Wolf in Shadow

I will put my cards on the table at once: Wolf in Shadow is one of the finest novels I have had the pleasure of reading, and I would argue it contains some of David Gemmell's very best writing. Gemmell is rightly celebrated as a master of heroic fantasy, but here, in the first full Jon Shannow novel, he reaches for something deeper and more thoughtful than the genre usually allows, and the result is a book that has, to my mind, never been given the credit it deserves.

The setting is the thing that grabs you first. Three hundred years after Armageddon, after a cataclysm that toppled the earth on its axis and drowned most of the world beneath floods, civilisation survives only in scattered, fragile pockets. Across these blasted lands wanders Jon Shannow, the Jerusalem Man, a brigand-killer and a man of the Bible, searching for the fabled lost city of Jerusalem, which scripture has promised will be reborn. He is not wandering aimlessly; he is a man on a quest, equal parts gunfighter and pilgrim. Ranged against him is Abaddon, the Lord of the Pit, an effectively immortal figure born before the sundering of the world, who commands a hell-born army and dreams of dragging this shattered earth into a new satanic age. Abaddon draws his power and his unnatural long life from the Sipstrassi, the mysterious stones of power, fuelled in his case by human sacrifice and bloodletting. And the Hellborn have made one fatal error: they have taken Shannow's wife for the altar, and so they have brought down upon themselves the deadliest warrior of the new age.

What makes the book extraordinary is the way Gemmell handles all of this. The post-apocalyptic western is hardly a new idea, and other fine writers have worked the territory, most notably Stephen King in his Dark Tower books. But in my opinion none of them matches the Jon Shannow novels. Gemmell takes the familiar furniture, the lone gunman, the lawless frontier, the corrupt powers, and infuses it with a genuine moral and spiritual weight. Shannow is a fascinating creation, a man of deep and sincere faith who is also capable of terrible violence, forever wrestling with the question of whether a righteous man can do the things he does and remain righteous. He is haunted, driven, and utterly convincing.

Crucially, this is Gemmell in a more restrained and intelligent register than usual. The bloodletting that marks some of his work is toned down here, and far more time is given to character, to backstory, and to the slow unfolding of the plot. Gemmell's great gifts have always been characterisation and action, and both are present in abundance, but here they are joined by a thoughtfulness, a moral seriousness, that lifts the whole enterprise. The supporting cast is richly drawn, the world feels lived-in and real, and the action, when it comes, lands all the harder for the care taken to make us care first.

A note for the completist: Wolf in Shadow is both the first volume of the Jon Shannow series and the third book in Gemmell's wider Stones of Power sequence, following on from Ghost King and Last Sword of Power, which deal with the Sipstrassi stones in an earlier age. You do not need to have read those to follow this; it stands entirely on its own, and Shannow's story begins cleanly here. First published in December 1987, it remains, for me, an astounding work of fiction and among the finest things Gemmell ever wrote. I cannot recommend it highly enough.