Quote:
Originally Posted by lawrenceRaider
Have you read any of Michael Moorcock?
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Only a few Elric short stories. They were ok. Honestly, outside of LOTR. I'm not a big fantasy reader. After having a run of bad luck finding new things to read I just jumped into these Fantasy books as a change of pace. I had just failed a (fourth!) attempt to make it past the fifth chapter of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" when I decided I needed to go in a totally opposite direction. What better way than with Conan the barbarian? Additionally, my local bookstore owner is a huge fan of the fantasy genre and I never like to leave his store empty handed so I let him pick out a few books for me.
Edited to add:
It's important to note two things:
1) I hate 99% of the things I read and watch
2) I have terrible taste, so you should feel pride in liking things that I say suck
Next:
Knights of Dark Renown by David Gemmel
It's ok. Fantasy fans seem to love it as nearly every review is glowing. It's not bad but there are some issues with it. While the first Gemmel book I read
"Legend" may have overly melodramatic at times it was hard not to get swept up in the story. I was never bored while reading Knights but it never really grabbed me. I think the biggest issue is the number of characters involved in the story; I didn't dislike any of them (in fact nearly every character in the book had the potential to be very interesting) but there were so many of them that none of them had enough of the spotlight for me to get attached to them. I think it would have helped to have one or two central characters and maybe to have merged some of the characters that filled similar roles.
I think the "too many characters" problem contributes to the second problem I had: the pacing is a little off. Many of the characters evolve very quickly. Too quickly in some cases. The story's climax feels a little bit rushed, but I think part of that is that a lot of the dramatic moments are undercut by the fact that I wasn't emotionally connected to the characters. The one page epilog was also a misstep, imo.
Having said all that, it's still a decent book. Fantasy fans should enjoy it. I just think it would have worked better as a duology as there just wasn't enough time to flesh out all of the (potentially) interesting characters.
Now:
If you aren't familiar with Conan or Dashiell Hammett this is a fairly entertaining book. The plot(s) are blatant ripoffs of The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. Maybe you can chalk it up as some sort of homage, but I'm not sure that is an acceptable excuse.