It’s delightful in the way Moorcock can describe unknown places and creatures, the way combatants spar verbally as well as physically, the way the fabric of the multiverse is traveled, bent, and torn its formative nature revealed, manipulated, and threatened. The fact that Moorcock has tied his Von Bek and Elric storylines to actual places and events in our own world within the last century is rather intriguing.Īfter that the story, in true Moorcock fashion, dives into the fantastic, the imaginative, the absurd.
At one point I Googled a map of Germany to find out where these places were in relationship to each other, and what they look like now. In fact, the first 80 pages are, to borrow a phrase Moorcock uses later in the story, “philosophical meanderings,” and they are a look into the emergence of Nazi Germany.ĭespite the slow pace and the meanderings, I was still interested. Instead the story opens with Ulric Von Bek…not he of The War Hound and the World’s Pain, but rather a descendant living in Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party. You see, the Dreamthief originally appears in The Fortress of the Pearl, an Elric novel, so I was expecting a book about Elric. I was initially disappointed at the start of The Dreamthief’s Daughter.
I was entrenched in so many different series, however, that I could never find the time to revisit the White Wolf. I bought it with the full intention of reading it. In 2001 a new Elric book was released, The Dreamthief’s Daughter. Time was unkind to the relationship between Elric and I from that point for Elric, he would appear in stories with new titles, but they were the same old stories for myself, my interests turned to stories of Glen Cook, Robin Hobb, Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind. For awhile I occasionally satisfied myself with bits and pieces – short stories, Elric at the End of Time, The Fortress of the Pearl, and The Revenge of the Rose. All too soon I had run through the entire Eternal Champion Cycle and was left with fading memories. Elric, on the other hand, was wildly imaginative, adventuring where whim took him, the plot shifting like the stuff of Chaos to which Elric was beholden.Īfter I devoured Elric, I moved on to Corum, then Dorian Hawkmoon, then Erekose, and finally Von Bek. Lord of the Rings was a carefully crafted tale full of structured language, culture, and a single, laser-focused plot. Up to that point my only exposure to fantasy had been The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.Įlric was something wonderfully different. Awestruck by Michael Whelan’s cover, which depicted a giant bug on a throne being challenged by the albino Elric, I was totally captivated. From the moment I pulled The Vanishing Tower from the bookshelves of my high school library, I became infatuated with Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion.
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