Books

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.