Hawkmoon (original 1992; edition 1995)

Hawkmoon was much more straightforward, and thus somewhat less interesting but also less annoying, than Von Bek or The Eternal Champion. It's a four-part novel, and very much a straight lone-hero-against-evil-empire adventure. One of the problems I have with Moorcock in general (at least in this multiverse) is that because the villain is always Chaos, it has zero subtlety - the villains rape and torture and perform hideous experiments because they're the villains, not out of any sort of serious characterization. That's less of a problem when the story is as twisty and multilayered as the Von Bek stories (although it's still a problem) but Hawkmoon has none of that and it just grew tedious.

That's not to say I totally dislike it - it's still a fast-moving adventure and it held my interest to the end - but it's pretty badly flawed as anything other that straight-up pulp fantasy.

(I'm plowing through the American collections very, very slowly, because Moorcock is not quite to my taste but he's interesting and also tremendously influential in the genre.) ( )

The Jewel in the Skull - http://www.librarything.com/review/25450607
The Mad God's Amulet - http://www.librarything.com/review/25466884
The Sword of the Dawn - http://www.librarything.com/review/25450351
The Runestaff - http://www.librarything.com/review/84515755 ( )

Huge amounts of imagination. I got very exasperated with parts of the plot, a couple of the really evil characters, love of torture, and oh dear me - attitudes to women....so I struggled to suspend disbelief and enjoy (if that's the right word) this book, so called it a day. Densely written prose with a love of violence, spectacle and the exotic. I did manage to get through one Moorcock book - the Elric one - but that was at least 12 years ago; maybe I had a stronger stomach then? ( )

Great stuff. Moorcock's amazing imagination at its best. All of the High History of the Runestaff in one volume. In my opinion this is a tour de force in fantasy wrting. Back in a time when fantasy was a very niche genre, Moorcock produced these sweeping vistas of incredible, gothic settings and immensely exotic characters. Strange, brooding heroes, deliciously evil villains and, running through it all, the enigmatic Runestaff. I loved it when I first read it (too many decades ago) and I still do. What more can I say? ( )

Moorcock once believed that if a story couldn't be finished in 24 hours, it wasn't worth writing. There are some of his complete novels that were written in this way, and some of them he wrote without looking back.

Hawkmoon is an omnibus released by White Wolf, featuring the four novels pertaining to Dorian Hawkmoon, a German Eternal Champion who must rise over the evil British empire.

Moorcock wrote each of these four novels in a very short time (I believe it was without even sleeping), and then spent the rest of the week asleep. And, wow, if I were to have done that, my end result would be nothing near the skill and mastery that Moorcock has given his work.

If you know nothing about Moorcock, then know this now: Each of his worlds is connected on some level through something he's called "the Multiverse," which is, effectively, the next abstraction above the universe. You will see characters that are familiar, and characters you know, and characters that seem like you've seen them before. This is how the multiverse works.

But not every story by Moorcock has to be a lesson in quantum mechanics. Sometimes, the story is just a story, and the characters are just these characters, and if they seem familiar, it's not necessary, in order to enjoy the story, to believe that they are a new incarnation of someone you've already met in one of his other books. Hawkmoon is one of those such books.

If you're familiar with Moorcock, but not with Dorian Hawkmoon, you may enjoy this Sword and Sorcery tale, complete with mighty artifacts, and a cursed black jewel, which may or may not be related to a certain black runesword. ( )