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Wolf in Shadow

1994David Gemmell

3.9/5

Hmmm.First off I should declare myself as a card carrying long term fan of David Gemmell's work. I've read a dozen or so of his books and variously loved or very much liked them. Technically I like all the components of this book. It's post apocalyptic, its gunslinger-y. I'm not sure why the book didn't really work for me. Possibly it's having read Blood Song, Fool's Assassin, and The Name of the Wind back to back, setting me up for a book-hangover of epic proportions.Many of my Goodreads friends have read Wolf in Shadow and they give it a remarkably high 4.41 average!And yet...The book reminded me of The Gunslinger by Stephen King to some degree and came out only a few years after that work (which I loved). For some reason though I kept getting a Michael Moorcock vibe off this story - the writing and the density of new ideas seemed Moorcockian to me. I like Moorcock - though perhaps less than I did 30 years ago when I really loved his work.So, I'm still saying it was like these things I like but...OK a list:i) It's a short book with a hell of a lot going on. Strange new encounters rush at you. A lot of it felt quite brief without enough flesh on the bones to be real.ii) Lots of the communication between the major characters is by magic and that makes the world feel small to me and the distances arbitrary. The big bad and the big good basically teleport/hologram in for a chat whenever they feel like it and ... I don't like it. It feels random and removes tension.iii) I don't like the magic. The Sipstrassi stones ... I just don't buy into it, the ESPers (hate that name)Gah. I don't know. It just didn't gel for me.There were some things I did like - Gemmell's too good a writer for it all to be miss. So 3* is how I feel about it. Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizes....

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