It’s incredible how some things that you never imagined would sit well together end up being sensational when combined.
This is the case with new book Skane: A Thriller in Verse by bestselling cult author Ben Counter. My first reaction –upon learning this was a gritty contemporary thriller told largely through the medium of poetry – was ‘This will never work’.
How wrong I was.
Perhaps I should have had more faith in the author, who is perhaps best known internationally for his many Warhammer 40,000 novels and novellas, because the premise is epitome of enticement:
In a city controlled by crime, seven kingpins meet to discuss business, unaware a new threat has arrived to shatter their underworld.
Known only as Skane, his origin is a mystery. From the shadows he has been patiently and methodically planning their downfall.
Through arch manipulation, Skane will pit the seven princes against one another in one single night of unrivalled bloodshed.
We never learn anything more about Skane, nor his location for that matter, other than he’s on a mission to wipe out seven despicable villains who, together, have blighted the unnamed city through their plague of crime and exploitation.
It is, though, suggested that he may have been one of many on the receiving side of their atrocities and that it just so happened that he was the one to snap and seek retribution for countless collective wrongdoings.
Everybody called him Skane, a name conveying nil,
Because he was one of millions surviving on their will,
Just a grey and faceless multitude, an echo of mankind,
Only earning their existence as resources to be mined.
Any one of them could fracture from the pressure out and in,
Be a child that plays with matches, a grenade without a pin,
Be a single drop of poison or a timer running out.
As it happened it was Skane that brutal fortune singled out.
That Counter never gives more – no backstory, no concrete location – turns Skane into something superhuman, the personification of avenging justice, and with it, the story becomes a timeless tale of good vs evil.
In many ways, then, he is an archetype in the same, satisfying tradition as The Crow or the Man with No Name, and this narrative simplicity keeps you engaged and rooting for each fresh dispatch.
And there’s no doubting that his targets deserve everything that’s coming to them. From an incel rapist and bent doctor to a cult leader and mob boss, they are irredeemably vile.
They have come together to deal with new measures set to end their reign of terror –Proposal 94 – but before they get a chance to thwart it, Skane brings his own plan into effect, cunningly manipulating them to turn upon each other.
As Counter has described it, the septet of sin fall like a “house of cards” once the first shot has been fired, which in this case comes from a concealed assassin’s rifle and which lands straight between the eyes of the unholy cult leader, Prophet Gideon.
Make no mistake, the story is packed with shocking violence and brutal killings, though there is some (very) dark humour intermixed.
But this comes in stark contrast to the ornate and gilded language, beautifully adorned and delivered in rhyming couplets and redolent of ancient narrative poetry or the work of the Augustan poets of the 18th century,
While Skane’s fusion of gritty thriller and poetic verse might seem as a bold literary departure, it is in fact a return to the very roots of Western storytelling as established thousands of years ago in the Greek epics.
In doing so, it brings an almost transcendent vitality and immediacy to the narrative that will stick in the mind long after the final page.
Elevated into the realm of the epic, every event, every tension, and every twist across its 70 pages is magnified in intensity in a way that could never be achieved through normal prose.
It does takes a moment to get your head round the juxtaposition of poetic form with 18-certificate content, but once you do, it clicks like a detonator, delivering pure entertainment like you’ve never experienced before.
Skane: A Thriller in Verse by Ben Counter (Black Octopus Publishing) is out now on Amazon, priced £5.99 in paperback and £2.99 as an eBook. For more information, visit www.bencounter.co.uk or follow him on Twitter or Instagram.
Celebrated by fans around the world for his vast contributions to the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer universes, as well as his range of scripted sci-fi and horror podcasts, the self-styled “general master nerd” Ben Counter has broken new ground with his latest work, Skane. We caught up with him to find out more.
Q. What inspired you to write a thriller in verse?
A. The plotline was one I had in mind for a long time, without anywhere to put it. The idea was of a group of villains whose relationships were like a house of cards, with only a tiny push needed to turn them against each other and create chaos. It was less a realistic plot and more of a parable or symbol of how evil is destined to destroy itself.
The verse form was based on studying the Greek epics of Homer in university. When translating the Iliad or the Odyssey, which were written in verse, translators had a choice between writing their translation in verse or writing it in prose. To try to maintain a rhyme and rhythm scheme while maintaining an accurate translation was extremely difficult. When I married the idea of that challenge to the house of cards plotline, I created a project which felt ambitious but satisfying.
Q. What books an authors proved the greatest inspiration to Skane?
A. Homer’s epics were the biggest inspiration. I loved reading them, especially the Odyssey, and studying them illuminated how creativity changed across millennia while some essentials remained the same. Some of the writing process took place over lockdown and during this time the musical Hamilton was streamed online. I was fascinated by the combination of intricate rhyming wordplay with a story that would normally be told through much more sober, prosaic means.
The violent urban story took cues from uncompromising thrillers like Goodfellas, in particular the way they expose the myth of organised crime and reveal its bloody, nasty side. The early movies of Quentin Tarantino were coming out during my adolescence and his combination of urban violence and modern mythmaking provided a lot of the DNA to Skane’s narrative.
Q. How do you think the experience of reading a thriller in verse differs from the usual prose form?
A. Verse can be highly compressed, with the maximum meaning expressed in very few words compared to prose. I feel reading Skane would involve more unpacking than prose. Most novels can be skimmed in part, with the reader’s brain filling in the words they gloss over. With verse, every word counts. It feels more like a picture crammed with detail, like a Hieronymus Bosch, than a simpler, bolder image that gets its message across instantly.
Q. How do you hope readers respond to your book?
A. My hope is the combination of thriller and verse form will make for an original experience. I also like the idea of the majority of the story taking place in the reader’s mind. The atmosphere, the details, the greater story that goes untold, are all created by the reader and all have extra impact as a result. The idea of sparking that fire is very attractive to me.
While we are steeped in violence through multiple media, I’m hoping that seeing it depicted in poetry will help it retain its emotional power and help readers see these themes anew. Death and bloodshed become incidental in so much of what we watch, read, and listen to, so perhaps seeing it in poetry, where it’s not supposed to appear, will be a reminder of how awful violence is.
Q. How did you find the writing journey in creating Skane?
A. The process was very personal. Skane was a project purely for me, not least to prove to myself whether I could write a story with such structured and restrictive language. While other paying projects were going on, I would set aside some time each day to write a single verse. It helped keep my brain busy during that very strange summer lockdown, when I would sit by the birdhouse in a mostly empty local park jotting down lines in a notebook.
It was a long process, which was part of its point. Taking on a long-term creative process helped give me a sense of purpose, and completing a verse felt like achieving that quantum of creativity to take satisfaction.
While I had the idea of publishing Skane in the back of my mind, at the time it was less about putting a book out and more about having a long-term creative process that was its own reward.
Q. With Skane now published, where do you go from here with novels in verse?
A. I haven’t made concrete plans for where to go next. If Skane is well-received, I imagine I will return to verse form, but the specifics of it will have to come to me organically and fulfil a similar purpose to the process of writing Skane: a long-term project, a challenge, and a story that’s inside, determined to come out. I’d like to see how the form intersects with the genres I have written in the past, like science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
Q. You have written more than 20 books to date, all in the fantasy and science fiction genres. How did you end up as a full-time author?
A. My way into writing for a living is quite atypical. I started out submitting to a short story magazine Games Workshop was publishing, and which I realise now was a means to find new writers who could work on the novel lines they were planning. It took a while to get a story accepted but once I had got past that stage, after a few stories I asked the editors if they wanted to see a novel proposal and one of the ideas I submitted eventually became Soul Drinker, my first book.
Writing for Games Workshop was more similar to working on the old pulp novels than modern publishing. It was only after writing for a while that I learned it is considered quite fast to write a book in a year. I was used to having a three-month deadline for 90,000 words. I believe the experience put me in good stead for writing at a good pace and to brief, which I was able to use working in other media like podcasts and video game writing, which need a high degree of flexibility and reliability.
Q. Take us through your approach to the creative process.
A. So much ink has been spilled on the creative process it’s hard to keep an answer simple. I have found that having a starting point, like a theme, a particular purpose, or even a specific licence, makes it a lot easier to start coming up with ideas. It’s a cliché to say that restrictions breed creativity, but it’s true, especially at the very beginning. Most of my writing has been to a brief, such as a particular story the publisher wants told or a plotline that facilitates the action of a video game, and I am very used to working within that framework.
That said, sometimes there is no substitute to having a blank page or screen and throwing a lot of ideas at it. I will sometimes find a snag in a plotline or character motivation, and I will write it down as a question along with several possible solutions, then choose the one that works the best. At other times it’s more a case of iterating the same idea several times according to feedback, which can be bruising to the ego but has to be done.
Q. What is the most important lesson any creative needs to learn?
A. I can only give examples from my own experience. Everyone creates differently, which is why there’s isn’t much of a playbook on how to do it correctly.
Something I have learned particularly keenly is the need to prepare. I haven’t had writer’s block, but I have got stuck because I didn’t know what to write next. I plan out everything before I write it, so I’m not going to end up writing myself into a corner or having to make things up as I go along. It’s rather uninspiring advice, perhaps, but in my experience it’s the truest.
Q. You have worked on a wide variety of creative projects, not only novels but podcasts as well. What can you tell us about your latest podcast project, and how does the creative process differ from writing a book?
A. The latest podcast is Dead Space: Deep Cover, based on the video game series. It’s an audio drama mixing science fiction with horror, which is very much my wheelhouse. Experience writing for licensed properties was extremely useful in getting at the core of what Dead Space is: it’s gruesome, a bit trippy, and bad things happen to just about everyone.
I’ve found the process is more similar than different. The biggest change is that other people will be doing so much of the finished story. Editors, actors, sound people, composers all have a say in how the final podcast sounds. They’re better at their part of the process than I would be, so when I write an audio script I leave a lot of the details to them. I don’t worry too much about the details of sound effects or music, for example. I’ll find myself writing something like ‘gross noises as a monster rips him apart’, knowing it’ll give the person in charge of the sound effects room to go to town. I try to imagine what will give the actors and other creatives what they need to get their own process started, and no more.
