Coming Outta Nowhere, Driving Like Rain
Originally posted in Antony’s newsletter.
As a teenager in the 1980s I fell deep into the Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion-shaped hole and burned my way through his Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon/Count Brass, and Jerry Cornelius books and stories. They were of varying quality, to be sure; Moorcock was famously prolific in those days, and literally writing a novel (or rewriting several short stories to combine them into a novel) over a long weekend to pay off your tax bill is no way to be precious about quality control.
But as happened to so many others, something about the sheer imaginative lunacy on display, the furious psychedelia combined with an attitude to story logic that can best be described as tolerant, grabbed me. And none of them more so than the Elric of Melniboné saga.
I mean, look; I was a working class teenage goth, raised on 1970s heavy metal and progressive rock. A pale, black-clad, cynical and drug-addicted anti-Conan whose strength came from a cursed sword that hungered for the very souls of his friends and lovers… is not something I was going to resist.
(The second tattoo I ever got was of Moorcock’s eight-arrowed Chaos symbol —also not uncoincidentally the logo of my first heavy metal band.)
I owned a full collection of the Grafton editions, with beautifully evocative Michael Whelan covers — I believe they’re essentially the same as the DAW editions in the US — bought with my meagre teenage funds because I simply had to have them. I treasured those books, re-read them, took them with me across many house and apartment moves… only to somehow lose them years ago in one such move. Boo.
So as an early birthday present to myself this year I bought a second-hand set, assembled from various Amazon and eBay sellers, and began re-reading them again.
I’m only a few books in, but so far they hold up surprisingly well so long as you’re inclined toward Moorcock’s antiheroic brand of fantasy in the first place. What amazes me most, though, is their length — or rather lack of it. ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ itself clocks in at just 48,000 words, little more than a third the length of an average modern fantasy novel. Heck, THE WEIRD OF THE WHITE WOLF is just 39,000 words; I’m pretty sure there are China Miéville novels ten times that length. Even the longest book, the climactic finale STORMBRINGER, is just 71,000 words.
They’re the equivalent of an early Sisters of Mercy single; three minutes of relentless amphetamine-fuelled gloom that smacks you around the face before vanishing in a fog of dry ice.
And yet, none of them feels short. This is mostly achieved by Elric rarely sitting still; he’s always on the move, always doing something. But it’s also down to not wallowing in detail. There’s plot a-plenty in these books, but written so sparingly that in the time it takes Tolkien to describe ten generations of a minor horseman’s lineage, Elric has sailed halfway across the world and fought a kraken to boot.
The ‘big fat fantasy’ took over the marketplace in the 1990s and has dominated ever since. But I wonder if the continued rise of ebooks, and the renewed appetite for serialised shorts concurrent with our modern oh-my-god-we’re-all-too-busy lifestyle, will see something more like this style of short-sharp-shock fiction regain prominence? Venues like Wattpad are already thriving with ultra-short serial pieces. The future could turn out to be more like the past than anyone expected.
Antony Johnston
antonyjohnston.com | @antonyjohnston
