Michael Moorcock, The Chronicles of Corum (Berkley, 1973)Moorcock returns to the world of the Eternal Champion, in the guise of Corum, then rips him out of it. Over a thousand years after the events of the last novels, Corum has become worshipped as a demigod. His followers summon him into their time to do battle with extraplanar beings of (at most) animal intelligence known as the Cold Gods. The Cold Gods are dying, slowly, but they have every intention of taking all of humanity with them.Together with the last of the Sidhi, a race of magic-using nonhumans roughly akin to elves in most fantasy worlds, Corum and those who worship him go to do battle with another force bent on destroying the planet.The plot may get old, especially when so many fantasy novels by so many authors revolve around it. But it's still fun to read and easy to deal with. As with the first part of Corum's epic (The Swords Trilogy), Moorcock doesn't take as many chances with fantasy conventions as he does in the Elric novels, and so these are slightly less challenging to the reader's conceptions of what's "supposed" to happen in fantasy novels. Still, they're quite a bit of fun, for all they they're predictable. *** ½
Moorcock has some poweful and intersting ideas flowing through this book, and I can see how it made Orion Book's Fantasy Masterworks list. But, I was let down by this read. The plot is often stilted; this comes through in awkard prose and character dialog. Put simply, I regularly felt like the writing just wasn't that good. Compare this with a similar sort of classic fantasy, Leiber's Lankhmar. Even though Leiber's work still has the flavor of an older read, with plots/characters sometimes seeming simple or immature, the overall quality of the writing carried me right through this, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed Lankhmar. Not so with Corum....
