Author : Steven Erikson
Description : Deadhouse Gates is Erikson's second entry in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which, despite its rather clumsy series name, is bang-up stuff. Few authors write martial scenes quite this well in high fantasy; Tolkein's final battle in Return of the King, Elizabeth Moon's depictions of day-to-day troop life in The Deed of Paksennarion, just about every aspect of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Yes, I'd rank Erikson with those three. Easily. Readers of Gardens of the Moon may find themselves slightly confused when opening up Deadhouse Gates, no doubt because it takes place half a world away from Darujhistan, the city at the heart of Gardens of the Moon. You'll remember that everyone was worried, at the end of that novel, about something called the Pannion Seer. Well, you'll not see the Pannion Seer, nor most of the surviving characters from Gardens of the Moon, here (from the description I just read, that tale continues in Memories of Ice). Instead, a select few characters have fled east across the sea for various reasons, and only they link the tales.
Like Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates is an ensemble tale, but is even more sprawling in scope; at any given time, Erikson is following between two and six plot threads in alternating sections of any given chapter. There are four main plot threads, through they meander towards and away from each other, split off, and join together differently, throughout the text. The first concerns a trio pressed into slavery-- an ex-priest of Fener the Boar God, a noble-born teen, and a barbarian, none of whom seem to have anything in common, yet who are forced by circumstances to forge an uneasy bond. The second revolves around Duiker, the Imperial Historian (mentioned, but never met, in Gardens of the Moon), who accompanies the Seventh Army on a grueling overland journey from the northern city of Hissar to the southern city of Aren. The third involves Crokus, Apsalar, and Fiddler, three of the characters from Gardens of the Moon, who have come east to try and get Apsalar home to her father. The fourth involves another refugee, Kalam, who has come east for decidedly different means.
Deadhouse Gates is, essentially, a tale of journeys. In epic fantasy series (and this one is truly epic in scope; the first three books alone total close to twenty-five hundred pages), the book of journeys, or the book of transitions, is often the weakest in the series (cf. Martin's A Clash of Kings, or King's The Waste Lands). Erikson, on the other hand, has crafted an amazing piece of work in Deadhouse Gates, investing the journeys, and the underlying transitions, with more than enough action and intelligence to keep the reader going, while still getting all the boring stuff out of the way under the surface. Everyone gets where they're going, all the plot threads are eventually sewn up (except those left as obvious hooks into the remainder of the series), all the details that one almost expects, these days, to see disappear into the dust of all these riders on their journeys come to satisfying conclusions. Erikson's eye for detail is truly astounding in some cases.
One word of warning, though, in case you hadn't yet realized it after reading Gardens of the Moon. Erikson is just as hard on his main characters as is George R. R. Martin; some of the characters in this novel have a decidedly Janet Leigh air about them, but Erikson never once, in the hundreds of pages before he dispatches them, lets you know which ones they'll be, and their deaths often come with the same surprise (and surprisingly-felt sorrow) as the surprising death at the climax of A Game of Thrones (the identity of the victim of which I shall not reveal here to spare those handful of you who have not yet started that equally brilliant series).
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