Just like life, all good things must come to an end. I finished reading the tenth, and final, volume in Steven Erikson's amazing series, "A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen." The tenth book is entitled, The Crippled God and is really the second half of the conclusion of the series that was started in the ninth book, Dust of Dreams. If you're going to read The Crippled God, and if it has been some time since you last read Dust of Dreams, I'd strongly urge you to pick it up and re-read it again.

I realize that many fans of Erikson's Malazan series have not yet read The Crippled God, or are still working their way through the earlier books in the series for the first time, so I am going to be very, very careful not to spoil one iota of the great adventure that awaits you.

It seems pretty obvious to me that only readers of the Malazan series will be reading The Crippled God, and what I can tell you is that you will finish this novel (and the series) and be profoundly satisfied. Let me reiterate--You will be profoundly satisfied!

Now, you may hear some reviewers say, "But what about So-and-So, and what about this or that plot thread?" But just like real life, Steven Erikson has concluded the tale with the characters and plot-lines that were required. Think about it like this, not every character that participated in fighting in World War II can appear in every battle during the six years of war. Erikson's "A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen" is just like that too. It is a continuum, a time-line, along which characters and plot-lines appear and come and go. Having said all of this, let me assure you that most of the characters you've come to love and admire (or fear) are all here in The Crippled God.

This final book is the poster-child for the definition of an 'epic novel'. It is epic in that it is the final episode in a truly epic series. The series finale contains several amazingly epic plot-lines that reach towering heights in a crescendo of drama, suspense and action; ending with the 'mother of all convergences' that takes up the final one-third of the book. This mythology that is the Malazan world is, in my opinion, only rivaled by that of Homer's tales in The Iliad and The Odyssey. All of the pathos, drama, courage, fears, treachery, visceral horror, and even the acts of human kindness that make up Homer's timeless story of the Trojan War and Odysseus' ten-year journey home to Ithaka, are brilliantly recast for a new age by Steven Erikson in his ten books of "A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen." This is seriously some very good stuff!

Maybe it really is best to finish this review by letting Erikson's soldiers of the Malazan Army have the last word--

"And now the page before us blurs.
An age is done. The book must close.
We are abandoned to history.
Raise high one more time the tattered standard
of the Fallen. See through the drifting smoke
to the dark stains upon the fabric.
This is the blood of our lives, this is the
payment of our deeds, all soon to be
forgotten.
We were never what people could be.
We were only what we were.

Remember us."