am in the middle of a dinner party.”

Vonvalt looked at Sokol. The urge to bring the séance to an end was strong.

“You murdered the people in your dining hall. You ate their brains. Why?”

“Quite delicious.”

“You killed them!”

Something changed. The air shifted, drew in. The darkness deepened. Vonvalt’s ears throbbed with a distant buzzing. The pit of his stomach dropped.

He looked sharply at Sokol. “Break the bond. You must.”

“Silence!” Sokol snapped.

“I have killed many,” Baran said. His voice had changed, deepened, taken on weight. It was an unsettling timbre, one that injured the mind to hear.

“I am speaking of the people in your dining hall,” Sokol pressed.

“Thousands. Tens of thousands. Bodies piled high like petals of ash.”

“Three people!” Sokol snapped. “I am talking of the three people in your dining hall!”

“What do you want? I am in the middle of a dinner party.” Baran’s voice, now, jarring and mild.

Vonvalt could clearly remember his tutelage many years before in the Grand Lodge in Sova. In warm, subterranean chambers, the walls and bedrock carefully inscribed with magickal runes, one of the first things they had been taught was to never interrogate an insane mind. They were like chum to the predators of the afterlife.

“Why did you do it?” Sokol asked. “Why!”

“The churned offal and powdered bones make good mortar for the stones of the Ziggurat of Ambyr,” Baran said.

Vonvalt clenched his fists. His heart pounded.  “Klaudia, please!” he hissed.

“Why did you murder them?” Sokol demanded, one last time.

“I’ll tell you why I did it!” Baran snapped. “I was there the day the Muphraab led his legions against the Accuser. He spent almost a year marshalling his host by the Halls of Hell. And then for six days they battled, and he slew them, rendered their flesh from their bones, put the flesh into pots and boiled them to mulch, ground the bones like chaff and mixed them, and he quarried the stone from the Broken Path which had set the ground of his greatest victory and built the great colossus of death in the Edaximae, the Ziggurat of Ambyr. The Muphraab made it his home, a temple to his greatest victory, may his name live forever in the mouth of the Accuser!”

Baran’s voice had reached fever pitch. Vonvalt looked between Sokol and the corpse. The latter had changed. Something intangible had shifted. Emil Baran, if he had ever been summoned to the Plain of Burden, was gone. His body was a vessel, but it was not his spirit that inhabited it.

Vonvalt instinctively grabbed his medallion and advanced on Sokol. Precisely his worst fears had been realised, and they had but a precious few moments to remedy it. “You must come back,” he said to Sokol, “at once!”

In a sudden, explosive movement, Baran’s corpse folded like a pocketknife. His mouth broke open and a violent stream of black ectoplasm vomited forth and splattered Sokol. She shrieked as the necrotic goo filled her mouth and nose. In moments, her eyes had gone from white to black as though diluted with poison. She staggered backwards clutching her face, screaming like a burn victim.

Vonvalt lunged forward. He quickly incanted the wards from memory and grabbed Sokol by the shoulder.

He gasped as he was thrown backwards, crashing through one of the solar’s windows. He landed outside in the gardens.

“Klaudia!” he shouted. He immediately pulled himself back up and hurried to the broken window.

Sokol was standing at the far end of the room, slightly hunched over and breathing heavily. Everything was silent and still.

“Klaudia?” Vonvalt asked.

She looked up.

It was not Klaudia.

Vonvalt leapt backwards as she bore down on him, barrelled out of the smashed window, overshot, hit the ground, turned, and came at him again.

“I am the progenitor of the Legions of Sardach!” Sokol shouted in a voice that was not hers. She took her medallion into one hand and Vonvalt watched as it melted into molten silver. “I am the one who smote the Accuser and took his head to the Halls of Hell! It was I who cut the heart out of Vangrid, and it was I who poisoned the Blood of Creus! And you, fools, children, animals, attempt to deny me my prey! This man is mine! His spirit is mine! No man should seek to deprive me!”

Vonvalt stepped backwards as Sokol—diminutive, elderly Sokol—towered over him, impossibly, her body swollen and straining with dark energies.  He was moments from losing his nerve entirely. His short sword was held out in front of him, but he was not even sure it would achieve anything.

Sokol took two steps forward and gripped the blade. Rancid breath washed over Vonvalt, making him gag. His fear manifested as a single, low grunt. He felt the cold, damp stones of the mansion press into his back. His ears were filled with a horrible buzzing that by itself threatened to crush his sanity to a fine powder. His heart squirmed and thumped so brutally he was sure it was about to give out.

“Tread. Lightly,” Sokol said, the words like blades of ice. With her other hand, she let the molten medallion dribble to the floor. “Have better sense than your master.”

And then, vacated, Sokol collapsed.

“Fucking Nema,” Bressinger said the following morning. In front of him was a jar of onions in vinegar, and he picked at them idly, crunching them between his teeth.

It had been a long, cold night, one filled with the heavy burden of administration that came in the wake of murder. Vonvalt, his taskman Bressinger, and the sheriff, Sir Ivan, as well as the latter’s constables, combed through the house for more remains. They had unearthed a hoard of corpses in the residence’s cellars in various states of dismemberment and decomposition, in and amongst a great many pots of human bonemeal.

After the search was exhausted, and the bodies had been cleared out, Vonvalt gave the order for the house to be burned. Now, he and Bressinger breakfasted in one of the few remaining inns in Baniskhaven—insofar as a succession of goblets of wine could be considered breakfast.

“What a senseless waste of a life,” Vonvalt said bitterly, draining the last of his wine and signalling to the barkeep for another. The man had broken out a bottle of some of his finest red, expecting Vonvalt to have a refined palate, but seeing that the two of them were simply drinking it as one might a pint of ale, this time he brought over a significantly cheaper vintage.

“And a career,” Vonvalt added.

“What did she hope to achieve?” Bressinger asked him.

“I know not,” Vonvalt sighed. “Nema knows I tried to dissuade her. Emil Baran was insane. His dead mind was never going to be anything other than a stew of interdimensional parasites.” Vonvalt shook his head and winced at the taste of the new, cheaper wine. “Interrogating him was nothing but reckless. She could have used me, too, but she did not.”

“I’ll warrant she was showing off. Going out with a bang. You said she was due to retire?”

Vonvalt shrugged. “Perhaps. I think it more likely her actions were born of obsession. Baran cheated her, and on her last case as a roving Justice. He killed himself. She cannot have thought to extract any useful testimony from him. I think she wanted to make his death more traumatic.”

“Revenge?”

“Something like that. In any event, it was a risk she did not have to take. And now she is dead.”

“Aye. And what a death.”

“Do not remind me,” Vonvalt said with great sincerity.

“What was it? That commanded her? I do not want the detail,” he added quickly. “Nema knows I’ve not seen you so troubled in a long time.”

Vonvalt pulled an expression of distaste. “Truthfully, I know not. A very old soul, talking on all manner of things concerning the holy dimensions.” He waved Bressinger off. “It is best relegated to memory.”

“It had its hooks in Baran?”

“Aye. As though Sokol had interrupted a tyger and the carcass of its prey.”

Bressinger shuddered. “Fuck me.” He drained his wine and fished the last pickled onion from the jar. “Have the families been informed?”

“Sir Ivan will take care of it.”

“Then there is nothing left for us in Baniskhaven?”

Vonvalt shook his head. “I must send a letter to the Order, explaining what has become of Justice Sokol. You and I will head north this afternoon.”

“Thank fuck for that.”

They sat in silence for a long while.

“Sir Konrad?”

“Aye?”

Bressinger cleared his throat. “If you want to discuss it, you know I will always listen.”

Vonvalt nodded. “I know,” he said. He looked out the window, to where snow was pattering against the panes.

“But I do not.”

They left Baniskhaven that afternoon, hunched in their saddles, their horses kicking through snowdrifts on the sand. Above, the sky roiled like a ceiling of broken slate. To the west, the cold, grey waters of the Grall Sea foamed and lapped against the beach.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

Like the pounding of a monstrous heartbeat.

“Dubine?” Vonvalt called over the wind.

“Aye?”

“Let me hear one of your Grozodan folk songs, eh?”

Bressinger smiled. “With pleasure, sire.”

Vonvalt eyed the distant horizon. It would be a long time before the image of Justice Klaudia Sokol being dragged into the afterlife, her eyes wide with horror and bafflement and agony, faded from his memory.

“And Dubine?”

“Aye, sire?”

“Make it a long and happy one.”

Want more Vonvalt and Bressinger?

Order The Scour now and find out what Vonvalt does when a fellow Justice is accused of murder.

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Watch A Reputation for Prudence on YouTube

Rather watch and listen than read? Then I have something awesome for you. You can watch A Reputation for Prudence performed by Black Sails actor Luke Arnold below.

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Acknowledgements

Author: Richard Swan

Header artist: Luke Spooner

Wolf’s head device: Shawn King

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The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, the first volume in The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, is a dark, dream-like fantasy novel that blurs the line between myth and memory. A densely-layered and influential novel, it laid much of the groundwork for later grimdark authors. For lovers of dark fantasy and those interested in the lineage of the genre, it is a vital piece of the grimdark puzzle.

‘It is my nature, my joy and my curse, to forget nothing. Every rattling chain and whistling wind, every sight, smell, and taste, remains changeless in my mind…’

The Sun is waning. Urth is dying. Humanity is but a decaying shadow of itself.

Gene Wolfe’s 1980 masterpiece, The Shadow of the Torturer, laid much of the foundation for what later came to be known as grimdark. It set in motion many of the tropes and expectations dark fantasy readers take for granted, and its influence on the genre cannot be overstated. It can be seen as a sort of proto-grimdark novel. 

Set in the far-flung future, The Shadow of the Torturer follows Severian, an apprentice of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence (the Torturer’s Guild) as he is exiled from his guild and sent into the wider, post-apocalyptic world. Spending his youth as an orphaned apprentice of the Torturer’s Guild, Severian is tasked early in the novel with torturing a political prisoner, Thecla. When he takes mercy on her by assisting in her suicide, he is sent into exile and ordered to travel to the far-off city of Thrax, taking with him a letter and great executioner’s blade, Terminus Est. On his journey, he meets a myriad of strange and allegorical characters. Each does their bit to turn this twisted hero’s journey from a simple wandering tale to an almost mythic pilgrimage. 

‘It was in this instant of confusion that I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane.’

Severian, who claims to have a perfect memory, is recounting much of his life. However, this is not a warts-and-all confession. It is controlled, articulate and, depending on who you ask, riddled with contradictions. All his claims, including this one, must be brought into question. Both the truthfulness of events and the nature of the man recounting them is determined by how one chooses to read and interpret Severian’s account. He can be seen as a naive, good-hearted man telling his story honestly; or a man with many sins to hide and reasons for keeping them hidden. 

Gene Wolfe was known for his literary prowess. He was a writer who straddled the line between literary and genre fiction. He is your favourite writer’s favourite writer. His approach is neither conceited nor pretentious. He has faith in the reader’s intellect and wants you to work for the story. It will not work for everyone, but I greatly respect him for not pandering and holding my hand. Through twisted characters in a dying world, Wolfe explored this moral ambiguity as well as his own Catholicism.

‘But there is no such reason to mourn the destruction of a colony of cells: such a colony dies each time a loaf of bread goes into the oven. If a man is no more than such a colony, a man is nothing; but we instinctively know that man is more. What happens then to the part that is more?’

There is a strange and haunting beauty to Severian’s narration and, in turn, Wolfe’s prose. From his descriptions of the grotesque landscape to the vile acts of torture themselves, the prose is lush, poetic and haunting. It is thickly layered and with depths beyond comprehension. The Shadow of the Torturer is an endlessly re-readable narrative, and with each subsequent sojourn with this flawed and mysterious character, greater depths are plumbed. 

There are some obvious influences this book had on the later development of grimdark as a genre: the depictions of violence, an unreliable narrator (and a torturer at that), a morally grey world. The Shadow of the Torturer is also a subversion of the hero’s journey, beginning with betrayal, torture, suicide and exile. I do not claim to have understood everything Wolfe packed into this, rather short, three-hundred-page novel, but there are, I think, deeper aspects of the novel that have carried over into the collective appetite of dark readers. Namely, the density with which the world’s information is doled out and the sheer lack of hands to hold. Severian, assuming the reader to be someone living in and aware of his contemporary world, does not bother to spoon-feed them. There are no dumps of exposition in The Shadow of the Torturer. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Wolfe demands quite a lot from them. He trusts them. That is a rare thing. Every line must be read between and every lie must be parsed out for the reader to truly glean the story’s deeper depths. It is a style of worldbuilding that would later be used by grimdark greats such as Anna Smith Spark and Steven Erikson. 

‘We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.’

Of course, one could read The Shadow of the Torturer at face value and come away with a perfectly enjoyable story, but there is much that would be lost. The novel requires patience, and a second or third reading is a must. The Shadow of the Torturer is not overly action-packed. There is much reflection, philosophising and introspection. There are slow moments and quiet moments. But that is all part of its beauty. Complaints of The Shadow of the Torturer often highlight that many of the events during Severian’s exile feels contrived. Characters appear once, and by chance pop-up later at convenient times. Side characters can feel like caricatures; one-dimensional foils to challenge Severian’s naive worldview. Such a complaint comes from a surface-level reading of the book. Severian is telling this tale, leaving many warts concealed. It is evasive, selective and rife with omissions. That is the point.

‘Have I said that time turns our lies into truth?’

Packed full of medieval imagery forcibly-blended with science fiction wonderment, like some kind of doomed and howling experiment, The Shadow of the Torturer is an essential book for lovers of all things dark. The prose is dense without meandering into the purple, the narration is sharp, witty and withholding much from a casual read and the world is a decaying and grotesque husk of what it once had been. The Shadow of the Torturer rests loftily in the genre’s lineage and, for the grimdark fan, is a must-read book.

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While Conan and Zula emerged unscathed from their audience with Thoth-Amon, master of the Black Circle of Sorcerers and an important figure in the insidious snake cult of Set, they learned of “Set’s brood gathering beneath Keshatta.” With the coming of dawn, Zula’s magic disguise has expired, however, and Athyr-Bast has escaped her bonds. An alarm is raised city-wide, but Conan and Zula remain committed to disrupting Thoth-Amon’s insidious plot to destabilize Stygia’s neighboring kingdoms. The pair venture into the tunnels below Keshatta, where curses and darker threats await.

Concluding the current Conan the Barbarian story arc, this issue is entitled “The Nest Beneath.” Jim Zub has managed to pack quite a bit of story into a single issue, and his narration work is appropriately breathless. Zub also incorporates a fun reference to Robert E. Howard’s original Conan tales by having the children of Set growing beneath the city take the same form as the monster from the story “The God in the Bowl.” A brief flashback in this issue reveals that the encounter in “The God in the Bowl” has already taken place in the Titan Comics Conan the Barbarian continuity, although not “on-screen.”

Fernando Dagnino delivers some more great expressions in this issue. Faces twisted in rage during combat, dumbstruck through mesmerism, panicking when confronted by supernatural horrors, etc. And while he had some opportunity to briefly show off some monster artwork in Conan the Barbarian #23, this issue’s Man-Serpents offer him an opportunity to really let loose.

In the final pages of the issue, Jeffrey Shanks delivers another informative essay on serpent-haunted Stygia, this time profiling the villains of Stygia. I was surprised to learn that scene-stealing sorceress villainess was not an original Zub-created character, but instead one who first appeared in Marvel’s Savage Sword in Conan in 1993, late in the original magazine’s run. Cheers to Zub’s archaeology work; his dedication to repurposing entertaining motifs and characters from the full body of Conan the Barbarian canon is laudable.

Conan the Barbarian #24 delivers a strong conclusion to one of the best storylines in Titan Comics’ two-year run. Newcomers to the title have been given a thorough grounding in Stygia, its snake cult, and power players like Thoth-Amon, meaning a firm foundation has been laid for the upcoming “Scourge of the Serpent” miniseries. While it’s unlikely that readers will be surprised to see Thoth-Amon and Athyr-Bast escape to plot another day, the fates of Livia and Zula are less predictable and should provide some exciting fuel for future stories.

Read Conan the Barbarian #24 by Jim Zub (W) and Fernando Dagnino (A)

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