I recently bought Elric: The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock and am reading it. I'm not normally a huge fantasy reader, though I admit to a fondness for the odd Conan story and comic book, but these particular tales came highly recommended by a bunch of geeks I knew in the 8th grade, some of whom are now fancy novel-readin', New-Yorker-Subscribin', Whole-Foods-Shoppin', look-down-their-nose-at-genre-fiction types. (Not mentioning any names, mind you.) (I also subscribe to the New Yorker and would shop at Whole Foods if they carried the crap my kids like to eat, so my taunt is tinged with hypocrisy)
Well, look, I love nothing more than trumpeting the virtues of this or that genre over literary fiction (which is also genre fiction of course, but "literary fiction" sounds so much better than "fiction about whiny bitches who can't bring themselves to write their novels"), but I don't think I can do it in this case.
Because this genre mostly sucks. Well, there are conventions of the genre that I have a hard time getting around, chiefly the highfalutin prose style and silly names, but even if you can get past those, there are problems. I mean, these Elric stories are apparently classics of the genre, and while there are some interesting ideas, they mostly follow the Conan formula of Problem, Intense Bloodletting, and Resolution, which is fine for a few stories but starts to get tiresome after a while. Many of the early Elric stories contain particularly egregious deus ex machina endings in which Elric, in a tight spot, calls out to his patron demon who pulls his bacon out of the fire just enough to allow Elric to engage in more bloodletting.
Okay, I do enjoy the bloodletting. But then we get to the four interlinked novellas, or novelettes, or something, in which Elric has to fight with his Chaos-forged weapons against the very forces of Chaos itself, including the aforementioned patron demon! All of which is dull and kind of difficult to understand. I mean, the guy accidentally kills the love of his life--this I get. The guy travels to alternate planes where dwarf messengers of the Lords of Law lead him to kill iterations of the eternal hero so he can bring the magical object back to his own plane and fight the forces of Chaos that have already destroyed the world except for the wreckage of Melnibone--well, I stopped caring about when we got to "dwarf messengers of the Lords of Law".
I'm stubborn and nearly finished, so I'm going to plow through even though I've kinda lost interest, but I don't think I'll be picking up any more volumes.
