Part of Gollancz's impressive 'Fantasy Masterworks' series of reprints, this volume collects the first two Elric books and makes for intriguing reading. Two grabs from J G Ballard strike me as apt:
These strange and tormented landscapes, peopled by characters of archetypal dimensions, are the setting for a series of titanic duels between the forces of Chaos and Order. Nightmare armies clash on the shores of the spectral seas. Phantom horsemen ride on skeletal steeds across a world as fantastic as those of Bosch and Breughel.
...
A world of powerful and sustained imagination ... successor to Mervyn Peake and Wyndham Lewis ... The vast, tragic symbols by which Moorcock continually illuminates the metaphysical quest of his hero are a measure of the author's remarkable talents.
What Moorcock's about here is the creation of a complete mythos, and one which is markedly different from any that came before him; the sense of ruin and a fatal (and fatalistic) drive towards destruction are palpable, and integral to the narrative and characters who walk these pages. At times, the writing is clumsy, and Moorcock's descriptions can be thin, feeling more like sketches than fully-realised images, but the underlying imaginative force of the books more than makes up for those stylistic flaws.
