Dark Moon

This is a Gemmell novel all the way through. You have your greater than life heroes, the horde of baddies ready to destroy everything and a touch of magic thrown in. After the Daroth destroy the ancient Oltor race the peaceful Eldarin manage to capture the evil Daroth in a giant pearl. That is until man finds the pearl and tries to use its power in a petty war. Instead the Daroth are released and begin the destruction of mankind. You have Karis a military genius mercenary leader who is quite slutty and you have Tarantio who might be crazy as your main heroes. Together they must find a way to defeat the Daroth. This was a quick fun read and now that I have read everything ever published by Mr. Gemmell, I can honestly say this is a typical book by a great craftsman.

This book was a page turner. I could not put it down. David Gemmell is a great fantasy writer. I am saddened greatly by his death. He was one of the few fantasy writers left who could tell a great story in a single volume. For someone who has gotten really tired of multi-part stories this story is a breath of fresh air.

On to the actual book. This story features three main characters, four if you count Dace. Gemmell develops each character sufficiently to make you care about what happens to them. The story involves swords, magic and a good story. All you could ever want in a book.

Three ancient races, and luckily the nasty one seemed to have vanished.

A war has been fought over the Eldarin pearl for a long time, until the coming of the Dark Moon. Then that pesty evil race the Daroth return from their newly appeared city.

These immortal bad guys will be opposed by three heroes, Karis the warrior-woman, Tarantio, the finest swordsman, a man with some serious split personality issues, and Durvodas, a healer.

No pressure though, if they fail, everybody dies.

I mostly enjoyed reading this book. It was basically as advertised--heroic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, dark and apocalyptic.

The problem I have with most fantasy these days, however, is the sheer mediocrity. Dark Moon manages to rest around the middle of my originality scale by not using terrible cliches but not exactly being original, either. It's a hard balance to manage, actually, of familiarity and originality. For some people, it might work very well, at least for read-through number 1.

However, I don't think this book merited my attention for a second read. While I found the dual personality of the protagonist interesting, many of the other characters were quite flat even as they entangled themselves in normally and superficially complicated situations. Forin and Karis were just not people I found very interesting after any length of time. Even a man as cold and distant as Darth Vader showed humanity, or at least inspired the kind of awe that one might hold for a carnivorous beast behind a steel-reinforced glass enclosure at a zoo for much of Episodes 4 and 5--many of the characters in Dark Moon failed to do so, at least for me. Actually the Daroth were quite chilling creatures, up to a point.

Read it, if you like the genre. It plays very nicely by the rules, even flaunts a few, to the point of enjoyment, though perhaps not permanence or rereadability,

Awesome swordplay, memorable characters, hey it's David Gemmell!!! Where can you go wrong?