Skavenslayer

Skavenslayer by William King, published in 1999, is the second volume of the Gotrek & Felix saga and arguably the book that defined the skaven for a generation of readers. Trading the wandering structure of Trollslayer for a single setting, it strands the Slayer and his reluctant biographer in Nuln, the Empire's great city of industry and gunpowder, working menial jobs, including a memorable stint in the sewer watch, while beneath the streets the ratmen of the Under-Empire prepare to bring the city down from within.

The novel unfolds as a series of linked episodes, each one a skaven scheme that Gotrek and Felix stumble into and demolish: plagues brewed by Clan Pestilens, monstrosities of Clan Moulder, assassins of Clan Eshin, warpstone-fuelled weaponry, and above it all the machinations of Grey Seer Thanquol, the horned sorcerer-prophet whose genius exists mostly in his own internal monologue. Thanquol is the book's masterstroke. By giving the villain his own point-of-view chapters (a swirl of paranoia, cowardice, self-congratulation and blame-shifting) King turned the skaven from faceless vermin into the Old World's blackest running joke, and began a feud with Gotrek and Felix that would echo through the rest of the series.

Skavenslayer matters because it perfected the saga's rhythm and gave Warhammer one of its great recurring antagonists. The skittering, treacherous, endlessly quotable skaven voice that fans know, every 'yes-yes' and 'man-thing', was codified here, and the book's blend of street-level adventure, urban conspiracy and escalating catastrophe became a model for Old World fiction. For readers following the series in order it deepens everything Trollslayer established; for skaven fans, it is simply scripture.