Jon Shannow

Jon Shannow is a gunman in a wrecked future, some three hundred years after a catastrophe tilted the world on its axis and let the oceans drown most of civilisation. He rides from town to town with his pistols, searching for Jerusalem, a city he knows only from the Bible, and most people he meets take the search as proof that he is mad. He is devout and unfailingly polite, and he does not hesitate once he has decided a man is evil, which makes him an uncomfortable hero; Gemmell answered one critic by adding a pacifist character to the later books to argue with him. Wolf in Shadow sets him against the Hellborn, and it is where the Sipstrassi stones enter his story. The Last Guardian picks him up middle-aged and feeling slower, drawn into a danger reaching across time from ancient Atlantis. Bloodstone opens twenty years after he disappeared, when a church has made a saint of him and is doing terrible things in his name.

Appears in

1. 1Wolf in Shadow (1987)A gunman with a Bible rides a drowned and tilted world in search of Jerusalem, until a blood-fed cult called the Hellborn makes his fight personal.
2. 2The Last Guardian (1989)Shannow rides south towards a sword that hangs in the sky, while a gate into drowned Atlantis lets something old and ruthless into his world.
3. 3Bloodstone (1994)Twenty years on, a harsh church has made the vanished Jerusalem Man its saint. Then he rides back, wounded and half-remembering, to hunt its killers.