The saga of Elric of Melniboné continues with the fifth volume of the author’s preferred text and organization, The Revenge of the Rose. This book collects the novel The Revenge of the Rose and the novella “The Stealer of Souls.”

Elric of Melniboné—proud prince of ruins, kinslayer—remains Michael Moorcock’s most enduring character.

This volume focuses mainly on dual quests: Elric’s own, to locate and retrieve the soulbox of his dead father Sadric, and his efforts to assist a mysterious being known only as the Rose to achieve her long-sought-after revenge. In this the two fierce heroes are accompanied by the intense, diminutive poet and temporal adventurer, Ernest Wheldrake—stranded in time and space as far removed from his original homeland in Gloriana’s Albion as ever could be—and by the variously psychic Family Phatt, outcasts from the ceaselessly moving cities of the Gypsy Nation in which they all find themselves.

If Elric achieves his goal, then the lost soulbox—claimed by two rival Chaos Lords, Mashabak and Elric’s patron Arioch—will free his father’s spirit to join his mother’s in the fabled Forest of Souls where she awaits him. If the quest fails, then Sadric’s soul will leave its prison and enter Elric, uniting the pair in enmity for all time.

The terrible and tragic nature of the crime and criminal against which the Rose seeks her revenge unfolds gradually throughout the book. She, Elric and their disparate allies all find themselves inexorably drawn into the orbit of the thoroughly untrustworthy Prince Gaynor the Damned, whose willingness to betray friend and foe alike in the furtherance of his own corrupted ends knows no bounds.