Hello and welcome to the Nauticast podcast, the podcast that usually goes through a song of ice and fire one chapter a week, but not here.

I'm one of your hosts, Emmett, better known as Poor Quentin.

My other host, Jeff, better known as Brendan B-fish, is away from the podcast for a couple months due to work.

So while he's gone,

I'm doing a series of episodes with guest hosts, as well as doing some audio and text posts of my

own. And I'm very happy to welcome on my guest host for this week. Welcome to the Natickast,

Gretchen Felker-Martin. Thanks so much for coming on. I was really looking forward to having you

with us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

So I remember first reading your stuff during season eight of Game of Thrones,

you know, the elder days, as it kind of feels now back when Game of Thrones was still on the

air. And I remember just really enjoying your writing about it,

enjoying the taste you were bringing to it because you were writing about it from a horror

perspective, especially regarding the long night episode.

I remember really liking your piece on that.

And I thought that was great because that was kind of an underappreciated filter on the show

a lot of the times, and I think on the show a lot of the times and I think on the books too

is I mean I think what people really love about that book series in the show was the immediacy and

the the memorable sudden vivid changes in tone and pace in a way that was really reminiscent of

horror as much as if not more than high fantasy and I remember really loving your your pieces on season eight in that regard. I'm sure a lot of people know

George Martin started as pulp sci-fi and horror writer. And I think that's extremely evident

in a Song of Ice and Fire, especially. It's a little less so in the show just because so much of that stuff is sort of out in the weeds in the books and naturally gets cut.

Things like The Story of the Rat Cook, which is just this awful little parable about cannibalism and body horror or the pseudo myth of the Lord Commander of the

...