Britains king of heroic fantasy wrote thirty-two books in his lifetime before dying of coronary artery disease in 2006: the Stones Of Power sequence comprises the two revisionist Arthurian novels Ghost King and Last Sword Of Power, and the three post-apocalyptic Westerns Wolf In Shadow, The Last Guardian and Bloodstone. Taking place in the same world ours but separated by a couple of thousand years, Ghost King features the peerless warrior Culain, the Lance Lord, while Wolf In Shadow stars the half-mad gunfighter Jon Shannow, also known as the Jerusalem Man. Theyre linked by the apocalypse: more specifically, by the two different civilisations that, through their irresponsible behaviour, caused the world to tilt on its axis and the seas to rise and swallow the earth. Culain is Gemmells Lancelot, in this tale the mentor to Uther Pendragon, an immortal survivor of the lost city of Atlantis. Jon Shannow, on the other hand, spends a good proportion of his time fighting a Satanic cult of gunslingers called the Hellborn. The books dont actually cross the streams: Culain and Shannow never meet. Instead, each plays their part in an ongoing storyline centred around the fall of Atlantis and the meteoric Sipstrassi stones that gave the civilisation its power, and eventually caused its downfall. That doesnt mean that a television adaptation couldnt correct that oversight, of course. Theres certainly something to be said for the idea of an epic television series featuring a post-apocalyptic spaghetti Western merging storylines with a new take on Arthurian legend.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
