false 5 1 false false Sat Sep 29 17:45:43 -0700 2007 Fri Nov 02 14:14:25 -0700 2007
My only real regret is that I cannot take the time to really immerse myself in this series, to read for days at a time and, for a time, live in this other world rather than just dipping into it during stolen free moments. What Erikson is crafting with The Malazan Book of the Fallen series is well worth that kind of deep, sustained attention. I can't say at this point exactly where Erikson is taking this series, as there are several books to go, but with what he's shown so far I am more than willing to trust that it will be a journey well worth the time and effort, and I doubt that it will run out of steam the way that some other high-profile epic fantasy series have done. Over the course of the first three novels, Erikson has more than earned our trust.

It's interesting, I think, that one complaint I had earlier in the series is that Erikson seemed almost too attached to his characters. Despite the shitstorm of epic proportions going on around them, despite some close calls, all the characters that we cared about seemed to come through the adventures and mishaps hale and healthy. There is, of course, a part of us that desires exactly this: when we fall in love with characters, we want to see them triumph, overcome, live, not die, and certainly there's something profoundly jarring when all or most of the characters you've come to care about die in the course of the work, but at the same time, in order for the stakes to truly remain high, there has to be a real sense that even the characters we've come to care about could die, that there really is something at stake. Well, Erikson seems to have answered those issues here, as some central characters appear to be pretty definitively dead. Or are they...? Time will tell, but he seems to have upped the ante with this volume, and that's no bad thing.]]>