A review by sexton_blake
Elric: Stormbringer! by Michael Moorcock

4.0

I’ve read Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels multiple times in adulthood but, essentially, I associate them with my teens, which is when they made the greatest impression on me. Perhaps because Moorcock himself was barely out of his teens when he created Elric, the early stories of the series fizzle with unrestrained creativity and youthful energy. For sure, they lack the literary merit of the author’s later (astonishing) work, but they make up for it by immersing the reader in wildly exotic worlds, filled with mad gods possessed of inscrutable motives, and soaked through with a dark sense of unavoidable destinies. The “otherworldliness” is brilliantly realised. Where R. E. Howard’s Conan inhabits a bejewelled mythical past, Elric exists in what feels like a fluid manifestation of his own psyche. No part of his gloomy world is stable, and neither is he, occupying as he does a liminal position between good and evil, between Law and Chaos … and, of all his tales, his confused engagement with reality is best portrayed in STORMBRINGER, which brings his saga to a stunning conclusion (in retrospect, a premature one). It doesn’t surprise me at all that my first encounter with this novel was a pivotal moment of my rebellious youth. Now, halfway through my fifth decade, I don’t relate to Elric in the same way, but I can still appreciate his significance and the early incandescence of Moorcock’s talent. This edition from Gollancz makes the whole experience even better by supplementing the novel with plenty of extra material, essays, and a portfolio of art by Jim Cawthorn.