Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The greatest ending in all fantasy fiction!, 11 Nov 2001
By A Customer
I could not believe this when I first read it!
This omnibus has almost all the best Elric stories, including Revenge of the Rose, which with Dreamthief's Daughter, the latest, and Stormbringer itself are the very best, containing the same elements of tragedy and characterisation which make Moorcock the only serious challenge to Tolkien. This is rich, dark, heady stuff and it won't appeal to you if you really just like cuddly hobbits and wise old wizards because there is never much that's reassuring about Moorcock. Which is no doubt why so many people who like his imitators like David Gemmell and Robert Jordan don't actually like him. This is the full-strength version and it's like the difference between a night of passion and a night at a lap-dancing club. Nobody, nobody does it better!
If you read no other fantasy book, read this.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Real Thing, 30 Jan 2002
By A Customer
Marvellous stuff, still streets ahead of anything out there -- but Philip Pullman has the same sort of mindset. Elric, exiled traitor and wife-killer, proud Prince of Ruins, adept sorcerer and swordsman, who carries the bewitched runesword Stormbringer, begins this book in a series of early adventures, clearly written as individual novellas, but then you start getting into the real meat -- Revenge of the Rose is a superb fantasy, head and shoulders above any of its contemporaries, and offers us, as well as poetic parodies and the like, wonderful images of the Gypsy Nation, perpetually trundling round the world and speaking the rhetoric of freedom while having become a total orthodoxy, the gigantic clock made up of human beings who will perish if any one of them makes a mistake -- and Moorcock is off at full throttle. Every scene has ironic meaning. A couple of minor stories (Kings in Darkness, The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams) and we're into the lush, manic rush to Armageddon that is STORMBRINGER! Still the greatest plot on the planet and the best ending in all fantasy fiction! Long before Pullman won the Whitbread Moorcock was offering this mad, bad and thoroughly humane fantasy to the world. He remains a giant. One word of advice -- buy this and not the Fantasy Masterworks edition, which is not good value and doesn't really give you the build-up which Moorcock artfully introduced with intermediary books, all relentlessly leading that dark, astonishing ending. You might want to stop off after Caravan of Forgotten Dreams and read The Dreamthief's Daughter, the latest singleton where Elric takes on the Nazis!
You'll believe it when you read it!
Wonderful energy. Marvellous ideas. Tremendous landscapes. Massive emotions. Yet somehow reality is never far away. In a great British tradition.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SARDONIC HUMOUR, 11 Feb 2002
By A Customer
There is very little Moorcock which doesn't have a bit of irony. His work has had this same sardonic humour from the very beginning, as you can see from the earliest work in this book which otherwise contains the three best Elric novels out of four and the fourth is The Dreamthief's Daughter. Elric himself has the same sardonic self-mockery. That's what appeals to me. There aren't many modern fantasy writers who can even begin to approach that tone. It's why he remains the best antidote to sentimentality with that self-knowing wink of his.
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by Michael Moorcock
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