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Zero-G: Green Space

William Shatner and Jeff Rovin

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In the second installment of William Shatner's Zero-G series, Director Samuel Lord must identify a...

Golden Parasol: A Daughter's Memoir of Burma

Wendy Law-Yone

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At the time of Burma's military coup in 1962, Wendy Law-Yone was fifteen. A year later, her father...

The Divine Name: Invoke the Sacred Sound That Can Heal and Transform

Jonathan Goldman

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What if there was a technique for sounding the personal name of God that could change the world?...

The Four Tendencies: The Surprising Truth About the Hidden Personality Types That Drive Everything We Do

Gretchen Rubin

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'A LOT OF US WOULD LIKE A RUBIN IN OUR LIVES' The TimesIn Gretchen Rubin's practical and...

Archaeology, Geo-Science, and the Holocaust: Finding Rhodes and Vilna

Richard A. Freund

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In summer 2016 acclaimed archaeologist Richard Freund and his team made news worldwide when they...

David McK (3695 KP) rated Knights of Dark Renown in Books

Aug 8, 2021

Knights of Dark Renown

David Gemmell | 1989 | Fiction & Poetry

7.0

(2 Ratings)

Book Rating

One of the rare(ish) David Gemmell stand-alone novels; [u]not[/u] part of any series such as the Stones of Power/Sipstrassi sereis, or even of the Drenai.

Indeed, there's only a single other reference made to the events of this in any of his other works: a throw-away line, briefly, during Morningstar.

The central character of this is Manannan, the Coward-Knight who once abandoned his other eight companions (the legendary 'Knights of the Gabala') to ride alone through a mysterious portal to another realm, and who is now (as the novel starts) trapped within his own armour and slowly being strangled to death by his own beard, as the armour was fashioned so that it could only be opened by passing through the portal.

As the land seems to be falling further and further into chaos, the rest of the novel deals with a terrible discovery made by Mannanan, and with the creation of a new Knights of the Gabala (the 'Knights of Dark Renown' of the title), most of whom - in true inimitable Gemmell style - start out as far from the ideal as it is possible to be!

I have to say, though, that I've always felt the ending of this story to be a little bit rushed: lots of work laying the groundwork; lots of 'meat' in the body and then it just seemingly ... ends. Almost as if Gemmell had gotten tired of the story!