Ghost King

By: David Gemmell

Narrated by: Christian Rodska

Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

Beyond Wolf in Shadow to an earlier layer in David Gemmell's fantasy of the Sipstrassi Stones: rebellion and invasion plunge Britannia into the Dark Ages.

Chaos and terror stalk the land, the King slain by traitors, the great Sword of Power vanished beyond the Circle of Mist. Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Brigante tribesman mass together to destroy the realm, aided by the powers of the Witch Queen and the Lord of the Undead.

Against them stand a weakling boy and an old mountain warrior. But the boy has the blood of kings, and the warrior is Culain, the legendary Lord of the Lance. And he alone knows the dread secret of the Witch Queen.

©1988 David Gemmell (P)2017 Little Brown Book Group

Even Better After All These Years

It’s not that often that something you remember fondly from 25 years ago is even better the second time around. I read "Ghost King" back in the early 90s, and I remember enjoying it, but I didn’t remember much of the plot except that it was a unique riff on the characters of Camelot and also involved the Lost Legio IX of the Roman Imperial Army.

Many years and many Gemmell books later, this now strikes me as one of my all-time favorite author’s best books. The first of an epic-fantasy duology that melds vaguely Arthurian characters with the Gemmell-conceived Sipstrassi Stones of Power, it is full of page-turning adventure peppered with surprises. Gemmell’s quirk of giving the same character multiple identities in ways that make the plot twist in interesting and well-conceived ways is brilliantly used here.

In looking at reviews of "Ghost King" on Goodreads and Amazon, I noticed several people felt it was "rushed" and didn’t fully flesh out the characters. One reader noted that the leading character’s transition from frail, scholarly wimp to heroic swordsman happened unbelievably fast. (In fact, there is a throwaway line spoken by Maedlyn the Enchanter -- guess who that is in standard mythology -- that at least partly justifies the transformation.) I don’t agree with either assessment, perhaps because I read Gemmell’s epic fantasy novels long before experiencing the multi-volumes and millipages of the Martin/Sanderson era epics (and I like both those authors, especially Sanderson).

In the days before computers made word processing a relative snap, authors wrote less prolifically and often (IMHO) more carefully. If you are too young to have experienced the joy of retyping your handwritten draft of a 20-page history paper, you may not be able to fully appreciate this. Gemmell, who started as a newspaper journalist (me too) and bar bouncer (me never), undoubtedly typed his first manuscripts himself, and probably on a manual typewriter. The result in this case is a tight, well plotted novel told with maximum characterization and action, minimum embellishment, and maximum impact.

"Ghost King" stands alone, but the epilog (epilogs are another Gemmell trademark) sets up the sequel, "Last Sword of Power." Indeed, the ringing last sentence of the book pretty much leads right into the next one (but without cliff hangers). The Sipstrassi Stories continue after "Last Sword," but they jump a couple of millennia forward to the postapocolyptic world of Jon Shannow, the Jerusalem Man ("Wolf in Shadow" et al.). I was a little surprised to learn that "Wolf," which I reviewed on Audible recently, was actually written before "Ghost King." I guess Gemmell decided the Sipstrassi needed a backstory.

Christian Rodska narrates the Sipstrassi series, and does so brilliantly.