Bought: The Dead Beat

Robert Bloch wrote a novel called The Dead Beat. I once owned a copy, sold during the early years of my marriage when it seemed we would move from apartment to apartment forever and my books would never come out of boxes. This ain't that. This book is subtitled Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. The author, Marilyn Johnson, has toiled in the magazine field as editor and writer of obits (among, I presume, other things). This appears to be her first book and I like to imagine that, made sensitive to the Reaper's presence, she is trying to escape from that swiftly thinning field before the whole moribund industry falls to his scythe. Her flight is less than assured because: a) leaping from periodicals to books may be like escaping the Titanic via rope ladder only to find yourself on board the Hindenburg; and b) I found this book on the bargain shelves, remaindered.

The Dead Beat's bibliography includes The Last Word, edited by Marvin Siegel, a wonderful collection of obits from the New York Times which, come to think of it, I found remaindered. The Last Word eschews celebrity deaths, focusing instead on eccentrics, local heroes, inventors and the like. It's a paradoxically uplifting book and a steal at any price.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 13

The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell

Let's start with the cover this time. Heavy Metal Presents? Howard Chaykin? You know what that means...

Boobies!

Full frontal nudity, in fact. But only the girls of course. We're not perverts or anything. There's some salty language too, which I actually found rather off-putting. The default language of fantasy, whether high, heroic, urban or science, remains discreet, if not utterly chaste.

According to his introduction, Moorcock gave Chaykin a detailed outline and then left him alone. I can't help wondering if the outline specified that little valentine on our hero's chest. I confess it makes it hard for me to take him seriously. The top-knot, which you can't really see here, doesn't help either. These things are a matter of taste, of course, and a lot of things that work in prose fail utterly when presented visually. A good illustrator makes it work or works around it or, often, just ignores it completely. Chaykin is in fact a very good illustrator. Maybe exposure to superhero comics warped his judgment. Compared to, say, Jack of Hearts our hero is dressed quite conservatively.

Flowers begins where Phoenix in Obsidian ended, with Urlik Skarsol (formerly Erekosë, formerly John Daker) alone on an endless plain of ice. Without further ado the Eternal Champion is drawn to his next Balancing Act...

"For my next trick (draws black blade) I will require a sacrifice from the audience."
*Drum-roll*
*Scream*
"Ta-Dah!"

...and finds himself in Hell. Seriously. That's what the barbaric natives call their desolate land. They identify the Champion as Clen of Clen Gar, Lord of the Dream Marches, which lie, it turns out, to the East, across a modest sea. East of the Marches, it turns out, lies a land called Heaven. Students of Moorcockology will get no extra credit for pointing out the obvious: that the balance represented by the messy, vulnerable Marches, not the extremes of Heaven or Hell, will turn out to be where it's at.

Erekosë and Urlik Skarsol were both Sleepers under the Hill, legendary heroes called from Death or something like it to aid their people in a time of crisis. It's never made entirely clear, but when Lord Clen returns to the Dream Marches he doesn't seem to have been missing for very long at all, perhaps a matter of months. Maybe for this very reason (if you need one) the Champion quickly acquires or recovers Lord Clen's memories, which saves a lot of time.

Briefly, Lord Clen finds out that the hordes of Hell are marching on Heaven with overwhelming force, and the Dream Marches, which form a kind of buffer zone, are their first target. Without aid the Marches are doomed, so he rides off to petition Heaven for help.

Lord Clen has a black blade but nothing much is made of it this time around. It doesn't get a name or a history. It writhes a little at one point but it never demands souls or blood or even Krispy Kreme.

Chaykin painted Flowers and I have to say I wish he had drawn it. The backgrounds are fantastic and he achieves some amazing effects. The problem I have is with the faces. Chaykin is great at drawing distinctive, expressive faces that reveal character, but I think this early painted work (his first?) lacks consistency in that regard.

But that's a quibble. His lay-outs are dynamic and varied and he makes great use of two-page spreads. In close-ups Lord Clen tends to look like the young Burt Lancaster, and Ermizhad -

Hold it, is that supposed to be Ermizhad? Ermizhad with her "elfin" features, high cheekbones and slanted, pupil-less eyes flecked with blue and gold? Ermizhad with her black hair? Oh well. Maybe the Champion's memories are getting a little scrambled.

Flowers is good enough to make me wish Moorcock had written a novella instead. However beautifully painted, this still feels like a sketch.

Oh yeah, in the introduction Moorcock reminisces about his early comics work. I can't resist passing on this sentence:

I also did a great deal of scripting for a weekly called Bible Story, which was one of the best-paying markets at the time, and was distinctive in that everyone who worked on it became, after a while, a thoroughgoing atheist.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 12

To Rescue Tanelorn...

Oops. I broke my reading order.

Moorcock's bibliography is a nightmare. I catalog my books on LibraryThing, an ongoing experiment in wiki-style public book cataloging. There's a forum for those members who try to straighten out tangled bibliographies, clear up ambiguities, etc. I did a search for Moorcock's name and found that basically everyone who's ever looked at the problem has thrown their hands up in despair and walked away.

For instance. The Eternal Champion is a novel as well as the second book in the UK omnibus series and the first book in the US series. The UK omnibus includes The Eternal Champion, Phoenix in Obsidian and The Dragon in the Sword. The US omnibus omits Dragon but includes The Sundered Worlds and To Rescue Tanelorn...

For another instance. Stormbringer is a novel as well as the twelfth UK omnibus, whose contents are identical to the eleventh US omnibus which is entitled Elric: The Stealer of Souls, which is also the title of the first volume of a new series of Elric collections with different contents altogether!

My head hurts. Anyway, the suggested reading order I'm using is an amalgam of the UK and US omnibuses mixed in with some other stuff. The list zigged, I zagged, and I read Tanelorn about forty books early. Mea culpa.

The cover. One thing about DAW: unlike a lot of publishers they were always conscientious about crediting their cover artists. Not that Michael Whelan needs it. There's his stylized badge/emblem/signature thingy carved into the top step. Note also the elegant framing and composition. Dig those baubles. No one baubled like Whelan back in the day.

And is that a near-subliminal face on the chest of the Lich King? Is that from the book? I don't remember.

I also don't remember this story, though I know I read the Elric books in my teens. Maybe I skipped it because Elric wasn't in it. That sounds like me.

It's a graceful little story and I don't think I'm really spoiling anything if I tell you the entire plot.

City is threatened.
Hero goes on quest for supernatural aid.
Hero returns with aid just in time to save city.

Well, duh! That's like spoiling Titanic by telling you the ship sinks.

Since we know where we're going the journey is everything. Here's how it starts.

Beyond the tall and ominous glass-green forest of Troos, well to the North and unheard of in Bakshaan, Elwher or any other city of the Young Kingdoms, on the shifting shores of the Sighing Desert lay Tanelorn, a lonely, long-ago city, loved by those it sheltered. Tanelorn had a peculiar nature in that it welcomed and held the wanderer. To its peaceful streets and low houses came the gaunt, the savage, the brutalized, the tormented, and in Tanelorn they found rest.
Now, most of these troubled travellers who dwelt in peaceful Tanelorn had thrown off earlier allegiances to the Lords of Chaos who, as gods, took more than a mild interest in the affairs of men. It happened, therefore, that these same Lords grew to resent the unlikely city of Tanelorn and, not for the first time, decided to act against it.

An unlikely army is raised against the unlikely city and Rackhir the Red Archer sets off for help. He acquires a companion, travels through five Gates and across five mystical realms, encounters an old flame (now an enemy), recruits allies against Chaos, and returns in the very nick. All in less than 10,000 words, another example of Moorcock's profligacy of imagination.

When it's all over Rackhir must deal with that old girlfriend, Sorana, who stood with Chaos against his beloved Tanelorn. His solution proves that he is entirely worthy of the peace he desires.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 11

Phoenix in Obsidian

I'm glad I read The Eternal Champion and The Sundered Worlds but I can't really see myself going back to them. Phoenix in Obsidian is a different story (so to speak) - smart, atmospheric, fast-moving science fantasy. Not as ambitious or assured as Moorcock's later work, but absolutely nothing to sneeze at or be ashamed of.

John Daker/Erekosë has had a hundred years of peace, but the multiverse keeps turning, and it starts to look like time for the Eternal Cowboy to ride off into the sunset. Sure enough, Daker is soon the wonderfully named Urlik Skarsol, another legendary warrior called to aid humanity in its darkest hour.

The setting is a distinctly old-fashioned Dying Earth venue. The sun grows cold. The Earth no longer turns, and her fires have long gone out. Ice has conquered the world. The vestiges of humanity live in sea caves along a narrow strip of coastline sheltered by an enormous mountain range.

This book is a great example of Moorcock's talent for bizarre but convincing landscapes, technologies and cultures. His imagination appears to be limitless, and his worlds are filled with odd little details and grace notes that have a preternatural rightness to them. Example: the sea of this exhausted world is so saturated with salt and who knows what else that it has become viscous, so that ships must glide on the water's surface via hydrofoil, and men who fall overboard sink slowly but inexorably as if in icy quicksand. The science may not make any sense (I couldn't say) but the point is the image - a frozen, tideless, poisonous, syrupy sea lying black beneath grey sky and shrunken, ghostly sun.

Erekosë had Kanajana, a poisonous sword only he could safely handle. Urlik is called upon to wield the generically-named but infinitely more frightening Black Sword, a fate he resists without quite knowing why. Anyone familiar with Elric's sword Stormbringer can guess that this Black Sword will be, at best, a mixed blessing.

Daker/Erekosë/Urlik again finds himself allied with humanity against an unhuman foe, the Silver Warriors of the book's alternate title. I'm happy to say that the Champion avoids genocide this time around, but nevertheless those that call him discover that, while they may use him, they are in turn used by Fate, which has plans of its own and exacts a price they may not wish to pay.

The cover. I read the omnibus version, and I own the Dell paperback with the magnificent but over-familiar Frazetta cover. The UK paperbacks have featured beautiful and striking artwork, but I decided this very classy and unusual Robert Gould cover captures the tone of the book best. Note that the cup and sword are here again. The cover vaguely suggests an illuminated manuscript, thanks to the prominent block of text (an ominous bit of verse from the novel). Text as a major decorative element is an Arts and Crafts touch. The colors are my favorite part (what I wouldn't give for a good-sized print of this cover!) - white for the ice, grey for the sky, black for the sea, and red for fire - and blood. Large quantities of blood.

Bought: a Buttload of Tubb

On a whim I loaded Timothy in the Odyssey tonight and drove down to Half Price Books in Tacoma. Memory is notoriously unreliable in these matters, but it seems to me that whenever I get these sudden urges to go to HPB I am always rewarded. Tonight I was rewarded in spades.

We have a rule around here that you can go just about anywhere anytime if you're willing to take a boy with you. Timothy was disappointed we weren't going to the Borders down the street (they have an elevator) but he handled it well. We found a Pixar-themed magnetic drawing pad that kept him occupied while I browsed. I was looking for reasonably priced Moorcock omnibuses. No luck. But check it out...

Someone brought in their entire Dumarest of Terra collection, most of them in fine condition, all of them priced at two dollars. I picked out twelve of the nicer ones, all DAWs. It turns out two of them are duplicates and will be donated to the public library.

I'll probably never read these, but there's a good chance someday Timothy or Nicholas will. In the meantime there are the distinctive yellow spines, author's name in red, title in black, stylized DAW = sf logo at the top. And the covers: I recognize George Barr and Ken Kelly, and there are two by Don Maitz, an old favorite. Thanks to Terran_Trader for uploading more than a thousand cover images to Amazon, including all but one of the above.

The Dumarest books would have made the trip worth it, but there were two more rare DAWs - The Witling by Vernor Vinge and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Phil Farmer - and finally a beautiful copy of the Dell 1979 Slaves of Sleep by L. Ron Hubbard with gorgeous San Julian cover, Edd Cartier illustrations and, yes, fold-out ad for the SFBC in the middle (4 books for a dime with membership, sucker).

Now I just have to explain to my wife that I didn't spend thirty dollars, I saved at least that much. Wish me luck.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 9

The Sundered Worlds

This cosmological romance is divided into two roughly equal parts, originally published separately. All the mind-bending revelations and universe-shattering events take place at the end of part one, which gives part two a distinct air of anticlimax. Once you've destroyed one universe and revealed the cosmic destiny of mankind, what do you do for an encore?

In part one Renark von Bek, with two friends and a chance companion, explores the Shifter, an anomalous planetary system which drifts at right angles to the multiverse, appearing for hours or days in any given plane before moving on to the next. Renark has gotten some Very Bad News about the fate of the universe and hopes to find a solution. The Shifter is a chaotic environment in which the laws of physics are in constant flux, driving men mad. Much is made of Renark holding self and psyche together through sheer will.

Renark and friend Asquiol form an unmistakable Eternal Champion/Loyal Companion pairing. Uniquely among Companions, Asquiol will graduate to E.C. status in part two, after Renark meets his ultimate fate.

The system is explored. Clues lead from one planet to the next. Cosmic secrets are revealed. There is much Capitalization. Here's a good example.

"It was believed," said the metazoa, "that those whom we call the Doomed Folk had passed away in a distant galaxy in our original universe, and that galaxy - which had known great strife - was quiet again in readiness for the Great Turn which would be the beginning of a new cycle in its long life. We and other watchers in nearby galaxies saw it shift like a smoky monster, saw it curl and writhe and its suns and planets pour in ordered patterns around the Hub and out around the Rim, reforming their ranks in preparation.
"The Dance of the Stars was a sight to destroy all but the noblest of watchers, for the weaving patterns depicted the Two Truths Which Bear the Third, so that while the galaxy reformed itself to begin a fresh cycle through its particular Time and Space, it also cleansed its sister galaxies of petty spirits and those who thought ignoble thoughts.
...
"When at last the Dance was over, the Hub began to spin, setting the pattern for the new Cycle. And slowly, from the Hub outwards to the Rim, the suns and planets began to turn again in a course that would be unchanged for eons."
...
"You witnessed a galaxy reorder itself by its own volition!" Renark sensed at last that his most important question was close to being answered.

I can't say much about part two without spoiling part one even further. It involves psychic combat, called the Blood Red Game, with an alien race. Two underused characters from part one reappear and are finally given something (but not much) to do.

Yes there's some clunky dialogue and awkward exposition, and it really works better if you think of it as two linked stories rather than a novel. But so what? It's good pulpy cosmic fun.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 8

The Sundered Worlds

What is this giddy, fast-paced space opera doing in the Eternal Champion omnibus, wedged between the first two John Daker/Erekosë novels?

Well, this is the book that introduced the term Multiverse, so I guess placing it after the book that introduced the E.C. makes sense. But man, talk about whiplash! Moorcock does ease the transition a bit by adding some connecting material in which Daker dreams of Worlds' protagonist Renark, now Count Renark von Bek, "scion of an ancient family".

In his introduction Moorcock says writing Worlds taught him that space opera "was harder to write well than I had guessed and that it didn't really lend itself to many of my literary aspirations." Which is a shame, because every cliché is in place here. The last chance planet full of outlaws, gamblers and dreamers. The cosmic anomaly from which no one has ever returned. The hero with a psychic talent and a terrible secret.

The cover. I have a copy of the Mayflower paperback from the seventies (under the alternate title The Blood Red Game). I quite like it, but now that I've read some of the book itself I think this Paperback Library edition from the sixties is more appropriate. I suspect that 20 years ago I would have put this cover in the so-bad-it's-good category. Now it just looks good to me. No doubt my standards aren't what they used to be. I have no idea who painted it.

I didn't get much reading done today. My wife is off on Mondays and insists that we get out of the house, run errands, do things, have "fun", etc. Ugh. Tomorrow, God willing, I'll wrap this up and get a headstart on Phoenix in Obsidian.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 7

The Eternal Champion

I knew from previous reading that the young Moorcock became a very good writer very quickly indeed, but I would almost swear that you can see him improve over the course of this single, quite brief novel. That's probably projection on my part, or else an artifact of the multiple revisions the work has undergone, including expansion from novella length.

The cover. I'm reading the US omnibus edition but... come on. Tom Canty or Frank Frazetta? That's a question? Not for me it ain't. Frazetta brings violent energy, flawless composition and sheer exuberance for the win. The Eternal Champion isn't doomed to pose for a series of pensive portraits - he's doomed to endless bloody combat! And seriously, that's the bass player from Duran Duran. Don't tell me it's not.

Fittingly, this cover features one of many Frazetta paintings that no longer exist in their original form. Like Moorcock, Frazetta has never hesitated to revise old works, often drastically and sometimes more than once. It's easy to forgive him, since those revisions are usually dramatic improvements, and often involve adding naked women or making the original women even nakeder. That last part, by the way, is rather unlike Moorcock, who has apparently had his consciousness raised quite a bit over the years on that front. That's no loss and all gain if the formidable Libussa from The City in the Autumn Stars is any example. Moorcock's women become sexier as they are objectified less.

John Daker of Earth is incarnated (or reincarnated) as Erekosë of... a different Earth. He is expected to lead the armies of Humanity against the "demonic" Eldren. It is painfully clear from early on that the Eldren will turn out to be more demonized than demonic. Erekosë's loyalties are tested. He takes a terrible oath. Bloodshed ensues.

Daker/Erekosë is unique among the various versions of the E.C. in that he remembers (vaguely) all his different lives. This really sucks, for him. But not for the reader, since Daker's dreams are full of scenes from other E.C. novels and occasionally he'll list various names he's had, which is always fun. I suspect that updates to these lists make up the majority of Moorcock's revisions. Among his other musings Daker wonders if his unique fate is punishment for some terrible crime. There is a hint, not very well developed, that his acts in this novel may constitute that crime.

Moorcock doesn't do anything in Champion that he didn't do better elsewhere, but he did them here first. A good example is the "two races" idea. The conflict between Humanity and Eldren will be echoed by that of the Mabden and Vadagh in the Corum books as well as in the Young Kingdoms that threaten Elric's Melniboné.

Stop reading now to avoid a big spoiler. The nicest thing I can say about The Eternal Champion is that it's surprisingly readable. Weak, I know. Sorry. The most damning criticism I can think of is that it features the genocide of one race and the near-genocide of another but lacks the thematic clarity and moral seriousness that would give those events anything like the impact they should possess. It's been a very long time now since anything Moorcock wrote could be criticised for those particular failings. It's kind of nice to know that the Master was once a journeyman.

Tomorrow, The Sundered Worlds.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 6

The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius

The suggested reading order I'm using is built around the Eternal Champion omnibus editions of the mid-nineties, which explains what this single short story is doing wedged between novels. Moorcock made revisions (most of them very minor, I'm led to believe) to many of his works to bring them more firmly into the whole E.C./Multiverse uh, thing. The protagonist of this strange detective story was renamed von Bek and the story was included in the US and UK versions of the von Bek omnibus. Why this particular story? No idea, unless it's simply a matter of the setting, Berlin. Recently Moorcock revised this story yet again for inclusion in The Metatemporal Detective which, frankly, makes more sense. The narrator refers to himself as a metatemporal investigator right up front.

My copy of the von Bek omnibus is, I am assured, in the mail, so I read the version from The Time Dweller.

It's hard to say anything about a fifteen page story without spoiling it somewhat. Let's see...

Things that Pleasure Garden reminded me of, mostly for quite superficial reasons:

Hitler Painted Roses - Harlan Ellison

How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion - Gene Wolfe

Death and the Compass - Jorge Luis Borges

The Long Goodbye (1973) - directed by Robert Altman; screenplay by Leigh Brackett

The Digging Leviathan - James P. Blaylock

The narrator on his method:

Don't ask me the location or the date. I never bother to find out things like that, they only confuse me. With me it's instinct, win or lose.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 5

The City in the Autumn Stars

Did I call this book a romp? Oh God. It certainly starts out that way. But oh God.

Spoilerish territory ahead. Nothing too specific, but if all you want to be told is "Great book, you should read it!" then you've been told: it is and you should. Just get ready to be put through the wringer.

Von Bek pursues the mysterious Libussa, Duchess of Crete, across Europe. He comes to rest in Mirenburg, an idealized city largely based on Prague: cosmopolitan, tolerant, prosperous, and at peace. There he finds friends and enemies old and new. A multitude of alchemical cultists converge on the city in anticipation of some imminent celestial conjunction. Von Bek's love for Libussa, a woman he barely knows, grows obsessive, while his dreams become bloody visions in which he is both Theseus and Ariadne, threatened by a bloody Beast that might be Minotaur or Kronos, monster or dark god. He becomes involved, much against his nature, in an elaborate scam, which further jeopardizes his already precarious mental equilibrium.

Up to this point, midway through the book, no overtly supernatural event has occurred. One character claims to be deathless, and to have known von Bek's distant ancestor Ulrich, but has shown no proof. Von Bek's dreams might simply be bad dreams, and Moorcock might be writing a naturalistic novel that explores belief in the supernatural and the exploitation of that belief, or one in which apparently supernatural elements will have mundane explanations (the Uncanny mode, per Todorov) or in which tension between natural and supernatural explanations is uneasily maintained (the Fantastic). Von Bek might turn out to be an unreliable narrator, whether deliberate fabulator, innocent madman or something in between.

Big spoiler: Moorcock didn't write any of those books. I mentioned symmetry in my earlier post. Exactly halfway through The City in the Autumn Stars von Bek and company go through the looking glass, from Mirenburg to the eponymous City. And that's when things get both seriously weird - and as serious as a heart attack.

City begins to spiral in on itself, becoming more and more intense and surreal. Von Bek enters a physical labyrinth which mirrors the tortuous maze of his own emotional, ethical and intellectual conflicts. The climax is hallucinatory, harrowing, and ultimately ambiguous; both deliriously romantic and utterly horrific.

City is in at least one sense a more mature novel than The War Hound and the World's Pain. Ulrich von Bek's love Sabrina was a convincingly real character but with an entirely passive role: she waited patiently on the sidelines while von Bek and various other men determined the world's fate. I have written almost nothing about Manfred's love Libussa not because she does nothing but because she does everything. Her character and her decisions are the engine that drives the book. She is a Player, and discovering her is a pleasure I dare not spoil.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 3

The City in the Autumn Stars

According to the blurbery on the back cover City is the "long-awaited sequel" to The War Hound and the World's Pain, but if anyone came to this "sequel" looking for more of the same they were quickly disillusioned. War Hound and City are both narrated by a von Bek (Ulrich, Manfred) and begin in something very like hell on earth (Germany during the Thirty Years War, Paris during the Terror) but the similarities seem to end there. Ulrich von Bek is a wary, weary, cynical mercenary. Manfred is a gregarious dandy with a reputation as a Casanova; an idealist who fought in the American Revolution and whose disillusionment with the new French Republic has just become complete as the novel begins. War Hound is a somber fable, a hopeless quest through an apocalyptic landscape blighted by war and disease. So far City is a romp: fast-paced, romantic and often very funny. In chapter one our hero flees Paris, where he has become persona non grata, pursued by a vindictive agent of the Republic. In chapter two he falls in love with the mysterious Libussa, Duchess of Crete, who promptly disappears. In chapter three he befriends a roguish Scot ballonnier looking for suckers to invest in Aerial Expeditions into those Unknown Lands where Rubies the size of Canteloupes litter the ground. And so on.

The cover. For a while Robert Gould was the Moorcock artist in the U.S., and his stuff is very beautiful, although I don't think this particular image is a good choice for a mass market paperback. A detail from it might have worked better at this size. The Arts and Crafts typeface goes with Gould's stuff like chocolate with peanut butter, and evokes the alchemical mysticism with which Reason's apostle von Bek will be confronted. The image is a rendering of an ikon encountered about halfway through the book, so it might be examined for clues: note that the youth on the left bears a cup, a feminine symbol, while the woman on the right holds a sword. A figure of somewhat obscure gender stands between them, holding both.

Symmetries, role reversal, gender confusion, the union of opposites. Yup, all here.

More tomorrow.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 2

The War Hound and the World's Pain

It's been unbearably hot here. Tomorrow (I mean today, *sigh*) there's a good chance that Seattle will set a new high temperature record. Not for a particular date - the highest temperature ever recorded here. The heat interferes with our lives in various ways. My reading hasn't been affected much. My blogging has, since our tiny portable AC unit is set up in the family room and my computer is in a craft room where temperatures have hovered around 90F the last few days. If I get an early start tomorrow maybe I can catch up before it becomes unbearable.

A contemporary reviewer (possibly Baird Searles in IASFM) pointed out that War Hound is a fable, a short tale with a moral lesson which is more-or-less explicitly spelled out. While it doesn't end with a pithy "Leave well enough alone," or "One good turn deserves another," it is almost that obvious. War Hound is also a metafiction, insofar as it is a fantasy about fantasy. Here are two snippets of dialogue between von Bek and an unusual hermit named Philander Groot.

"And do you understand the nature of the Mittelmarch?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "I do not. All I know is that Mittelmarch could not survive without the rest of the world - but the rest of the world can survive without Mittelmarch. And that, I suspect, is what its denizens fear in you, if they fear anything at all."

...

"Everything that is fantastic leagues against me," I said, repeating Klosterheim's warning.
"Aye. Everything that is fantastic is threatened. Some believe all these marvels you have witnessed to be productions of the World's Pain. Without the Pain, some say, they would not be necessary. They would not exist."
"You suggest that mankind's needs create them?"
"Man is a rationalising beast, if not a rational one," said Philander Groot.

Is there a name for the part of a fantasy novel where the author hits the fast forward button? After meticulously describing progress from Peasantville to Wizardtown to Elfwood the author realizes his characters are only a quarter of the way to Climaxburg, and suddenly our narrator is saying "We continued East in this way for some months. In the Subplot Mountains we were set upon by brigands, who shot my favorite llama. We rested for a while in the Kingdom of Reluctant Allies, where I bedded the Queen. Or a queen, anyway."

At about the 3/4 point, Moorcock hits the fast forward button just briefly. Von Bek has been joined in his quest by Sedenko, a Muscovite soldier of fortune who shares the almost universal antisemitism of his time, and we get this wonderful paragraph:

Beyond Crema we passed again into the Mittelmarch. Save that the seasons were, of course, reversed, the landscape was not greatly different. We were in a kingdom, we discovered, which was the vestige of a Carthaginian Empire which had beaten Rome during Hannibal's famous campaign, conquered all of Europe and parts of Asia and had converted to the Jewish religion, so that the whole world had been ruled by Rabbinical Knights. It was a land so horrifying to Sendenko that he believed he was being punished for his sins and was already in Hell. We were treated hospitably and my engineering experience was called into play when the Chief Judge of this Carthaginian land pronounced a sentence of death upon a Titan. A gallows had to be built for him. In return for aid and some extra gold, I was able to design a suitable scaffold. The Titan was hanged and I received the gratitude of those people forever.

Believe it or not, that's Moorcock's idea of a throwaway. Another writer would milk that idea for a novel, if not a trilogy. To Moorcock it's a bit of color tossed in near the home stretch of a singleton. Your typical fantasy author would turn War Hound's plot into the framework for an interminable series of overplotted doorstops. Moorcock chronicles the End of the World as We Knew It in 208 pages of flawlessly paced adventure fiction and every incident, every word is there in service of his theme. Note to self: Moorcock is a mensch.

It's strange to start this project with this particular book, because it has such a strong goodbye-to-all-that vibe. If Moorcock had gone mainstream after its publication, eschewing swords and sorcery for more literary output, no one would have been surprised, and War Hound would be seen now as both summa and apologia from a man ready to put away childish things.

Thank God that didn't happen.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 1

The War Hound and the World's Pain

I'm a slow enough reader but when it comes to writing my pace is best described as glacial, so if I'm going to do this at all I'm afraid that composition, as such, will have to go out the window. Sorry.

This is a re-read for me. Besides the bare bones of the plot and its resolution the only thing I really remember after 25 years is the Mittelmarch, various supernatural realms scattered across Europe (and, presumably, the world), visible and accessible only to the damned.

Great cover by Rowena Morrill. The combination of angel's wings and devil's horns strikes a suitably ambiguous note. In the book Lucifer is actually without horns, wings or pants. I like how Rowena restricted her color palette, too. My only problem is that, for me, the shadow under Lucifer's nose keeps turning into a little Hitler mustache. Nobody wants that.

A short book that nonetheless takes its own sweet time getting started. The protagonist (hero?) begins his hopeless quest precisely one third of the way through the book. Don't get me wrong, the time is well spent.

This book has something in common with Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away, Dunsany's The Charwoman's Shadow, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. This brief excerpt foreshadows that connection. Cynical mercenary Ulrich von Bek has fallen in love with the witch Sabrina. For the sake of her soul as well as his own he has accepted the charge of her master, the fallen angel Lucifer, to find the Cure for the World's Pain, sometimes called the Holy Grail. He prepares to depart.

I returned to draw back the curtains and sit on the edge of the bed, looking down on Sabrina's sleeping face. She started suddenly, crying out, reaching her hand to where I had lain. I touched her cheek. "I am here."
She turned and smiled at me. Then her eyes clouded. "You are leaving?"
"I suppose that I must. Soon."
"Yes," she said, "for it is morning." She began to sit up. She sighed. "When I made my bargain with Lucifer I thought that I was resisting circumstance, taking my fate into my own hands. But circumstance continues to affect us. Can it even affect who we are? Is there any proof beyond ourselves that we are unique?"
"We feel ourselves to be unique," I said. "But a cynic sees only familiarity and similarity and would say that we are all pretty much the same."
"Is it because a cynic does not possess the imagination to distinguish those subtle differences in which you and I believe?"
"I am a cynic," I said to her. "A cynic refuses to allow distinctions of motive or of temperament."
"Oh, but you are not!" She came into my arms. "Or you would not be here."
I held her closely. "I am what I have to be at this moment," I said. "For my own sake."
"And for mine," she reminded me.
I felt a terrible sadness well within me. I suppressed it. "And for yours," I agreed.
We kissed. The pain continued to grow. I pulled away from her. I went to the corner of the room and began to wash myself. I noticed that my hands were shaking and that my breathing had become unusually deep. I had a wish, at that moment, to return to Hell, to summon up an army of all those poor damned souls and set them in rebellion against Lucifer, as Lucifer had set Himself against God. I felt that we were in the hands of foolish, insane beings, whose motives were more petty even than Man's. I wanted to be rid of all of them. It was unjust, I thought, that such creatures should have power over us. Even if they had created us, could they not, in turn, be destroyed?
But these ideas were pointless. I had neither the means, the knowledge nor the power to challenge them. I could only accept that my destiny was, in part at least, in their charge. I would have to agree to play out my role on Lucifer's terms, or play no role at all.

That gives you an idea of the tone of the book. If the characters aren't chasing or fighting each other, or witnessing some supernatural manifestation, they're talking about God, Fate, Chance, Will, Faith, Love, War... the Big Stuff.

More tomorrow. Oops, I mean later today.

"I go out bloggin', after midnight, out in the moonlight..."

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 0

I had all but forgotten this blog existed. Maybe a Big Project will inspire me to keep at it this time.

The Big Project is this: read more or less the entirety of Michael Moorcock's oeuvre (hey, got it right the first try!) in one year. Since I've been averaging a book a month for decades now, this represents a colossal opportunity for me to fall on my face. My only consolation is that it seems likely no one will ever know.

This thread from a forum at Moorcock's Miscellany includes a recommended reading order. I intend to follow this plan closely, with one big deviation. The list's author uses Moorcock's Eternal Champion/Multiverse conceit as his organizing principle, and rightly so. Everything that doesn't clearly fit within that framework is lumped together at the end of the list. For the sake of balance and variety I plan to shuffle this material back into the deck, so to speak.

What, this thing is still here?

I mean seriously, doesn't anything ever get deleted anymore?

Oh well...

REBOOT!