Author George RR Martin visited Conan O’Brien last night and was treated to a montage of fan reactions to the momentous events of this week’s episode of Game of Thrones. Check out the video here!

Conan O’Brien welcomed George RR Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, to Conan last night. During their chat, Conan treated the best-selling author a montage of fan reactions to Sunday night’s traumatic episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones, “The Rains of Castamere.” Check out Martin’s response right here:

Martin seemed amused by the compilation, and was especially pleased by a man who declared that the brutal ending scene was reason why “This is the best [expletive] show of all time.” Martin was also tickled by the fact that the reactions were captured by fans wise to the events of the books, who set up cameras to catch their friends and family experiencing the same emotions which readers had felt for years.

In another clip from the interview, Martin spoke about his propensity to murder popular characters, and the guilt that came from speaking to the actors portraying the doomed men and women.

O’Brien expressed his own shock at the recent events of the TV show, enthusing “You get us to really care about characters, love them… And then you kill them! You sick bastard!”

“I do do that, yes, it’s true,” Martin almost giggled in response.

Martin did clarify his reasoning for killing off so many characters, however. “As a reader, I always like unexpected things,” he said. “I always like the suspense to be real.” The authorial logic took a darker turn as he continued, “I want my readers… to be afraid when my characters are in danger. I want them to be afraid to turn the next page because the next character may not survive it.”

“You’ve achieved that,” O’Brien assured him, speaking for legions of fans with tear-stained copies of the series hidden beneath their beds.

In the rest of the interview, Martin touched on his difficulty with detail, the banality of growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey – and the “fifteen-hundred page monster” of the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire, The Winds of Winter. “I’m writing very fast,” he admitted. “[Game of Thrones] is moving like a freight train.”