The Vanishing Tower

I continue to be amazed at how much each book of this series manages to pack into less than 200 pages. And yet, it rarely feels rushed! The writing continues to be lyrical and evocative ("The wings of gold and silver flapped with the sound of a hundred cymbals meeting..."); Elric continues to brood and despair; the Eternal Champion returns in various guises; and certain of Elric's friends and enemies meet their final fates, while others survive to see another day.

If you need 500 pages of backstory for a world and all its wonders, this is not the series for you. Otherwise, read on!

I don't know what it is about Elric, but damn, I just love this character, and this world. I wouldn't call Moorcock the best writer on the planet, not by a long shot, and there's honestly times when this series feels like he's making it up as he goes along, but overall, it's just an honestly enjoyable reading experience, and this one, with Elric chasing Theleb K'aarna hither and yon, is no exception.

It hurts me to say so, but these stories don't resonate with me now the way they did when I was a teen. Elric, who I used to consider an edgy anti-hero now comes across as a whiney bitch. His motivations are unclear and the story barely hangs together. Secondary characters are barely fleshed out.

It's not all bad though. The story moves along briskly with exciting set pieces (like Edgar Rice Burroughs) and a great sense of the macabre (like Robert E. Howard).

I liked this somewhat less than a few of the previous books in the Elric Saga, but only because it had less of the nearly meta-multiple-worlds eternal hero/villain in it except for the last tale.

The rest of it seemed very natural for a sword and sorcery adventure and rather plain. You know, a mysterious woman, albeit overpowered and in need of more overpowered help, almost throwing herself at evil (debatable) albino Elric after he avows he needs nothing, not even a reason to do whatever he wants.

Eternal brooding nightmare of a man, serving chaos though not always being served BY chaos, always/never regretting, tossed by fate, used by his malicious soul-drinking sword, and in a never-ending search for wisdom.

Good. Very good stuff.

In show more general.

This one reads like what Stephen King will eventually do better in his Dark Tower. Still, interesting to see the seeds. :) show less

You always get the feeling that most of the shorter Eternal Champion novels were written on the run, kind of like Anthony Trollope sitting down for so many hours to write so many pages per day. The Deus ex machina is always too much a part of this sort of Moorcock's sloppier slap-dash fantasy writing.

A pretty good start rambles about in typical Moorcock fashion into various travels, adventures, and perils involving a powerful sorcerer with much fantastical mayhem and swashbuckling. The best thing about this is the conjunction of three incarnations of the Eternal Champion, the fabled city of Tanelorn, and a shout-out for Dorian Hawkmoon.

These Eternal Champion novellas are mostly reminiscent of sword and sorcery pulp writing with a show more little more edge to it. They are fun reads with favorite characters (Elric and Von Bek being my personal favs) but lack the depth and the atmosphere of the longer EC novels. show less

In which our twisted hero plays paladin to Myshella, Empress of Dawn and muse to heroes, in his running contest against the vengeful wizard Theleb K'aarna. As in most of Elric's adventures, the results are less than hoped and he has to curse his fate. Unlike "Elric of Melnibone" and "The Weird of the White Wolf," this collection didn't have quite the same psychedelic flair, while some of the "Multiverse" elements of the story do feel a bit dated and clunky.

In this Elric story, our hero becomes more familiar and entwined in the multiverse. From this point on it seems that Moorcock really starts to develop Elric into a very complex character.