David Guymer's Blog - Posts Tagged "c-l-werner"
C.L. Werner Appreciation Week
This week, the Black Library website is having a focus on the works of C.L. Werner (http://www.blacklibrary.com/CL-Werner...) and in the spirit of this long overdue recognition of the one true Lord of Decay’s magnificence and glory and fine coat of fur, here in my foetid corner of Skavendom we’re holding our own wildcat “Clint Werner Appreciation Week*”
My first encounter with Clint’s books was with the Witch Hunter books, which I’ll be honest, I ‘borrowed’ from my sister and can’t actually remember all that much about them. I won’t make Clint feel his age by saying how old I was when I read them. But in a way it doesn’t really matter that I can’t remember what happened, because I can remember how they made me feel. They made me feel as if I was in the Old World, which is a rarer experience that that sounds. It was dark, and sinister, and indeed, dark and sinister are what Clint does better that most. It also leads me perfectly onto my own celebration of the Werner variorum with my personal favourite: The Red Duke.
There are more popular books, but here are three reasons why this one is my favourite:
1) Mood. Try watching a horror film without the music, and you’ll soon see how powerful mood is. It’s the same with the written word, albeit by the necessity of the medium more subtle. The words a writer chooses, the length of his sentences, the arrangement of his paragraphs, all contribute to the mood of a story. Red Duke is its perfect example. It is darkest, gloomiest Bretonnia, the moon is full, dead things are abroad, and by the Lady, I feel every second of it. The fact that so much of the story takes place in creepy moonlit locales is obviously part of it, but even when the sun shines and the pennons fly, the horror movie chill never lets up for a moment.
2) Bretonnia. This is the first novel I’d read set there, and the way it was described, the distinction to the more usual, Germanic, Empire and the horrifying juxtaposition to the events unfolding was a joy (in the most horrible, horrible way!) to experience
3) Scary things. Yes, I got a little scared. The Red Duke is fantastic, but its his minions that really put the shivers up me. The scene where skeleton legions march through a moat to lay waste to a town or when we first see the banshee drift through a castle wall and start melting faces was a master class in terror
Read it before you read anything else.
We can’t have a proper acknowledgement of the great work of C.L. Werner however without a mention of the Grey Seer novels. I won’t talk about them all, but I personally owe a tremendous debt to Thanquol's Doom for how it helped give birth to my own novel, Headtaker.
The idea of Queek the maniac, talking to the decapitated heads he carries, wasn’t mine. It was Clint’s. The theme of the novel, the contest between dwarfish conservatism and skaven innovation, wasn’t mine. It was Clint’s. I just flipped it on its head. Clint, being a devil-may-care colonist of the great American frontier had his dwarfs suffering a slow death in the face of the boundless inventiveness of the skaven race whereas I, doughty Brit, naturally imagined that the short-lives and carelessness skaven would allow the always dependable dwarfish way to prevail.
Of course, then the End Times happened and naturally proved Clint right. Never doubt a skaven.
What this special week does reminds, is that I’ve still not finished the Dead Winter: The Black Plague trilogy (great opening book, just got snowed under with other reads) and that Brunner the Bounty Hunter has somehow passed me by all these years.
Looks like we all have some ready to do.
Happy C.L. Werner week
(Can we do this every year?)
*BYO warpstone
My first encounter with Clint’s books was with the Witch Hunter books, which I’ll be honest, I ‘borrowed’ from my sister and can’t actually remember all that much about them. I won’t make Clint feel his age by saying how old I was when I read them. But in a way it doesn’t really matter that I can’t remember what happened, because I can remember how they made me feel. They made me feel as if I was in the Old World, which is a rarer experience that that sounds. It was dark, and sinister, and indeed, dark and sinister are what Clint does better that most. It also leads me perfectly onto my own celebration of the Werner variorum with my personal favourite: The Red Duke.
There are more popular books, but here are three reasons why this one is my favourite:
1) Mood. Try watching a horror film without the music, and you’ll soon see how powerful mood is. It’s the same with the written word, albeit by the necessity of the medium more subtle. The words a writer chooses, the length of his sentences, the arrangement of his paragraphs, all contribute to the mood of a story. Red Duke is its perfect example. It is darkest, gloomiest Bretonnia, the moon is full, dead things are abroad, and by the Lady, I feel every second of it. The fact that so much of the story takes place in creepy moonlit locales is obviously part of it, but even when the sun shines and the pennons fly, the horror movie chill never lets up for a moment.
2) Bretonnia. This is the first novel I’d read set there, and the way it was described, the distinction to the more usual, Germanic, Empire and the horrifying juxtaposition to the events unfolding was a joy (in the most horrible, horrible way!) to experience
3) Scary things. Yes, I got a little scared. The Red Duke is fantastic, but its his minions that really put the shivers up me. The scene where skeleton legions march through a moat to lay waste to a town or when we first see the banshee drift through a castle wall and start melting faces was a master class in terror
Read it before you read anything else.
We can’t have a proper acknowledgement of the great work of C.L. Werner however without a mention of the Grey Seer novels. I won’t talk about them all, but I personally owe a tremendous debt to Thanquol's Doom for how it helped give birth to my own novel, Headtaker.
The idea of Queek the maniac, talking to the decapitated heads he carries, wasn’t mine. It was Clint’s. The theme of the novel, the contest between dwarfish conservatism and skaven innovation, wasn’t mine. It was Clint’s. I just flipped it on its head. Clint, being a devil-may-care colonist of the great American frontier had his dwarfs suffering a slow death in the face of the boundless inventiveness of the skaven race whereas I, doughty Brit, naturally imagined that the short-lives and carelessness skaven would allow the always dependable dwarfish way to prevail.
Of course, then the End Times happened and naturally proved Clint right. Never doubt a skaven.
What this special week does reminds, is that I’ve still not finished the Dead Winter: The Black Plague trilogy (great opening book, just got snowed under with other reads) and that Brunner the Bounty Hunter has somehow passed me by all these years.
Looks like we all have some ready to do.
Happy C.L. Werner week
(Can we do this every year?)
*BYO warpstone
