Elric of Melnibone (Pseudo Review)

Michael Moorcock's "Elric" stories are slowly graduating from "between good books fillers" to good books in their own right as I read through them.

If you like dark fantasy with some sword and sorcery action, you might try one of Moorcock's short novels about this brooding and tragic character.

The early Elric stories are very short and even the novels themselves feel like anthologies of short stories. This is due to the fact that the Elric tales were originally published as short stories in magazines.

This makes them easy to pick up and use to fill some time without getting you stuck in a book you have to finish before moving onto what you may REALLY want to read.

Elric is a very flawed anti-hero, haunted by his sentient sword's need to feed on the souls of its victims. Additionally, unless he lets his sword(called "Stormbringer") feed, Elric becomes weak from a natural condition that has made him feeble his entire life.

Moral dilemmas show up often during these stories and you sense the author working through his own frustrations and questions about the nature of the universe and the existence and character of God(despite the story-world being polytheistic).

The world, concepts and plots are fairly interesting, but it isn't until much later in the series that Moorcock spends some needed time on Elric's inner character. Very little time is spent revealing the thoughts of any characters until later books like "Stormbringer" and the "Fortress of the Pearl". These books are closer to traditional novel length, and so lose the ability to easily drop and pick up at whim, however the added character development makes them worth the extra time.

To get a taste of Elric, I'd recommend "Elric Of Melnibone", the first book in the series. You can likely find a dirt cheap copy online and it's worth a shot if you're looking for a new author, or just something to pass the time between other books.

Although I haven't finished "Fortress" yet, or the other two books that were published after it, I'd offer the following estimation of the series-

Quality: 8.0

Veracity:8.0