You hardly need the horror element that is soon introduced into the mix. In some ways, the tension actually dissipates with the advent of a monstrous bear-cum-angered-Inuit-spirit. Once the creature starts tearing exploratory parties to pieces, there is focus and legitimacy to the fears of the trapped men. But it is surely the sprawling and deepening nature of these fears that provides the true horror for us all. Or maybe that’s just 2021 speaking. Maybe vicious giant bears roaming the icy wastelands were more frightening, and will be again one happy day. The second half is the Q&A session, which he sets up hilariously as an interview with himself, though he reluctantly realises the limitations of that format and opens it up to hoi polloi in the audience. Yeah, westerns are just read in some video game horror criticism. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you have any final thoughts to leave our listeners with?

Must Read Horror Articles 23 October 2023 Welcome to Must Read Horror, where we search the internet… I think so too. So you know, we've both gotten on record. So if one of us gets cancelled, we're going down together, so Exactly. Good. Brilliant. Yeah. We'll take the rest. Right. But I mean, I didn't ask in fact, what was the inspiration for reprising the Garth Marenghi character?One of the broader trends here is to strip out sources of rerolls wherever they were found and replace them with new effects or simply rewrite the scroll entirely. Despite having a whopping 16 leaders out of 27, many of these leaders have been tweaked and written to have a specific niche, resulting in a selection where you can make an argument to include almost everything here. Leaders Faction rules completely redesign the way the army is played, rewriting Nighthaunt into an incredibly mobile scalpel of an army.

Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome (Exclusive Signed Hardcover) by Garth Marenghi published by Coronet @ ForbiddenPlanet.com - UK and Worldwide Cult Entertainment Megastore Spiteful Spirit lets you roll a number of dice equal to your general’s Wounds characteristic on any turn they’re injured, inflicting a mortal wound on each enemy unit within 6” on a 4+. Most Nighthaunt generals that see combat aren’t going to be alive there very long, and while it might be cute as a little bomb it still doesn’t meet the mark for us. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's it was good fun recording it as well. So yeah, it's very stupid. Yeah, it's nice to do. You know, some other some of the silly voices.

Yeah, writing your answer in terms of wherever they would be another dark place on the screen is the best possible answer someone could hope for, you know, it's like only if all the right conditions of the air only if you don't compromise any your artistic integrity in terms of doing it, you need that creative you put in on that accent reminds me of possibly the worst attempt at a remake ever, which is the American attempt at a peep show remake? I think they'd have you seen it? I think they did. Like I think it's only one pilot episode and it took everything that was good about peep show and Well, it's an interesting one, because I've got it was slightly frustration, I think that things just weren't moving. And the trouble with sort of specialising in film and TV is that most of the time your projects are spent in development. And, you know, I did pass them. And I immediately wrote another script, which I was very pleased with, but it then goes through the development process, and it can take forever. And, you know, it's still in development, as are so many other things that I've written. And I think it was real frustration that, that, you know, aside from short stories, which gave me immense pleasure, because, you know, there's your work, it's there, and someone can read it. There was no way of doing that with the films, because it's entirely out your hands, it's in someone else's control, really. So I think, my I think I decided that I just wanted to get on and write something and have a bit of control over it. And, you know, sort of get away from from the interminable process of development, which is incredibly soul destroying, and I think most writers would, would agree with me, that it's lovely to have something in development, but it's appalling until you can get it out of development and into production. So it's, it's a very dis, it can be a very disheartening process, particularly when you've put so much of effort and and your much of your soul into your piece of writing. for it not to even find an audience, I think, you end up thinking, what's the point? So yeah, that was that was really, I think, probably the main thing, just wanting to get on, and I knew that prose was about the only place left that you can properly kind of be in charge of it and and get it done. So I just decided to sort of pitch that. Terrifying Entity is the one we’re going to be testing first – with the number of interactions based around terrified , having your general project a 6” Aura of Dread rather than 3” could be quite nasty. It doesn’t give your general any personal bonuses, but Nighthaunt heroes have always been more about buffing their army rather than being blenders themselves.

Huge glow up – Probably more than any other army in the game, Nighthaunt really needed an upgrade, with an old book containing old units and army-wide rules that seemed outdated just as the book was launched. The units are now generally much improved but the battle traits in particular are a lot better. Chainghasts are pretty much as we saw them in Arena of Shades, functioning largely as a +1 to hit aura to Nighthaunt units while a Spirit Torment is on the battlefield. This is… nice, but because it’s dependent on a Spirit Torment floating around, killing that off means the Chainghasts are almost useless. At least you get them for free in the box with your Spirit Torment? Glaivewraith StalkersAnd there's something so exciting about doing that, I think and finding, finding stuff and finding, for example, a writer that just really speaks to you, that you haven't been, you know, it's because of your efforts that you've, you've kind of and you know, that sort of search for it. And that, that kind of stumbling upon someone who's got a similar outlook to you. I mean, it's a really precious part of that reading experience, I think, and, you know, obviously, things changed. But that was, that was something that I really miss from just browsing books, in shops, you know, secondhand books, you know, can't really do that anymore. And it's so depressing that even in charity shops, now you just know what books are going to be on the shelf, and they're going to be everything that was fairly cheap in the first place from the supermarket aisle. Well farmed and just shoved on the shelf and it's, it's yes, dreary. You're just trying to find interesting stuff, and no one seems to you know, provide it anymore. It's all it's all what we're told we should be buying. Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about this. And it makes me think that, yeah, we could see things really branching off. So you've got people creating creative art, and then you've got people creating independent art, because if you think of all the great filmmakers, I mean, they didn't get there from following a formula. They had their own vision, their own way of doing things, their own uniqueness. And I mean, if these kinds of artistic restrictions are happening, particularly with television, then we're probably going to see more and more of the great, you know, filmmakers, and artists and writers just gravitate towards film rather than TV. Yeah, Yes. And I think I think there was one story in particular, where I used my teacher, I think, an alien ship comes down. And, and I think they, they, they they took her hair so that she was bald, and I think she was absolutely furious about that. And I think that was the final straw. The first edition Nighthaunt book introduced the fascinating idea of Nagash as a god of justice, with cruel and evil deeds in life rewarded (?) by unending servitude and punishment by Nagash in death. Kurdoss Valentian was punished for his ruthless desire to rule and murder of his own brothers with a curse of being fated to never rule and never kill again, a bitter jest of Nagash. Dreadscythe Harridans were once healers and nurturers that denied souls to Nagash through extending their life now cursed with rage against those self-same healers, and Chainrasp Hordes were vicious and irredeemable criminals, how fated to be tortured and imprisoned forever. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, given the growing gap, you were clearly immersed in horror and in stories. Did you know then from an early age that you wanted to be a horror writer? Was that always the dream? Or was the aspiration?

I was actually reading mostly Fighting Fantasy gamebooks the subjects in Livingston books and those those Really my entry into book reading, I absolutely adored them and collected them right up until I think number 50. And then I realized I had to sort of stop. But I wish I hadn't. Now I'm collecting them again, I wish I wish I'd carried on. But, but yeah, those were those were mainly the books. I mean, I also had, I had a lot of annuals, and I had the Dracula spine chiller annual, which had the really good house of hammer magazine, graphic novel adaptation of the horror of Dracula. And also, I think twins of evil was another one that's in that particular annual. So I was I was reading a lot of that stuff. But there was definitely, you know, I don't think I was on to horror novels at that point. But I was definitely absorbing as much horror content as I could. Beginning with an introduction by Marenghi himself, the book sets out its stall straight away. Those familiar with Darkplace will recognise the voice immediately. It’s irreverent, egotistic, and condescending. It’s also incredibly funny. It both captures the spirit of Darkplace and sets up the conceit of the three novellas, in a kind of meta way (more of that anon). Then we’re straight into the first story. that's wrong. Although, although I have to say that, you know, we did make our fair share of mistakes, it being the first TV show, we did. So I'm sure that some of our mistakes we probably didn't let on about and just oh, you know, those were intentional. But what we did do was ask all the department heads, you know, how would you do? How would you do your job badly? You know, what, what are the ways you could really, you know, screw up your job here. And so we got a lot of info on on what would be the worst way to do certain things from them. And when we would just pop them in and if, you know, if they suddenly came on to take something off the thing or arrange, you know, sort out the continuity, we say, What's this for? And they said, Well, he was hand was there on the last cut, and then we would basically go no, no, okay, forget that, then we'll just keep the bad continuity in. So a lot of those were sort of real mistakes that were happening, but we just put the brakes on correcting them.

Show notes

Well, it's an odd one because that is a good question, because the way we've always done gas pros when we wrote it for the show, and when we did it for the live shows was prose was just very immediately bad. So there would be terrible sentences, terrible choice of words. And the problem that I faced was if you do that, for something that's novel length, the joke very rapidly wears thin. And I realized that you needed to have some form of prose style for Garth that was at least competent enough to maintain interest and not let the reader get bored. And sort of, you know, otherwise, it's just very one note, and you just can't read deliberately bad prose for longer than I think a few paragraphs before. You know, your eyes sort of glaze over and you go gray. So I had to kind of strike a happy medium between a competent piece of writing, but one that still had terrible sentences, terrible ideas every so often, but yeah, so it's less, it's less immediately appalling prose wise than say, you know, other other gaff material, but hopefully means that, you know, people will enjoy it for the stories, and perhaps, you know, feeling that, you know, at some level, maybe Garth does have an idea about how to get, you know, from A to B, without going via, you know, every other letter of the alphabet.