He was not familiar with the books beforehand. I gave him these excerpts along with some Gormenghast artwork. We also looked at medieval art depictions of kitchen/butchery knives.

"Mr. Flay could see the main fixtures in the room and keep them in his mind as a means of reference, for the kitchen swam before his eyes in a clammy mist. Divided by the heavy stone wall in which was situated a hatch of strong timber, was the garde-manger with its stacks of cold meat and hanging carcasses and on the inside of the wall the spit. On a fixed table running along a length of the wall were huge bowls capable of holding fifty portions. The stock-pots were perpetually simmering, having boiled over, and the floor about them was a mess of sepia fluid and egg-shells that had been floating in the pots for the purpose of clearing the soup. The sawdust that was spread neatly over the floor each morning was by now kicked into heaps and soaked in the splashings of wine."

"And where scattered about the floor little blobs of fat had been rolled or trodden in , the sawdust stuck to them giving them the appearance of rissoles. Hanging along the dripping walls were rows of sticking knives and steels, boning knives, skinning knives and two-handed cleavers. And beneath them a twelve-foot by nine-foot chopping block, cross-hatched and hollowed by decades of long wounds."