I totally loved it, its probably my favourite fantasy series now. I wasnt able to get into other fantasy for a few years after finishing this series, because it all felt simple and childish in comparision.
Phoning in here because this series turned Erikson into one of my fantasy authors. I notice as I skim the comments that most people didn’t like the series. That’s fine and perfectly valid. Erikson is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Why I liked this series:
Erikson is heavily inspired by Glen Cook, one of my other favorite fantasy authors, who has a similar approach of throwing you in the middle of everything and explaining things slowly as you go along. There’s magic in the series called Warrens. No one explicitly defines it until maybe the 9th book when a king asks a wizard to explain what the hell warrens are. Instead, when you get the POV of a magic user you are learning how they personally feel about their magic, but everyone seems to have their own twist on the Warrens. If you enjoy a fantasy world that gives you all the information up front, this is not one of them. Erikson likes to play with history and unreliable narrators. So you need to take all info presented to you with a grain of salt unless its a god’s POV to someone who was there (and even then, the gods are fickle).
Erikson takes a lot of inspiration from classic fantasy. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Elric. Conan. If you are familiar with these stories, you might pick up on when he’s paying homage to them, and subverting their ideas.
Erikson is an archeologist and spent a ton of time developing and muddying the histories of his world. It gives the cultures a verisimilitude that I enjoyed. The cities feel lived in.
I enjoy Erikson’s prose. He is a short story writer who wrote a 10 book series with short story detail. There are beautiful lines and sequences in this series.
"It was a quirk of blind optimism that held that someone broken could, in time, heal, could reassemble all the pieces and emerge whole, perhaps even stronger for the ordeal. Certainly wiser, for what else could be the reward for suffering? The notion that did not sit well, with anyone, was that one so broken might remain that way - neither dying (and so removing the egregious example of failure from all mortal eyes) nor improving. A ruined soul should not be stubborn, should not cling to what was clearly a miserable existence.
“Friends recoil. Acquaintances drift away. And the one who fell finds a solitary world, a place where no refuge could be found from loneliness when loneliness was the true reward of surviving for ever maimed, for ever weakened. Yet, who would not choose that fate, when the alternative was pity?” - Toll the Hounds
Every fantasy author writing a series faces a dilemma of how to pace and package their novels. Tolkien wrote the full Lord of the Rings and then ripped out the superfluous chunks to put in the appendices. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has to develop a full cast of characters, but the characters get developed unevenly so while some characters are having their moments other already developed characters are just faffing around waiting for the next book. Erikson’s solution is to write 10 loosely connected books that share themes and usually characters between them. You’ll meet characters, wonder if they’re the main characters, then not see them for a few books. The Malazan Book of the Fallen has many protagonists. Almost every book works as a stand alone novel with its pacing and development. The one exception is the ninth book, Dust of Dreams, because its really just the first part of the last book, The Crippled God, but the final book was too long and got cut in half. Dust of Dreams felt weird to me because it didn’t have a nice ribbon tying off the end of the conflict like the prior books did. Since each book is kind of stand alone, Erikson can experiment with the pacing and presentation so each book feels like its own animal with unique themes that still relate to the overall story. The downside to this is that its very often to to read one book, get interested in that continent, and then the next book switches to another continent with its own cast.
Malazan has some of my favorite fantasy characters. Over the course of 10 books, you see a lot of plot lines and characters grow and mature. For example, the fourth book, House of Chains, is controversial because it starts with the POV of a young cocky shit who is cruel and hurts others (he’s a deconstruction of Conan the Barbarian). I started the book hating him, by the end of the series he was my favorite character.
There are some metal ideas floating around these novels.
No one writes a climax like Erikson. The plot lines converge, characters come together, and the results are decisive. The series climax in the final book is worth the build up.
Caveats: Besides the stuff I mentioned in what I liked that might have turned you off.
The series is long. It took me two years to read it all in one go, though I didn’t read every book back to back. I usually would read other books between each Malazan novel as a palate cleanser. I took an emotional break after the second book, Chain of Dogs, that lasted five years because I got distracted by other series, and by the time I returned to the series I couldn’t remember the first two books so I just reread them. If you factor the first attempt in, it took me 7 years to read this series.
I found these books to be a high cognitive load. There’s a lot of themes and events juggling around hundreds of characters, and there are some things you won’t understand until later books. This has the added bonus that if you like the series enough to reread, there’s a lot of things to pick up on that you missed the first time. I could not listen to this series as an audiobook on the first read.
This is dark fantasy. Erikson pulls some horrific events from human history for us to ruminate on. Love, friendship, and hope are major themes of the novels, but they come attached to all the awful things we humans do to each other. Many of these characters are soldiers, so there is a lot of violence. The second book has children getting crucified. Sexual assault happens throughout the series, and the ninth book, Dust of Dreams, has the most horrific rape I’ve ever read in a novel. I think Erikson is respectful and does not trivialize sexual violence. What makes that scene so uniquely horrific is it involves the complicity and cruelty of an entire tribe against one of their own. If you want a series without rape, this is not for you.
The first novel, Gardens of the Moon, was Erikson’s first novel. So it has first novel growing pains. I agree with others that it is one of the weaker novels of the series, but it is also a microcosm of all of Erikson’s themes with disparate groups of characters converging in one epic climax. I think it has some of the worst pacing of the series, but it still introduces essential knowledge and characters. Some readers might recommend reading the second book, Deadhouse Gates, first, but I disagree. Even Deadhouse Gates has enough characters and relation to Gardens of the Moon that you’ll be needlessly confused about some of the plot points. If you’re not sure about the series, give Gardens of the Moon a try. If you find the novel entertaining, keep going through the series. If you hate the core of the novel’s being, stop. You probably won’t like the series.
Erikson developed this world as part of a roleplaying game with his friend and co-author, Esslemont. Esslemont has written companion series which are not a part of this humble bundle. This means that there are some intriguing plot points and characters that just disappear from the 10 books making up the Malazan Book of the Fallen. That usually means they ended up in an Esslemont novel, which work as companion pieces to Erikson’s works. I enjoy Esslemont’s novels, but I think Erikson is the stronger writer.
I made it to the fourth book (or was it the fifth?) many years ago before I gave up. There are better book series that require less effort to understand, and that don’t antagonize the reader.
There seem to be two kinds of readers here: one that gives up halfway the first book, and the other that struggles on and starts appreciating it at about the second book and becomes a fan. You have ‘made it’ to the fourth book and only then given up. Which makes you pretty unique. Can you tell why?
Unfortunately Malazan will be one of those book series I will never read. I have too many friends who read/tried to read them and suggested I skip it. In it’s place I would recommend Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series. Beefy books but totally worth the read.
I tried reading the first book, but the writing is so needlessly ponderous. It’s not even that I didn’t know what was going on, just that I didn’t care because it was annoying trying to parse the way he words everything. I’ll probably pick it back up at some point, but it’s a rough start.
Are you trying the audiobooks? I don’t believe Malazan is a good series for audiobook. Too many scene changes and character swapping. The audiobooks might be better if you’re rereading though.
Possible - but I've been listening to audiobooks instead of reading for years now. It's much easier to find the time to listen to an audiobook rather than sitting down to read a book. Don't see it changing in the near future...
Here’s a cleaned up review I posted yesterday (minor spoilers ahead):
These books are for a very specific reader. I have multiple friends who are those readers, but I am not one of them. To begin with, they’re badly in need of an editor. I think about 30% of them could be trimmed with no loss of narrative or even world-building. They are needlessly wordy.
Malazan was originally created for a GURPS campaign and, oh boy, does it feel like it. Many characters ramble or talk with annoying tabletop idiosyncrasies that work fine among friends, but does not translate well to a novel. Iskaral Pust is the worst example, but there are so many variations on that character you can practically spot the player that created them every time. The pre-story background for the Malazan Empire itself feels like an incredibly annoying tabletop conceit: a bunch of adventurers in a tavern decided to create an empire. They combine a bunch of magical McGuffins and incorporate modern tactics and strategies and basically go on to take over a significant chunk of the world. For a series that prides itself on its seriousness and ponderous history, this is such an unbelievably dumb foundation.
These books are graphic and violent to the point of feeling like torture porn in novel form. While Karsa Orlong’s introduction is especially repugnant and noteworthy, I’m reminded of smaller scenes, such as Felisin getting attacked out of nowhere by a swarm of magical blood flies. It’s long, it’s graphic and, honestly, it served no narrative link to the events surrounding it. They just show up and attack one character in particular and vanish, never to be a thing again. These books have a deep, unsettling fascination with violence and pain.
They are intentionally confusing. This may be a selling point to some, who like a narratively consistent world, but don’t like having characters spell out the rules of the universe in exposition, ala Brandon Sanderson. For me, this occasionally really works, as you labor to understand what’s even going on and then suddenly break through; it can feel very rewarding. Other times you realize there will never be an explanation or a reason and that can be deeply frustrating when confronted with bad characterizations that could be acceptable with a proper explanation.
In short, I don’t think Erikson knows when to pull back and allow less to be more. Instead, he feels compelled to give every nitty, gritty detail whether it’s important or not. I don’t think Erikson actually likes the violence or suffering, far too often you see this compassion bleeding through. Despite singling out the woman for an extended, horrific and disgusting blood fly attack, he spends much of the book trying to defend her from the abuses of the patriarchy. Despite war and violence seeming glorified for page after page, we meet characters like the Redeemer, who offers us a glimpse into a better way of living. We often see the results of these conflicts, during the Chain of Dogs, The Snake, or the simple, powerful line, “Children are dying.”
I believe Malazan is just in desperate need of a really good editor. Someone who could battle against Erikson’s attention to unnecessary detail. If you don’t mind a slog, if you can separate yourself from the characters and their suffering, and if you don’t mind the occasional tabletop RPG motif, then Malazan offers a wondrous window into an intensely creative and unique world.
One of my favorite fantasy series. It's not an easy read, but the end of each book generally feels very gratifying, despite the overwhelming nihilism that permeates Erikson's writing.
Possibly one of my favourite series, period. The first book is objectively hard to get into. (The writing is a little rougher than the later novels, and the in media res start + Erikson’s… anthropological(?) approach to world building (where history and culture are complicated, everyone disagrees about everything, anyone who can tell you something about the world with certainty either refuses, or is lying) leaves you needing to work hard to understand what’s going on while not being sure if the effort is worth it.)
And then book two shares almost no characters and takes place on an entirely different continent, only tangentially connecting to the main plot. :P But if you can get over the shock of that (and get through the first book to get here to begin with) Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice (books two and three) are genuine works of art, and the rest of the series is of similar quality.
Probably my favorite series at this point. It does have what could be called a rough start (I didn’t finish the first book on my first try, but once I was over the hump it was hard to put the books down) but the world building, characters, and plots are really good. It also has great re-readability
Sucks that you’re getting downvoted for stating an honest opinion.
I also gave up on this series after getting halfway through book 1. I know people love this series, but I couldn’t understand anything that was going on in book 1. I’m told it eventually makes sense, but I just couldn’t find the strength to power through 1000 pages before I could figure out what the hell was going on.
Entirely understandable, the first 400 pages are basically an info dump with no context and no way to connect any dots. It does smooth out, and I think it’s worth it, but I can easily understand why people don’t go through with it. But since there’s no new malazan books currently, what’s your favorite fantasy series that you’d recommend?
It’s a very different style, but one thing I love to recommend is The Gentlemen Bastards by Scott Lynch, starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora. Simply fantastic fantasy.
If you’re looking for something a bit more classic, there’s The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny that I absolutely adore, as well as The Black Company by Glen Cook for that grimdark fantasy feel.
Took me about 6 times to get through the first book and I actively recommend this series. It's too bad how rough it starts because it's one of my favorite reads of a series.
I read it after ASOIAF looking for some grimdark and I did eventually get into it. However it wasn’t really quite dark enough for me. The first book was also a bit rough writing wise, but this gets better over the series.
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