The Hall Monitor is published every other week, the same day as the latest installment of the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame drops on Tabletop Battles (here’s today’s). A cross between a director’s cut and a backstage pass, it’s a look behind the scenes at the Hall of Fame project.
Every word you’re reading now… every article you’ve read or seen on the Warhammer Wordforge… every piece or review I’ve written for Tabletop Battles (formerly Goonhammer)… it all springs from one single font of inspiration.
It might surprise you to learn that it’s not Warhammer. It’s cancer.
Strap in for a personal one today, folks. If getting hit with an involuntary trauma-dump right off the bat isn’t what you' signed up for, that’s okay, I get it. Skip down to The Vox Populi Top Twenties below- I’ve made a really cool change this week to the format of the Top Twenties (note the plural!) that you won’t want to miss.
My Warhammer discovery story came about fifteen years ago, back when I was playing Aussie Rules football. One of my teammates, upon learning I was a sci-fi and fantasy buff, was eager to share the gospel of the grim and the dark. He let me borrow three of his omnibus books, and so I became acquainted with Eisenhorn, Gaunt’s Ghosts, and Commissar Ciaphas Cain.
I remember reading them, and I certainly remember enjoying them. I especially remember sitting on the front stoop of the family cottage in Cape Cod, on vacation with my girlfriend devouring Eisenhorn greedily in the fading light of the evening as she read beside me.
All that reading put Warhammer firmly on the map for me, and I’d go on to read plenty more. The books occupied a small corner of my personal library, with me adding a new one every great now and again when the mood stuck. I wasn’t so much a fan as I was an enjoyer, and I enjoyed a great many different books and genres.
As for the girlfriend, well, Jimi was a keeper. A couple years later, in an event we’d both anticipated from the first day we met, we made it official. Sometimes you just know.
A lot of this followed. In addition to the wonderful two she brought with her from her first marriage, we continued to be blessed with children. First Liam in 2010, then the twins Declan and Lorcan, followed by Ruari and finally Moira.
I’d scarcely had time to pick up a book, and when I did- sitting out on the back porch listening to the tree frogs and crickets wake up at the end of a long day, it was usually a history. Fiction was a rare treat, so my Warhammer books sat in good company on the shelf with all the other ones I seldom touched.
In 2013 we became FLGS owners, buying our town’s comic and game store from its previous owner. No Warhammer, I’m afraid. Games Workshop required a minimum buy-in of $2000 of stock, and situated between two larger markets (Louisville and Lexington) there just wasn’t enough local demand to justify it (though we’d stock the tabletop games and RPG’s from Fantasy Flight, who held the license back then).
Between my day-job career and the shop I was putting in 80-hour weeks. When we learned we were once again expecting (this time our daughter, Ruari), I realized I had to pick two: my career in health insurance, a game store owner, or a father to my kids. A bittersweet decision but not a difficult one, we sold the game store.
Life continued as it does. She got prettier, I got older.
In 2023, we got our big break. She’d landed her dream job, a doula at a Louisville hospital helping bring babies into the world. She’d been freelancing for years, but this was like getting called up to the majors. The following year, we moved to Louisville, and in one of those happy little accidents life can bring, we found ourselves just up the road from the Warhammer store.
It was full steam ahead, things were looking up for the Kirkmans…
…until they weren’t.
A saying that’s kept us going these last couple years is, God gives you what you need, not what you want. We certainly didn’t want Jimi’s job to go away at the hospital, but when a few months later she found a lump on her breast we were grateful she’d had time to grieve the loss of it and ready herself for the battle ahead. The battle of her lifetime.
Jimi’s energy is infectious. She walks into a room full of strangers and leaves a room full of friends. Me, I find a reason not to go in at all, happier to read and write in quiet and relative solitude1. She is vibrant, gregarious, disarming, alive. Not one to ever do anything in her life by halves, she wouldn’t be content with just garden-variety, run-of-the-mill cancer. No, that wouldn’t do at all. Instead, she picked the rare and aggressive triple-negative inflammatory breast cancer.
Great choice, babe.
Those early days are very much a blur. The shock of it all, slowly giving way to dread, punctuated with bouts of sorrow- but gradually becoming replaced by resolve. It was unimaginable that something with such long odds could be happening to us, but then it has to happen to someone, right?
It was in those early days, her first round of chemotherapy in Autumn of 2024, that I’d picked up a bit of light reading at the Warhammer store. Something to take my mind off things, some book called the Night Lords Omnibus by some guy named Aaron Dembski-Bowden, whoever that was. Very casually invested in Warhammer, all I knew about the Night Lords were that they were the edgelord legion, the one preferred by nine out of ten Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails fans2. All the same, the book came highly recommended by the store manager and the sheer length of it meant I’d have something to keep my mind occupied for awhile.
And so I’d sit next to my wife, with an IV full of chemicals in her arm as she drifted in and out of sleep, and read about Talos Valcoran, Septimus and Octavia, and the rest of First Claw. Page after page, IV bag after IV bag.
Week after week. Story after story.
When I talk about the three great books I’ve read in my life, it’s never just because they’re terrific reads. It’s because they meant something profound to me in that time that I read them. Frank Herbert’s Dune showed me what depths science-fiction could explore. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, prompted a change in the way my inner self thought and acted, giving me the focus and awareness to tame the terrible rages of my adolescence. And about R. A. Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, well, perhaps the less said the betterfnord.
The Night Lords Omnibus takes a comfortable place amongst them now, opening up as it did a place of refuge for me at a time I needed it the most. I went from being an occasional reader back to being the voraciously daily one of my youth and young adulthood, always having an answer for ‘what are you reading right now?’
Night Lords then opened the way to reading Krieg, to reading Bloodlines, to reading every other Warhammer book I’ve read since then. Opened the way to delighting in building miniatures after a lifetime of disinterest. Opened the way to writing about my hobbies for the first time in a decade3, to then getting paid to write about them again… and to once more founding a site of my own.
Is this at least in part a trauma-induced escapist hyperfixation? Of course it is. My wife wasn’t given cancer just so that I’d rediscover my love of books and stories, writing and publishing. I’d give all of it up if it took her sickness away without a moment’s hesitation, but that’s not how it ever works.
But gratitude is how you keep it together when life throws its worst at you, because screaming at it sure doesn’t do a damned thing.
Just last month I lost my job, my career of twenty years. It came out of nowhere, but it came at a time when my wife needed me more than ever. The cancer hasn’t been idle, you see, and despite the best efforts of the physicians and the pharmacology industry… its grown. And spread. Now Stage IV, she’s been accepted into a clinical trial at MD Anderson, which means trips to Houston, 800 miles away. Lots of trips. I’ve been able to focus on her and our family, and for that I am grateful.
She can’t drive anymore. Some days, she can barely walk. But she remains that beautiful, amazing soul I fell in love with two decades ago, and I am grateful for that, too. She’s a fighter, and if anyone can prevail through this it’s her. It would be easy to look at all the misfortunes that have befallen us these past two years, an annus horribilis that’s well overstayed its welcome, and lose sight of all the blessings we’ve been given over the years.
But that’s how you lose.
“I lived a life of repetition,” noted Septimus to Octavia in Soul Hunter, “another tiny cog in a vast, dull existence. But this? This is different. Every week will bring something new, something incredible, something that takes my breath away.”
“Rarely in a good way, I confess.”
So why did I choose to share all this today? I had occasion to reflect on my own Warhammer origin story this week as Soul Hunter entered the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame with the Class of 2010, an induction that surprised me with just how personal it somehow felt. It’s a book that has given me so much.
Life throws a lot of shit at us, it’s true… but it’s the other stuff that gets us through.
Thanks for reading. Now, let’s get to the fun stuff!
The Vox Populi Top Twenties
In one of those ‘so obvious, why didn’t I think of it sooner” moments, I realized that Fantasy was at risk of disappearing into oblivion entirely as more and more 30K/40K books came in with dominating board positions. Why not just… break them out seperately?
So going forward, we’ll have two different Top Twenties, one for each side of the Black Library.
30K/40K
Aaron Dembski-Bowden came storming onto the table this week, with a remarkably tight grouping. Soul Hunter, Helsreach, and The First Heretic all enter the table with an approval rating in the mid-80’s, while Dan Abnett’s Horus Heresy story Prospero Burns squeaks in at the bottom.
Of course, that means we must bid farewell to those books who have departed. With the above four coming in, we say goodbye to Traitor General and Legion by Dan Abnett, as well as Graham McNeill’s Fulgrim.
Wait, you might say, how did four come in and only three go out? That’s because we’ve also removed the two Fantasy books that were previously on the combined table. They get their own now, and here’s how it looks.
Fantasy
It’s amazing to consider that the entirety of Fantasy’s top twenty belongs to only six different authors: Dan Abnett, William King, Mike Lee, Nathan Long, Kim Newman (writing as Jack Yeovil), and C. L. Werner. Of these, only Long has yet to be inducted into the Hall, but it represents quite the body of work- particularly around the characters Gotrek and Felix, and Malus Darkblade.
The divide in popularity between the two halves is also evident in the approval ratings. To crack into the Fantasy Top Twenty you can sneak in with less than half, but you need to be in the top three-quarters for 30K/40K.
Hall Winners Leaderboard
Finally, with the bounty of new inductees this time around there’s been some movement on the Leaderboard:
Extra special congratulations to Steve Lyons, who made his Readers Hall of Fame debut!
Thanks for reading as always, for I am grateful too for all your support! And if you haven’t already, please don’t forget to vote for your choices in the Class of 2011!
I say ‘relative,’ because solitude doesn’t exist in a house with five children.
Dating myself here. If these don’t work, feel free to substitute in equivalent contemporary cultural references here.
I wrote about seven book’s worth of content about Magic: the Gathering, mainly for my site ErtaisLament.com reviewing preconstructed decks, but that also led to paying gigs at Quiet Speculation and Gathering Magic (now CoolStuffInc.).